century in which only the theft of cloth in the process of manufacture had been
excluded from benefit of clergy (in 1670 ), a number of statutes passed in the gen-
eration after 1689 extended the list of non-clergyable, that is in essence, capital,
felonies. All forms of robbery and housebreaking, shoplifting to the value of five
shillings or more, and theft from a house of goods worth more than forty
shillings, even without breaking in, put offenders in danger of being hanged
upon conviction. There was clearly a continuing commitment in this period to
the old conviction that the threat of hanging was an effective deterrent—
indeed, the only possible deterrent—against offences that seemed to be
increasing dangerously.
Not all the capital statutes of this period, however, were enacted with the
same intentions and expectations. In view of the way that robbery was regarded
by juries and judges, there is no reason to doubt that MPs who voted in favour
of removing clergy from all forms of theft accompanied by violence expected to
see the law applied to significant numbers of convicted offenders. On the other
hand, it is not clear what the supporters of the bills that made shoplifting and
servants’ theft capital offences expected the outcome of that legislation to be in
court. Since many MPs would have had first-hand knowledge of the discre-
tionary way the law was actually put into effect at the county assizes and the Old
Bailey, it seems unlikely that even the strongest proponents of these measures
would have expected large numbers of such petty thieves to be hanged. The
statutes were gestures towards solutions to a problem that became increasingly
troubling in the 1690 s when the gaols were often crowded, the resources of the
courts were strained, large numbers of convicted offenders were executed, and
unusually large numbers of women were charged who could not be easily dealt
with—the problem, that is, of the lack of an effective and acceptable punish-
ment for minor property offenders. The search for such a punishment, taken up
once again in this period and forming a powerful counter-current to the
reliance on capital punishment, resurrected themes and ideas formulated in the
interregnum but given expression only intermittently over the previous half
century.
There are hints from time to time in the post-Revolution parliament that
some MPs would have favoured a reduction rather than an expansion of the
scope of capital punishment. It is difficult to assess the seriousness of those ideas.
Proposals introduced into parliament that seem to carry this message are known
only from the titles ofbills that do not survive, or from stray comments in diaries.
None of these initiatives got very far, evidence in itself of their limited appeal.
They none the less underline the strength of feeling in the 1690 s that the pun-
ishments available to the courts were entirely inadequate. The first such bill of
importance was introduced by John Brewer, a backbench lawyer and recorder
of New Romney, who had chaired the committee on the 1692 legislation that es-
tablished the forty-pound statutory reward for the successful prosecution of rob-
bers. Two years later Brewer chaired a select committee of the Commons that
320 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London