gallows, and they were either granted clergy or whipped (Table 7. 4 ). Of the 105
women charged, a fifth were acquitted, more than half were convicted on a
charge of simple larceny rather than the capital offence of shoplifting, and just
over a quarter, twenty-seven altogether, were found guilty as charged and sen-
tenced to death. In the end five were executed at Tyburn. Like the sixteen men
convicted of a lesser charge, the fifty-five women saved from the gallows by their
juries were either allowed clergy and immediately discharged or sentenced to a
term of hard labour in the house of correction under the 1706 statute, or—in the
case of the twenty-three women and six men who were convicted of petty
larceny—they were ordered to be whipped.
We cannot assume that over the whole range of property offences the verdicts
rendered by juries and the sentences imposed by the bench proceeded from a
consistent set of intentions: indeed, it is clear that juries differed one from the
other in their responses to similar sets of facts and circumstances. Why some
men and women were chosen by juries and judges for one form of mitigated
punishment rather than another cannot be discerned from the evidence we
have. The patterns of verdicts suggest that some juries and judges favoured one
outcome; those at the next or subsequent sessions another. They were all doubt-
less influenced by the age and apparent experience of the accused, by the evi-
dence given by their victims as well as by witnesses to their character—
testimony that cannot be recovered in a systematic way. But how they re-
sponded to those things depended on the accident of personality and the influ-
ence exercised by jury foremen or by the recorder and other judges. Verdicts
and sentences were also likely to be influenced by the length of the calendar and
the pressures produced by a run of particularly difficult and time-consuming
cases. Such considerations may also explain why at some sessions, unusually
large numbers of the accused pleaded guilty—encouraged perhaps, one might
speculate, by the promise of favourable treatment at the sentencing stage,
though how that might have been communicated to them is unclear. In an un-
usually busy session of the Old Bailey in September 1693 , in which forty-three
defendants were tried for felonies committed in the City of London, fifteen
women and one man pleaded guilty to grand larceny. There is no evidence of
this being part of a bargain struck with the bench, but it clearly helped the
judges to get through a heavy calendar, and all the women who acknowledged
their guilt in that session were allowed their clergy and were discharged.^61
Given the meagre information available about most cases in this period—
about the nature of the crime, the relationship and characters of the principals
involved, and the evidence presented in court (even with the beginnings of trial
reporting from the Old Bailey)—it is impossible to be certain why some accused
344 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London
(^61) CLRO: SM 64. In several sessions in the three years following the granting of clergy to women on
the same basis as men in 1691 several other women pleaded guilty to simple grand larceny and were
allowed their clergy: five in April 1694 (CLRO: SM 64 ), for example, and five more in the following
session of the Old Bailey in July 1694 (CLRO: SM 65 ).