Another apparent concession to defendants—the right to have their wit-
nesses sworn in court, included in a statute of 1702 —was similarly intended to
encouraged prosecutions and convictions. Defence witnesses had not been re-
quired to give their evidence under oath for the same reason that accused de-
fendants were not required to swear to the truth of the statements they gave to
magistrates at the preliminary hearing: out of fear that they might be tempted
to lie and thus commit such perjury as would jeopardize their chances of salva-
tion. The move to put defence witnesses under oath in 1702 was not the result of
a changing sense of the consequences of lying under oath, but of a compelling
anxiety to increase the chances of convicting offenders.
There was a strong persuasion in this period that thieves were becoming well
organized, at least to the extent that they were getting the help of ‘solicitors’ to
arrange defences for them before trial and to give them alibis.^8 There was a fur-
ther fear in the difficult decade of the 1690 s that some of that help was coming
from receivers who were thought not only to be managing the disposal of stolen
goods but encouraging thieves to commit offences, and supporting them after-
wards—including arranging for the perjured evidence that would save them at
their trials. Certainly the lack of control over receivers, especially pawnbrokers,
had long been seen as a fundamental source of crime in the city.^9 By the end of
the decade hostility to receivers was so intense that when a group of London
shopkeepers petitioned parliament in 1699 to protect them against thieves, they
blamed many of their problems on what they called ‘receiving networks’ and the
support that such networks were giving to shoplifters under indictment. The
statute that made shoplifting a capital offence originally included a clause that
required defence witnesses to give their evidence on oath, clearly to create the
possibility of prosecuting receivers and their hired agents who gave perjured tes-
timony in court. That clause was removed by amendment, but the requirement
that defence witnesses ‘take an oath to depose the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth, in such manner, as the witnesses for the Queen are by law
obliged to do; and if convicted of any wilful perjury’ shall suffer the conse-
quences, passed into law two years later as part of‘An Act for punishing of ac-
cessories to felonies, and receivers of stolen goods’. Putting defence witnesses on
oath was intended to strengthen the prosecution, not to ensure a safe verdict, as
might first appear.^10
Legislation after 1689 thus introduced some new encouragements to pros-
ecution and strengthened prosecutors’ efforts to convict those they accused in
court. On the penal side, the picture is distinctly mixed. New approaches and
practices were to be tried, but in conjunction with a continuing reliance on es-
tablished sanctions—indeed, with a return to the Tudor belief in the threat of
capital punishment as a way to discourage property offences. After more than a
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London 319(^8) As we shall see, this was one of the complaints of a group of shopkeepers who petitioned parliament
in 1699 for tougher laws (see below, p. 329 ).
(^9) For receivers, see above, p. 39. (^101) Anne, stat. 2 , c. 9 , s. 3 ( 1702 ).