from Middlesex (Table 1.2).^41 By the second quarter of the eighteenth century
the Old Bailey judges could expect to deal with 500 to 600 accused charged with
property offences every year. In the county of Sussex, in contrast, just over thirty
indictments on average were tried every year at the two sessions of the assizes
and the four quarter sessions; and even in a populous county like Surrey, the aver-
age was no more than a hundred cases a year, less than a fifth of the number of
offenders appearing at the Old Bailey.^42 In addition, compared to other parts of
the country in which the levels of prosecuted property crime were at relatively
low levels in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (compared, that
is, to the levels they had reached in the half century before 1620 and to which
they were to climb after 1780 ), London prosecutions showed little sign of overall
decline in that period.^43
The Old Bailey also met eight times a year, compared to the twice annual
meeting of the county assizes at which serious crimes were tried outside London
(once a year on the Northern Circuit). A court that met roughly every six weeks
to deal with as many as seventy-five or more felons over the course of a few days
kept the issue of crime before the public more insistently in the capital than the as-
size courts in the English counties, especially when the Old Bailey trials came to
be regularly reported in a pamphlet account of the session. And the fact that sev-
eral sessions every year would be followed by a hanging day at Tyburn—a day on
which the condemned offenders would be carted across the city to be executed
before a large crowd near what is now Marble Arch—could only have further
sustained the impression of crime as a serious social problem in the metropolis.
18 Introduction: The Crime Problem
(^41) A gap in the Middlesex Gaol Book makes it difficult to collect similar data for William’s reign and
the early years of Anne, but an examination of the numbers of accused offenders listed in the gaol calen-
dars for both Middlesex and the City in twenty-two sessions between 1696 and 1699 , for which such data
are available for both jurisdictions, reveals that of the total of 2,327defendants held in Newgate on the
eve of the sessions, 42. 0 % were from the City (CLRO, SF 418 – 46 ; LMA, MJ/SR 1872 – 1931 ).
(^42) Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 201 , and ch. 5 generally.
(^43) For this comparison, see J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550 – 1750 (London, 1984 ),
53 – 63 ; for the reduction in indicted property offences in the second half of the seventeenth century in
Cheshire, see ibid., Fig. 2 , p. 60.
Table1.2.Defendants from the City of London and Middlesex in
trials for offences against property at the Old Bailey
Years City Middlesex Total City% Middlesex%
1675‒6 363 479 842 43.1 56.9
1684‒5 278 439 717 38.8 61.2
1714‒15 287 764 1,051 27.3 72.7
1731‒2 323 826 1,149 28.1 71.9
1740‒1 324 892 1,216 26.6 73.4
1749‒50 367 914 1,281 28.7 71.3
Source: CLRO: Sessions Minute Books (SM); LMA: Gaol Delivery Books (MJ/GBB)