who revealed the identity of two or more of their accomplices and gave the evi-
dence that convicted them would be entitled to the king’s pardon. That was
clearly aimed against the imagined gangs of shoplifters. To earn such a pardon,
the evidence had to be given before the accused was actually committed to trial;
that is, the accused would have to confess to the examining magistrate and
divulge the names of his or her accomplices.^36 The statute included a further in-
ducement: a reward to the prosecutor of a convicted shoplifter of what came to
be known as a Tyburn Ticket, a certificate that freed the holder from the obliga-
tion to serve in parish and ward offices for life. Such a reward might appear a
laughable curiosity until one remembers that this legislation was inspired and
shaped by London interests, and by men who, precisely at this time, were be-
coming increasingly reluctant to serve as constables and perhaps in other parish
and ward offices. The simplest way to avoid office was to pay a fine when first
nominated. But that was also the most expensive, and the device of the Tyburn
Ticket was well judged to induce shopkeepers to overcome their reluctance to
undertake prosecutions. Far from being a oddity in 1699 , it was deliberately
crafted to have a maximum impact on a particular form of crime in London.^37
With respect to clergyable offences, the 1699 statute attempted to answer
what was recognized as the weakness of branding on the thumb by moving the
branding to the cheek to heighten its shaming power. It was a proposal that
speaks both to the anxiety to find a solution to the problem of petty crime in the
metropolis and to the callous indifference of the consequences of such a perman-
ent stigma for the individual offender. Within a few years this new form of
clergy was seen to have had disastrous results, and, again at the instigation of the
City of London, another attempt was made to find an alternative punishment,
indeed to broaden the array of punishments available to the courts. A new cam-
paign to strengthen the penal law began with a petition to the aldermen at the
October 1704 session of the Old Bailey from the magistrates ofWestminster and
330 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London
(^36) For the importance of such pardons in eighteenth century criminal procedure, see John H. Lang-
bein, ‘Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial: A View from the Ryder Sources’, University of
Chicago Law Review, 50 ( 1983 ), 84 – 105 ; and Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 430 – 49.
(^37) Tyburn Tickets freed the recipient from parish and ward offices in the parish and ward within which
the offence had taken place. Inevitably, they were of little direct value to many prosecutors, particularly
thief-takers. They could, however, be ‘assigned’ to another person. For two Tyburn Tickets signed by the
recorder of London and assigned by their recipients (in the case of one, in 1719 , Jonathan Wild) for £ 11
and £ 8. 8 s. 0 d., respectively, see GLMD, MS 20844 , MS 14845 ). Radzinowicz expressed understandable
puzzlement about the use of immunity from parish office as a reward, calling it ‘a curious method of fur-
thering the ends of criminal justice.. .’ (History, ii. 155 – 6 ). The idea for such a reward may also owe some-
thing to the resistance of the London sheriffs to the expansion of statutory rewards which they had to pay
to successful prosecutors and their witnesses. When a bill was sent from the House of Commons to the
Lords in May 1698 ‘for the better discovery and suppression ofhouse-breakers’ that included the payment
of a £ 10 reward, the sheriffs ofLondon and Middlesex petitioned to be heard against the bill by counsel.
Their complaint was that they already paid rewards that were ‘very considerable, owing to the large num-
ber of convictions’, and laid out ‘in other disbursements for his Majesty’s service more money than the
profits of the County [of Middlesex] will defray... so that the Sheriffs have been forced to satisfy such
rewards out of their own money’ (HMC: The Manuscripts of the House ofLords, 1697 – 1699 , p. 243 ).