382 Crime and the State
Whether or not he was its target, Wild was to be the most celebrated victim of
the clause in the Transportation Act making mediation between robbers and
their victims a capital crime when the offence by which the goods had been ob-
tained was itself capital.^38 In 1725 , by which time the business of his ‘lost prop-
erty office’ had grown hugely, he was charged, convicted at the Old Bailey, and
executed.^39
Wild did not have successors who combined the two strands of thief-taking as
he had. No doubt, stolen goods continued to be returned to their owners for a fee
and no questions asked. But none of the thief-takers operating in London in the
second quarter of the century sought to profit by linking thieves and victims on
as large a scale and as a main activity.^40 The decision to put the clause of the first
Transportation Act into effect, and the publicity that Wild’s trial and execution
generated, seems in this case to have had the effect that the terror of capital pun-
ishment was expected to achieve, and to have cast something of a chill, at least
over large-scale receiving and mediation between thieves and their victims.
The other element of the thief-takers’ business, the detection and prosecution
of valuable offenders, was not likely to cease so long as rewards were offered by
the state, and particularly the one-hundred pound supplement offered under
the royal proclamation of 1720. Certainly, large number of robbers were con-
victed in the metropolis in the early 1720 s and the amounts being paid in re-
wards brought the lords of the treasury by 1726 to wonder about the generosity
and open-endedness of the policy. They asked the attorney-general and solici-
tor-general to look into the way the proclamation reward had been adminis-
tered, and discovered that Anthony Cracherode, the solicitor of the treasury
who authorized payments under the proclamation, had not only paid out about
five thousand pounds, but that ‘great sums’ were owed for offenders already con-
victed, and that ‘the offenders increase’. The treasury lords suspected that the
sums involved must have included illegal payments for the prosecution of pick-
pockets and other offenders not covered by the proclamation, but they were as-
sured by the report of the attorney-general and solicitor-general that
Cracherode approved payments of the one-hundred pound reward only when
the judge before whom the criminal had been convicted certified that the of-
fence was indeed a robbery upon the highway, and the sheriff of the appropriate
jurisdiction had been ordered to pay the statutory forty-pounds reward.^41
(^384) Geo. I, c. 11 ( 1718 ), s. 4.
(^39) For his trial and conviction, see Howson, Thief-Taker General, ch. 22. The trial was managed by
Nicholas Paxton, the deputy solicitor to the treasury (SP 44 / 81 , fos. 390 – 1 ).
(^40) A statute of 1752 — 25 Geo. II, c. 36 —established a fine of £ 50 for anyone advertising a reward with
no questions asked for return of stolen goods, and a similar fine for the printer or publisher, but Black-
stone wrote about the offence of taking a reward under pretence ofhelping the owner to recover stolen
goods in a way that suggests it was no longer as common as it had been earlier in century. It was, he said,
‘a contrivance carried to a great length of villainy in the beginning of the reign of George the first.. .’
(Commentaries on the Laws of England(Oxford, 1765 – 9 ), iv. 132 ).
(^41) T 1 / 255 / 55 ( 1 August 1726 ). The ‘judge’ was generally speaking the recorder. See William Thomson’s
letter to Walpole in 1722 in which he mentions the burden of this work in 1722 , below, pp. 433 – 4.