are, are fuller than most in Anne’s reign. In the first place, two of the offences
were uncommon. William Bond’s was so distinctly unusual (entering into a recog-
nizance under a false name), and the sentence of death so startling, that the
council reprieved him in order to ask the judges about the law he had broken.
The death sentence imposed on a women for highway robbery was also un-
common. It is true that Patience Cooper attacked a female victim, but very few
women were accused of highway robbery at the Old Bailey. Further, two of-
fenders who had been convicted of the clergyable offence of simple grand lar-
ceny had been denied benefit of clergy by the Old Bailey judges on the ground
that they had been allowed it at an earlier session. This was rare by the early
eighteenth century. Normally the courts and the judges overlooked the evidence
of previous convictions and the brand on the thumb that had been their conse-
quence: once clergy had been fully extended to women in 1692 , clergyable lar-
ceny was most commonly punished with a non-capital sanction. The difference
in 1704 may be that Stephen Swift and Elizabeth Price had been branded in the
faceand not the thumb—as laid down by the clause of the 1699 statute that was
to be repealed 1706. It is possible that judges found it more difficult to overlook
previous convictions for clergyable offences when the evidence was so vividly
obvious, and especially when the prisoner was thought to be ‘notorious’.
Altogether, the recorder reported that ten felons had been convicted and sen-
tenced to death at the Old Bailey in December 1704. (Sixteen others had been
convicted of clergyable felonies and five of petty larceny.) The cabinet’s recom-
mendations, whether to confirm those sentences or to grant pardons, provide
some clues as to how such offences and offenders were viewed. As the cases of
the ten condemned felons were discussed by the council, the recorder almost
certainly shaped his accounts to achieve particular outcomes. The marginal
notes make it clear that he reported on the offenders as well as the offences and
that his evidence about their previous conduct led to the choice of three to be exe-
cuted—not so much John Smith, for by being convicted of three highway rob-
beries he had done enough on his own, but certainly the two women shoplifters.
They were selected to be hanged, the scrawled marginal note makes clear, be-
cause they were ‘old offenders’ who had been previously charged with or sus-
pected of such offences. Two other women were saved from execution because
they had pleaded pregnancy in court. The council agreed that Patience Cooper,
the robber, would be reprieved until her baby was born, but that she would then
be executed. The fate of the other, a shoplifting accomplice of one of the ‘old
offenders’, was to be reconsidered when she had given birth.^85 Elizabeth Price
354 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London
(^85) It is unclear what happened to Cooper and Elizabeth Harrow. They do not appear in the list of
transported convicts in Peter Wilson Coldham, The Complete Book of Emigrants in Bondage, 1614 – 1775 (Balti-
more, 1988 ). The council took a hard line on respites for pregnancy in Anne’s reign. In the thirteen other
extant recorder’s reports from this period seven women came before the council after having being de-
livered of children for which their execution was respited. Five were ordered to be executed—four of
whom had been convicted of burglary and one of shoplifting—and two (originally convicted of picking
pockets) were pardoned and ordered for transportation.