Apart from the numbers of offenders, the pattern of prosecutions shown in
Table 1.1suggests two other characteristics of urban crime. One is that a large
proportion of accused faced capital charges. Close to 60 per cent of the defend-
ants from the City in the late seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth cen-
turies were tried for offences that were ‘within clergy’, that is to say, for felonies
in which a convicted offender could plead benefit of clergy and thus escape the
common law penalty of death by hanging.^44 But the remainder—well over four
thousand men and women between 1670 and 1750 from the City alone—were
on trial for their lives, accused of committing an offence from which clergy had
been removed by statute. Most of what were considered to be the serious crimes
against property had been removed from clergy in the sixteenth century. These
included robbery, burglary, and housebreaking—offences that were feared be-
cause they threatened the victim’s safety as well as goods. But they also included
a number of larcenies that were much less obviously threatening, for which cap-
ital punishment came to be imposed after the Revolution of 1689. As a conse-
quence, an even larger proportion of defendants at the Old Bailey in the
decades that followed faced charges that threatened them with a gruesome
death at Tyburn.^45
The initiative to make the criminal law tougher by removing the right to ben-
efit of clergy from a number of property offences and so threaten more offenders
with capital punishment came largely from the City. It emerged in this period in
part because of another characteristic of property crime in London that is not
fully revealed by the pattern of prosecutions in Table 1. 1. That is, the pervasive-
ness of petty theft. Despite the fact that almost 60 per cent of property crime pros-
ecutions in the City were for offences that remained within benefit of clergy—for
the most part, offences that involved the taking of goods without the threat of vio-
lence—the incidence of such crimes was hugely under-represented in the cases
brought to court. There was a decided reluctance to bring minor thefts to trial in
this period, even when victims reported them to the authorities. The inability of
the courts to deal with petty offences was one impulse behind several initiatives
to make the law more effective. What made the problem of minor crime so much
Introduction: The Crime Problem 19(^44) All felonies were capital offences at common law. From the twelfth century, however, there had de-
veloped a privilege, known as benefit of clergy, that saved those who could claim it from the capital con-
sequences of a conviction for felony. There were some important changes in the application of clergy in
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but very largely one can say that by 1700 benefit of
clergy was available to all defendants convicted of simple theft. The privilege of clergy had been removed
(by statute) from a range of other property offences. On the other hand, though restricted in that way,
clergy had been gradually extended to virtually every convicted offender. The situation at the beginning
of the eighteenth century was that felonies were either clergyable or they were not. The latter were cap-
ital offences; those that were clergyable remained nominally capital, but that penalty was by then only
rarely imposed and the defendant was subjected to branding on the thumb and immediate discharge or
to some other punishment. We shall have reason to return frequently to changes in benefit of clergy over
this period and the way it was administered. For a fuller account of the history of clergy, see Beattie, Crime
and the Courts, 141 – 6 ; and Langbein, ‘Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial’, 37 – 41.
(^45) For changes in the criminal law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see chs 6 – 8.