Not all suggestions emanating from the City for new legislation depended on
the grand jury or the Court of Aldermen. There were interest groups in London
well organized and influential enough to act effectively outside official struc-
tures. The clause of the act of 1699 that extended capital punishment to the
offence of stealing from shops over the value of five shillings ( 10 & 11 Wm III, c. 23 )
can be traced to a petition submitted directly to the House of Commons from a
group of shopkeepers in the City. This legislation originated in a bill to establish
rewards ‘for the encouraging the apprehending of housebreakers, horse-
stealers, and other felons’, a response to the perception in the years following the
end of the war in 1697 that serious crimes against property were increasing dan-
gerously around the country. Having been introduced as a measure to promote
prosecutions on well-established lines, the bill provided an opportunity for those
concerned with other kinds of crimes to move amendments that in fact changed
the thrust of the original proposal. It was in this way that the bill became the
vehicle for the extension of capital punishment to a large class of property
offences—the first for more than a century. Indeed, the bill that began as a
proposal to encourage the prosecution of burglary and housebreaking became
an entirely formless statute as additional concerns, boiling up because of the
heightened alarm about crime in 1699 , were tacked on in the course of a long
period of debate and amendment in both houses. The text of the original bill
does not survive. But it is clear that amendments were proposed on at least five
occasions as the bill became a catch-all for members with ideas about how
crime problems should be dealt with. As we have seen, one of the amendments
that failed would have required that witnesses for the defendant in a criminal
trial give their evidence on oath.^31 But other initiatives were successful, and they
changed the character of the bill considerably. It was by way of amendment that
it came to include two very important clauses: one that moved the branding of
clergy from the thumb to ‘the most visible part of the left cheek nearest the nose’
(s. 6 ); and a second that turned out to be the central matter of the statute as it was
finally passed, to make shoplifting a capital offence.^32
These additions were in line with a tough attitude towards crime in these
post-war years, exemplified by the 1701 pamphlet Hanging Not Punishment
328 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London
that the magistrates were not using their discretionary powers in this period to send young men suspected
of petty offences to the army as an alternative to prosecution, as they seem to have been doing a century
later (King, Crime, Justice and Discretion. Law and Social Relations in England, 1740 – 1820 (Oxford, 2000 ),
153 – 61 .) For this subject, and its possible effects on the pattern of indictments for property offences
during wars, see the sources referred to in Ch. 1 , note 111.
(^31) See above, p. 319.
(^32) For the parliamentary history of this statute, see JHC, 12 ( 1697 – 9 ), pp. 497 , 525 , 540 , 541 , 556 , 607 ,
625 , 659 , 669 , 671 , 675 , 681. The House of Commons was occupied with this bill on and off for three
months; on the other hand, despite its inclusion of capital provisions, the Lords approved it in three days,
though it was in the Lords that the words ‘nearest to the nose’ were added to the branding clause, and
the further instruction that the branding be inflicted in open court in the presence of the judge, ‘who is
hereby directed and required to see the same strictly and effectually executed’. The judges do not appear
to have been specifically consulted on the bill; see JHL, 16 ( 1696 – 1701 ), pp. 455 , 456 , 460 , 465.