forms of punishment, even though the innovation it embodied was not success-
fully established because there was as yet no engagement with the financial and
material consequences of new schemes. When that issue was confronted, as it
was to be after 1714 when the state took over the costs of transportation to the
colonies—the labour-related penal policy that remained the preferred
option—a significant conceptual breakthrough was achieved and a decisive
break with the penal structures of the past was effected.^51
Before that was to happen, however, there was to be another turn in the penal
cycle that returned to older ways of dealing with crime. The immediate occa-
sion was the increasing level of prosecutions for theft as the War of Spanish Suc-
cession came to an end, and a persuasion in London that the hard labour option
for clergied offenders was not serving to prevent property crime. It was also
driven by an old anxiety that came to the forefront now as an explanation of the
level of property crime in London: the view that much of the theft in the capital
was being perpetrated by servants, and took the form not merely of minor pil-
fering, but of major assaults on the household goods and valuables of their em-
ployers by servants in league with receivers and gangs ofburglars. An additional
element made this the more plausible, as it had the argument that supported the
making of shoplifting a capital offence a decade earlier: that is, that many of the
perpetrators were women who were assumed to have been drawn by men into
the plunder of houses. Since the softness of the punishment awaiting convicted
shoplifters could no longer be blamed for the high levels of theft in the city and
for the involvement of so many women, anxieties about servants intensified in
Anne’s reign, and came to be a favoured explanation of the numbers of offences
being perpetrated in the years after the Peace ofUtrecht was signed, in 1713.
There had long been a ‘servant problem’ in London in the sense that domes-
tic servants had been blamed in the past for high levels of theft and had indeed
been prominent among the offenders charged at the Old Bailey. Grand juries
on occasion blamed domestic servants for a good deal of the crime in the City.^52
As we saw in Chapter I, there had been a sustained effort in parliament in the
reigns of William III and Anne to give employers some protection against ser-
vants who, it was widely believed (and this was the nub of the charge against
them), all too often sought employment in order to steal or, even worse, to open
the house at night to their thieving and dangerous male accomplices. Four pro-
jectors had sought government support in 1691 , for example, for a scheme ‘for
preventing the general complaint of the unfaithfulness of servants... to set up a
register by means whereof the cheats and vagabonds may be discovered’, and
several similar proposals were made thereafter.^53 It is hardly surprising, given
the number of servants in London, the frequency with which they changed
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London 335(^51) See Ch. 8. (^52) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, October 1694 , February 1695.
(^53) CSPD 1691 – 2 , p. 14 ; for registry offices as labour exchanges, see M. Dorothy George, ‘The Early
History of Registry Offices’, Economic History: A Supplement to the Economic Journal, 1 ( 1926 – 9 ), 570 – 90.