certainty.^28 But on matters of penal policy, if not on other central matters of day-
to-day criminal administration, whig aldermen were more active than tories in
supporting the tempering of capital punishment and of clergy with sanctions
that involved work and incarceration.
Offences against property that carried a threat of violence were particularly
feared in an urban environment, and the propertied interests in the City were
always likely to favour efforts to reduce robbery, burglary, and housebreaking.
More minor offences that merely involved the taking of goods or money with-
out threat to the victim did not induce the same levels of anxiety as a wave of
muggings. But they were seriously aggravating in the metropolis, in which
widening circles of consumption and commerce made objects increasingly
available to be stolen and supported an active market for second-hand goods.
And since the law was so weak in this area, it is hardly surprising that City mem-
bers were among the MPs who showed the greatest interest in establishing pun-
ishments for more petty offences. The thrust of the City’s efforts within the
broader campaigns to make the criminal law more effective after the Revolu-
tion centred on petty crime and the weaknesses of the policing forces and of the
courts in dealing with it.
The need for a more vigorous response to crimes of all kinds was expressed in
several grand jury presentments urging the aldermen/magistrates to seek par-
liamentary solutions. The grand jury that sat at the January sessions in 1694
warned, for example, that there had been a great recent influx into London of
‘loose, idle and ill disposed persons’, who, ‘having noe visible estates or honest
way to mainteyne themselves doe turn Robbers on the highway, Burglarers,
pickpockets and Gamesters that follow other unlawful wayes to support them-
selves’. They went on to suggest that the Court of Aldermen should ‘endeavour
the obtaining an effectual Law to compell’ young men who came to London
and were not working to join the army. This would be ‘a greate meanes’, they
suggested, ‘to prevent Robberies, Fellonies, Burglaries, and other Crimes and
misdemeanors which doe daily abound in and neere this City’, and which, they
concluded, ‘bring many Young and able persons to untimely ends by the hands
ofJustice’.^29 Another jury suggested that magistrates needed additional powers,
so that after examining men who lived on pilfering and begging they could send
them to the army, and send women and ‘black guard’ boys to the plantations.^30
That same grand jury also called for new laws against clipping.
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London 327(^28) While interesting and suggestive, it may be unwise to ascribe too much significance to the fact that
the two statutes that extended capital punishment to forms oflarceny in this period (statutes of 1699 and
1713 that we shall discuss presently) were passed in parliaments dominated by tories and when the four
City members were also tories, and that the statute that imposed hard labour on clergied offenders was
passed in a whiggish parliament and was pushed by whig members for the City. We would need to know
a great deal more than can be learned from the journals of the two houses about who spoke and voted for
each, who proposed, opposed, and supported which amendments, and so on.
(^29) CLRO: London Sess. Papers,January 1694.
(^30) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, February 1695. There is a strong suggestion in this recommendation