posts,^54 and the pervasiveness of theft, that the aldermen and common council-
lors of the City had played a leading role in these efforts to create a system that
might provide potential employers with reliable information about servants
seeking employment. In 1704 the aldermen ordered the preparation of a bill to
be introduced into the next session of parliament—‘at the humble Petition of
the Lord Mayor and Commonaltie of the City of London’—to establish a regis-
try of servants. One great cause of crime, the bill asserted, was
the ill Conduct of unwary housekeepers in the hireing and Reteining Men Servants and
Maid Servants into their Services having no knowledge or good Account of them and
who oftentimes prove persons of evil dispositions and shift from place to place ’till they
have opportunity to put into practice their wicked designs...
To prevent such dangerous practices in the future the proposed bill called for the
creation of a public office at which all servants within the Bills of Mortality
(except those of the nobility) would have to be registered and from which they
would require a testimonial before being hired.^55 A broadside printed in Lon-
don in 1708 in support of another such bill spoke of the special need for such
controls in London where, it claimed, employers ‘are frequently robbed by
Servants who belong to the Gang ofHouse-Breakers... who oblige them to rob
the House, or let some of the Gang in to do it.. .’.^56
As in the case of the Shoplifting Act, the introduction oflegislation in 1713
was almost certainly related to the recent rise of prosecutions for property crime
at the conclusion of the War of Spanish Succession. If the City magistrates
needed persuading that female servants were potentially dangerous and treach-
erous, they clearly found evidence in the depositions they were taking in 1711
and 1712 as they heard the complaints of victims of theft and their accusations
against those they held responsible. An unusually high proportion of the depo-
sitions taken in the City in these years accused servants of theft, most especially
women.^57 Whether such crimes were in fact very common or employers were
choosing for some reason to prosecute their servants more readily than they
might have earlier hardly matters. The evidence was sufficient to persuade the
London magistrates, the grand jurors, and the broader propertied public that
336 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London
(^54) J. Jean Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England( 1956 ); D. A. Kent, ‘Ubiquitous
but Invisible: Female Domestic Servants in Mid-Eighteenth Century London’, History Workshop Journal,
27 ( 1989 ), 111 – 27 ; Timothy Meldrum, ‘Domestic Service in London, 1660 – 1750 : Gender, Life Cycle,
Work and Household Relations’, Ph.D. thesis (London, 1996 ).
(^55) CLRO: Papers of the Court of Aldermen, 1704 ( 18 September 1704 , 16 November 1704 ). The bill
was prepared, but not presented, having been examined by a committee of three of their number who in
the end found it ‘not serviceable’.
(^56) A Proposal for the Due Regulating Servants, which will be Beneficial for the Kingdom in General, and to Private Fam-
ilies in Particular, and no ways Obstructive to honest Servants.. .(? 1708 ). Another broadside from the same
period made the point that many servants turned to theft because they were free to leave posts whenever
they chose. A statute to compel all servants to be registered, the author believed, would impose some con-
trol over servants’ movements and ‘keep many from Tyburn’ (The Usefulness of, and Reasons for, a Publick
Office, for Registering of Servants(? 1700 ) ).
(^57) See Ch. 1.