offenders.^104 By the middle years of the 1690 s, before the Great Recoinage in
1697 reduced the number of prosecutions and executions sharply, Lapthorne
several times remarked on how crowded Newgate was becoming, how full the
Old Bailey courtroom, and how many of the condemned were being executed.
In August 1695 , he remarked that ‘never were there more clippers in custody
than now’; in October, he reported that ten offenders had been executed at
Tyburn in one day; and in December that ‘near thirty condemned’ and within a
few weeks many executed, including ten drawn to Tyburn on hurdles (as traitors)
and hanged for clipping and coining.^105 Narcissus Luttrell similarly recorded
many ‘execution days’ on which an unusually large number of offenders were put
to death at Tyburn. His figures, incomplete as they are, suggest that at least forty-
eight offenders a year on average were executed at Tyburn in William’s reign.^106
It was in the midst of this carnage that the search for an alternative punish-
ment for serious as well as minor offences was pressed by men in the City and in
parliament in the last years of the decade and the opening years of the new cen-
tury.^107 The extent to which this represented an implicit criticism of the bloodi-
ness of the Tyburn scene, as well as a belief in the need for a more effective
response to petty offences than clergy and public whipping, is unclear. It does
suggest a resurfacing of the ideas expressed so vigorously in the interregnum
about the value of hard labour as a reformative punishment (if not so obviously
the opposition to capital punishment that was also advocated then). And it is at
the least suggestive of the sensibilities underlying the support for labour-based
punishments that some of the strong proponents of alternative penal practices
were men sympathetic to the movement for the reformation of manners and, as
we have seen, men like Alderman Ashhurst who was in touch with the non-
conformist community in London, and Sir Robert Clayton, the main proponent
of the Corporation of the Poor and the Bishopsgate workhouse it established.
As one would expect from the sharp fall in prosecutions in the war years that
occupied most of Anne’s reign, the bloody displays over the last years of the
seventeenth century and the first year of the eighteenth gave way to relatively
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London 361(^104) For the problems in the coinage in the 1690 s, see above, Ch. 1 , text at nn. 114‒17.
(^105) Kerr and Duncan (eds.), The Portledge Papers, 183 , 210 – 11 , 241 , 246 – 7. Coining and clipping were
both species of treason, and thus conviction could lead to a sentence of being dragged to the place of ex-
ecution on a hurdle, and there to be subjected to hanging, drawing and quartering (in the case of men),
or burning (for women). But judicial discretion interposed. Of the fourteen men convicted in the sample
sessions in this period, all were sentenced to be dragged on a hurdle to the place of execution, but only
one (a coiner) was to be subjected to the full traitor’s punishment. Women were treated more harshly at
the sentencing stage. Of the seven convicted, six were condemned to be dragged to Tyburn and there
burned to death, including one woman who had been convicted with her husband, who was sentenced
to be hanged. On the other hand, all the women were pardoned, whereas the sentences were carried out
on twelve of the fourteen men. Perhaps that was the point: that the judges knew the women would be par-
doned and the men not, and so increased the terror and anxiety for the women. (Data from the Sample,
for which see above, p. ix).
(^106) Luttrell, Brief Historical Relation. For the accuracy ofLuttrell’s figures, see above n. 101.
(^107) See above, pp. 326 – 7.