more visible and so much more alarming was another characteristic of pros-
ecuted offences in the metropolis revealed by the pattern of prosecutions in
Table 1. 1 : the unusually large proportion of women among the offenders charged
with clergyable offences. That 40 per cent of the defendants over the period
1670 – 1750 were women is remarkable enough. But, as we will see, in several years
in the 1690 s and the first decade of the eighteenth century they actually outnum-
bered men before the Old Bailey. Women did not figure as prominently as that in
prosecutions at the county level, and, as far as I am aware, there is no other
period in which women made up such a large proportion of defendants on trial for
felonies in London.^46 The courts could rarely have had to cope with such num-
bers of women—defendants who, the established practices of the courts strongly
suggest, could not easily be subjected to the terror of the gallows, the only pun-
ishment available to the judges in felony cases. The numbers of women on trial
gave this period a particular character, and the problems they raised go a long
way towards explaining why the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
saw so many efforts to make the law and its administration more effective.
It will come as no surprise to the modern reader to learn that violent offences,
especially robbery, caused the greatest concern in late seventeenth century Lon-
don. They were feared for the obvious reason that street mugging and highway
robbery threatened serious physical harm, even death, to a defenceless and un-
suspecting traveller. Burglary and housebreaking carried a similar threat of a
confrontation between intruders who might be tempted or panicked into using
force, if only to escape, and a victim caught by surprise and at a disadvantage.
Contemporaries were certain that such offences were very common in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and, more often than not, that they
were increasing. The anonymous author of Hanging, Not Punishment Enough( 1701 ),
who, as his title suggests, argued for the imposition on such offenders of savage
punishments more terrifying than death, claimed to have been driven to such an
extreme position by the state of violent crime. He had, he said,
with great Concern for some years last past observed the Lamentable Increase of High-
way Men, and House-breakers among us; and this tho’ the Government has vigorously
set it self against them, by pardoning but very Few, and that divers Laws have been
Enacted to suppress them.^47
20 Introduction: The Crime Problem
(^46) For the high levels of female prosecution at the Old Bailey in the eighteenth century and their de-
cline in the nineteenth, based on the OBSP, see also Malcolm M. Feeley and Deborah L. Little, ‘The
Vanishing Female: The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process, 1687 – 1912 ’, Law and Society Review,
25 / 4 ( 1991 ), 719 – 58. Morgan and Rushton have found that more than half the defendants in property
cases at the quarter sessions in Newcastle between 1718 and the end of the century were women. They
suggest that ‘[h]igher rates of prosecution in urban centres than in the countryside were not unusual in
the eighteenth century... .’ Glenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Rogues, Thieves and the Rule of Law, The
Problem of Law Enforcement in North-east England, 1718 – 1800 ( 1998 ) 68 , 104. For a fuller discussion of women
defendants at the Old Bailey, see below, section ‘The problem of women’.
(^47) Hanging, Not Punishment Enough, for Murtherers, High-way Men, and House-Breakers. Offered to the Consider-
ation of the Two Houses of Parliament( 1701 ), A 2.