clearing the streets ofbeggars and vagrants but also in reducing crime, since the
numbers of prosecutions for crimes against property had gone down noticeably
in the years following its establishment.
It is likely that the reduction in prosecutions, the easing of the crowding in
Newgate and the shorter calendars dealt with by the grand juries had at least as
much to do with the onset of the War of Spanish Succession, in 1702 , as the work
of the Bishopsgate Street workhouse. But that was not the conclusion that those
who believed in the social value of hard labour as a means of correction and
training were inclined to draw. The grand jurors who remarked on the reduc-
tion of crime in their presentments congratulated the magistrates on their
efforts to improve the morals and manners of the poor, and particularly on the
success of the workhouse which they thought in 1706 had been mainly respon-
sible for the low levels of criminal prosecutions over the previous several years.^41
The apparent success of the new institution as a training ground for vagrant and
‘blackguard’ youth emboldened those who had long favoured penal hard
labour and encouraged some of the City’s whig aldermen and MPs to establish
a hard labour regime for criminal offenders, at least for those who persisted in
committing minor felonies.^42
Suggestions had been made before 1700 —without eliciting much support—
that some form of labour might be a more effective punishment for some of-
fences than hanging. Clayton and Sir William Ashhurst, a whig member for the
City sympathetic to the nonconformist community and, like Clayton, an alder-
men and former mayor, were among those who believed in the usefulness of
labour as a punishment for felonies, even for some of the offences currently sub-
ject to capital punishment. Indeed, they had made an unsuccessful effort in 1702
to persuade the House of Commons to substitute transportation for some of-
fences subject to the gallows.^43 The disastrous failure of cheek-branding
332 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London
(^41) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, May 1703 , July 1703 , May 1706.
(^42) The larger context of the belief in the usefulness of hard labour as a form of punishment and train-
ing was the conviction, widely expressed by writers on the economy in the late seventeenth century, of
the need to harness labour in general in the national interest. A fully employed labour force and low
wages were seen as essential to increasing England’s share of overseas trade and thus to underpinning
national security. The need to recruit and discipline the labouring power of the country in the interest of
expanding manufacturing and overseas trade in support of national security in an increasingly compet-
itive world fitted neatly with narrower beliefs in work and training in workhouses and other institutions
as a solution to the social indiscipline that was widely believed to be leading to crime and vagrancy and
other forms of unacceptable behaviour by the poor. See Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and
Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England(Princeton, NJ, 1978 ), ch. 6 ; Daniel A. Baugh, ‘Poverty, Protestantism,
and Political Economy: English Attitudes toward the Poor, 1660 – 1800 ’ in Stephen B. Baxter (ed.),
England’s Rise to Greatness, 1660 – 1763 (Berkeley, Calif., 1983 ), 76 – 9 ; and Innes, ‘Prisons for the Poor’, 79 – 84.
(^43) The Clayton–Ashhurst bill was ‘for the more effectual punishment of felons and their accessories’
(JHC, 13 ( 1699 – 1702 ), pp. 777 , 781 , 783 ). It was rejected at second reading. The bill’s main provision is
revealed in a brief entry in the diary of Sir Richard Cocks, who noted under the date on which it was
turned back: ‘some bills were read and amongst the rest the alteration of the law as to felons, viz. to trans-
port them to our plantations instead of hanging them.. .’. The bill attracted a good deal of interest:
217 members voted in the division in which it was narrowly defeated ( 113 to 104 ), a relatively high turnout
for legislation of this kind. On the other hand, Cocks thought that ‘half of the house did not know what