introduced in the first place in the Lords—perhaps to seek the endorsement and
support of the judges for an innovation, the consequences of which may have
been raising anxieties. That possibility is suggested by the Lords’ order, when
the bill was introduced, that the judges be asked to attend at second reading.^47
The statute that received the royal assent did not include the penalties for sec-
ond and third offences originally contemplated, but it did include the central
suggestions in the City of London petition, and indeed the petition was quoted
verbatim in the preamble. As a result, the branding of clergy was returned to the
hand, and the judges were authorized at their discretion to sentence clergied
felons to a period of six months to two years at hard labour in a house of
correction or workhouse.^48
The provisions of the act were immediately employed in a significant number
of cases in several jurisdictions,^49 including London. But its implementation did
not run smoothly, for the same reasons that bedeviled transportation. Both re-
quired resources. The Hard Labour Bill increased the population of the houses
of correction with relatively long-term inmates, yet the statute was silent on the
issue of who would pay the additional costs. Complaints from those responsible
for running the houses of correction were not long in coming, and the policy ini-
tiative embodied in the bill was stifled from the beginning. As we will see, it was
to be overtaken in London for half a century by the revival of transportation.^50
But the 1706 act made an important gesture towards filling a crucial gap in the
penal structure. It pushed out the boundaries of the possible and acceptable
334 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London
(^47) JHL, 18 ( 1705 – 9 ), pp. 184 , 194 , 202 , 203 , 232 , 236 ; JHC, 15 ( 1705 – 8 ), pp. 252 , 270 , 273 , 281 , 282. The
high court judges, who sat in the House of Lords, were frequently consulted when the Lords considered
important criminal bills. That was not as firmly established a practice in the late seventeenth century as
it was to be a hundred years later (Innes, ‘Parliament and Eighteenth-Century Social Policy’, 78 – 9 ), but
it was certainly common, especially when capital punishment was involved. When the housebreaking
bill of 1691 ( 3 Wm & Mary, c. 9 ) was under consideration by the House ofLords, the lord chiefjustice
and another judge were specifically named to a committee to draw a clause that would deny benefit of
clergy to servants who stole their masters’ goods; and the judges were consulted later in the debate on an
amendment relating to theft from lodgings (JHL, 14 ( 1685 – 91 ), pp. 638 – 9 ; HMC, 13 th Report (appen-
dix): The Manuscripts of the House of Lords, 1690 – 1 , p. 284 ). A copy of the bill that made theft by ser-
vants a capital offence in 1713 ( 12 Anne, c. 7 )—for which see below, pp. 335 – 7 —was sent to the judges
after second reading and they were asked to attend the committee of the whole house that would take it
into consideration (JHL, 19 ( 1709 – 14 ), p. 574 ). The judges would also be sent a copy of the Transport-
ation Bill in 1718 when it received first reading in the House of Lords and were asked to attend at second
reading (JHL, 20 ( 1714 – 18 ), p. 593 ). That such consultation was not yet considered essential is suggested
by the fact that the judges were not apparently consulted on the bill that made shoplifting a capital
offence in 1699 (see below, n. 32 ), which received very rapid passage through the lords (JHL, 16
( 1696 – 1701 ), pp. 455 , 456 , 460 ).
(^485) Anne, c. 6 ( 1706 ). (^49) Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 491 – 2.
(^50) This was true in London (in which the costs of transportation were met by the central government),
but not everywhere in the country. In the north-east, Morgan and Rushton have shown that while the
assize judges sentenced no convicted thieves to imprisonment between 1720 and 1750 , the magistrates at
quarter sessions in Newcastle and Northumberland (though not in Durham) continued to use the provi-
sions of the 1706 act. A quarter of men and women convicted oflarceny at the sessions were sentenced
to prison between 1720 and 1750 and the pattern of punishments in those jurisdictions is thus very
different from that prevailing at the Old Bailey in that period (Rogues, Thieves and the Rule of Law, 71 – 6 ).