the courts were failing to prevent a serious crime problem. The depositions
being taken by City magistrates make it plain that one source of anxiety was the
imagined connection between servants and receivers, and, as in shoplifting ac-
cusations in the late 1690 s, the magistrates were clearly intent on getting sus-
pected servants to name the receiver to whom they had sold stolen goods.
Apart from the simple number of cases, then, the attack on servants’ theft in
1713 grew from the assumption that women could be dangerous intruders in a
household because they could be easily manipulated by receivers into stealing
to order, and even worse could be associated with a gang—lovers, it was a com-
mon fear, of gang members—and so be willing to open the house at night to a
group of ruffians. Shoplifting aroused some of those concerns, but without the
same threat ofbeing attacked in their beds that untrustworthy servants raised in
the minds not merely of the rich but in the broad middling ranks of metropol-
itan society accustomed to having servants living in. Although it would apply to
a range of offences, including the theft of silver tankards from public houses, the
statute that removed benefit of clergy from the offence of stealing goods from a
house was aimed explicitly at servants, as the preamble revealed.^58 It was also
aimed at particular kinds of servants. The threshold that triggered the capital
provisions of the statute was set much higher than in the case of shoplifting, in
which the nature of the offence itself was the target of the legislation. In the 1713
statute clergy was removed from the stealing of goods of more than forty
shillings in value (as opposed to the five shillings of shoplifting), making it clear
that the offence made subject to capital punishment was not petty pilfering, but
thefts of significant value and those that could be conceived as involving ac-
complices outside the household. It was also a much more straightforward
statute than the Shoplifting Act in that it was narrowly and specifically framed.
It was introduced into the House of Commons by three tory MPs, two of whom
sat for constituencies in or touching on the metropolis ofLondon—Westminster
(Thomas Medlycot) and Surrey (Sir Francis Vincent)—and the third,
Sir Gilbert Dolben, who was a lawyer and a judge of the court of common pleas
of Ireland. The bill passed quickly through both houses with only minor
amendments.^59
A variety of initiatives had thus been pursued in the generation after 1689 to
find more effective ways to prosecute and punish offenders. They had included
efforts to bring more women offenders to account, to encourage the arrest and
conviction of violent offenders, to protect the coinage, to improve policing, and
in particular to deter property crime of all kinds by making the penalties for con-
viction more serious and more effective. Several of the most significant cam-
paigns had been led by the City of London, and were almost certainly inspired
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London 337(^5812) Anne, c. 7 ( 1713 ).
(^59) JHC, 17 ( 1711 – 14 ), pp. 313 , 358 , 368 , 383 , 385 , 432 , 433 ; JHL, 19 ( 1709 – 14 ), pp. 561 , 564 , 574 ,
578 – 9 , 599.