For women defendants, there were much bigger changes after the Revolution
in both capital and non-capital cases, the result of two of the major alterations
in the law we have discussed: the extension of clergy to women on the same basis
as men; and the statute of 1699 making shoplifting a capital offence. The former
perhaps helped to increase the number of women charged in the 1690 s, as was
surely its intention. The latter ensured that many women continued to face a
capital charge. The change in the numbers of women prosecuted for clergyable
offences was especially marked: more than three hundred were brought to court
charged with simple larceny in our sample years after the Revolution as against
forty-five in a similarly constructed sample over the years 1663 – 89. The exten-
sion of clergy to women, in 1692 , no doubt helps to explain the increased will-
ingness of victims to prosecute female offenders, though, as we saw in Chapter 1 ,
there are other reasons to think that the more active prosecution of women in
this period was not simply a matter of the redefinition of crime.
Whatever the reason for the numbers of women charged with theft after
1689 , the influence on the juries of so many women crowding the Old Bailey
dock was clear. In the case of non-clergyable—that is, potentially capital—
offences, acquittals of women fell from close to 48 per cent in the pre- 1689 sample
to 26 per cent in the years after the Revolution, a lower acquittal rate than for
men in this period, unlike the years before 1690 and, as we will see, the years
after 1714. The increase in the number of women charged with clergyable of-
fences in the reigns ofWilliam III and Anne also brought a lower acquittal rate
for women than for men— 30 per cent as against 39 per cent (Table 7. 2 ).
As we have seen, until the statute of 1706 established hard labour as a possible
punishment for clergyable larceny, the courts had but a narrow range of sanc-
tions available in such cases. And, since women did not have to meet a literacy
test to claim their clergy, the judges were not as able to manœuvre women, as
they could some men, into a position in which they were threatened with the
gallows. Nor were they as likely to think it necessary. The consequence was that
more women than men were granted clergy once it was made available to them.
This was not a matter ofleniency. Women were also more likely than men to be
sent to the house of correction for a term of hard labour when that possibility
was made available to the bench. And they were more likely than men to be con-
victed of the reduced charge of petty larceny, whether they were charged with
clergyable or non-clergyable felonies. While very few men or women were
actually charged with petty larceny, as we have seen, more than a hundred
women and fifty-five men were convicted of that offence by trial juries in the
sessions we have sampled in this period, virtually all of whom were sentenced to
be whipped.
The changes in the criminal law in the generation after 1689 carried serious
implications for everyone who committed offences against property. But one
statute—the act of 1699 that extended capital punishment to theft from shops,
stables, and warehouses—had particular importance for women, who were its
342 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London