The fate of those defendants who pleaded not guilty and took their trial is set
out for our Sample of cases (one in three of the trials for property offences from
the City of London) in Tables 7. 2 – 7. 7. To consider first the juries’ propensity to
acquit defendants outright, there is a noticeable difference between the cases we
examined in the Restoration and those from the years after the Revolution. Be-
tween 1660 and 1689 , juries acquitted about 45 per cent of all defendants (men
43 per cent and women 48 per cent). In the years examined after the Revolution
those levels of acquittal had fallen to 31 per cent overall— 34 per cent in the case
of men and 28 per cent for women (Table 7. 2 )—suggesting that juries had
adopted a noticeably tougher attitude towards defendants by the 1690 s, and to-
wards women in particular. It would hardly be surprising ifjuries were less gen-
erous in this period, given the sharp increase in prosecutions in William’s reign
and the general mood of anxiety about crime. The apparent advance of vice
and immorality spawned an active campaign in favour of a ‘reformation of
manners’, as well as determined efforts in parliament to find more effective ways
of enforcing the criminal law, and in particular to impose controls over women,
who made up an unusually large proportion of the defendants at the Old Bailey
in these years.
It is impossible to discover how and why juries arrived at their decisions. But
the pattern of verdicts in this period suggests strongly that the character of the
offence was an important consideration as they deliberated. Let us begin with
the way the Old Bailey juries and judges dealt with offenders on trial after the
Revolution for non-clergyable felonies, conviction for which meant the threat of
a death sentence (Table 7. 2 ). In the case ofboth men and women there was a
decided change in the pattern of jury verdicts with respect to these offences after
the Revolution, a change that reflected a concern for more effective prosecution
and punishment. This can be seen in the increase in the conviction rate for men
to nearly 40 per cent of those facing a death sentence in the post-Revolution
years as against about a third of those charged in the years before 1689. Not all
seventy men convicted of non-clergyable offences were executed; just about half
were pardoned in a procedure that came to be significantly altered after the
Revolution. None the less, the juries’ intentions were to impose some form of
punishment on more of the men charged with these serious, non-clergyable,
offences.
A determination to seek more effective punishments may also explain the
juries’ decisions to convict a further 33 per cent of men accused of non-clergyable
offences under a partial verdict that acquitted them of the original charge but
found them guilty of either grand or petty larceny (Table 7. 2 ). As we will see,
some of those men were hanged, despite that verdict, but most were granted
clergy and discharged—though with the pain and humiliation of a branded
thumb, or more seriously, during the seven years after 1699 in which this was on
the books, with the brand burned into their cheeks. After the passage of the 1706
statute that gave judges the authority to punish clergied offenders with up to two
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London 339