by then.^2 Petty larceny and even grand larcenies of small value only rarely
appeared on the calendars of the London sessions of the peace or the sessions of
gaol delivery at the Old Bailey.
The availability of the Bridewell might explain why the London magistrates
developed the habit of diverting petty offenders away from the courts. It cannot,
however, explain why nocharges of petty larceny or very few grand larcenies
under five or even ten shillings in value were brought to trial before juries in Lon-
don as they were routinely in other parts of the country. That distinctive London
practice was to have profound consequences, particularly as the population of
the metropolis and the number of petty thefts and other minor crimes against
property increased in the seventeenth century. Most crucially, it meant that in
London there were two persistent sources of dissatisfaction with the law after the
Restoration. One was the obvious failure of capital punishment as a deterrent to
serious crimes. The other was the absence of any official response to more minor
and more common offences. It was the poverty of this regime of criminal law,
along with the principled opposition to capital punishment during the civil war
and interregnum, that had encouraged speculation about the advantages of new
punishments in the middle decades of the century and that had supported the
efforts we saw in the last chapter to establish transportation to the colonies as both
an alternative to execution and a possible punishment for clergyable felonies.
The fundamental weaknesses of criminal administration in London had been
exposed well before major crime problems arose in the capital in the last decade
of the seventeenth century. But there is no doubt that those problems encouraged
further speculation about the need for better policing methods—better surveil-
lance and encouragements to prosecution—and alternative penal options that
might together repair some of the weaknesses of the criminal regime in the me-
tropolis. A variety of responses took shape to the problems posed by crime in the
1690 s and in the early eighteenth century. They emanated from several sources,
but particularly from parliament. Together, they brought significant alterations
and additions to the system of criminal administration in the generation following
the Revolution of 1689 that mark the onset of a second phase in the early modern
response to urban crime. This is our present subject. We will begin our explo-
ration of the complexities of these responses to crime in post-Revolution London
by setting out very briefly the variety of parliamentary initiatives and the more im-
portant criminal statutes that were passed in the reigns ofWilliam and Mary and
of Anne. We will see what difference they made to the administration of the law in
practice by extending our analysis of the work ofjuries and of sentencing into this
period; and we will conclude with a study of another major alteration in the penal
system that had fundamental implications for the way the law was put into effect
in post-Revolution London—the creation of an entirely new way of deciding who
among the men and women condemned at the Old Bailey would be executed at
Tyburn, and who would be spared by being granted a royal pardon.
PUNISHMENT IN LONDON, 1690–1713 7 THE REVOLUTION, CRIME, AND
(^2) See above, pp. 24 – 30.