What was particularly alarming, he went on to argue, was the violence that such
men threatened against their victims, the terror and fear they caused.
The author of this tract (to whose arguments and prescriptions we will return)
had come to his conclusion about the dangers posed by crime in London be-
cause of the evidence of ‘our Sessions-Papers Monthly, and the Publick News
daily’.^48 Certainly, the regularly published accounts of the sessions at the Old
Bailey provided numerous examples of highway and street robbery, particularly
in the 1690 s, and while not as common as they were to become later in the eight-
eenth century, accounts of robberies and other crimes also began to appear in
the newspapers in Anne’s reign.^49 The regular reports of violent offences tried
at the Old Bailey at the very least sustained the sense of alarm in the capital.
This is suggested, for example, by the correspondence of Richard Lapthorne in
the decade after 1687. Lapthorne was the London agent of Richard Coffin, a
Devon country gentleman, employed by Coffin to buy books and keep him
informed of doings in the capital—including (perhaps because Coffin was a
JP) news about crime. Lapthorne sent copies of at least some of the Sessions
Papers to his patron, but he also drew on them regularly in his newsletters, es-
pecially reports of the numbers condemned to death. In April 1688 he informed
Coffin that he had heard that the recent sessions had been very busy, and that he
would know more about the trials in a few days, when ‘the narrative will come
out’.^50
Lapthorne did not depend entirely on the Sessions Papers for the informa-
tion about violent crime that fills his correspondence. He collected news and
gossip from the coffee shops and taverns. By way of illustrating his frequently ex-
pressed lament about how ‘vitious and debouched’ London was becoming, he
often included reports about robberies recently committed. He reported on one
occasion in the 1690 s, for example, that
last night at 5 a clock a Wiltshire Farmer having under his arme a bag of £ 80 carrying it
to Sir Francis Child’s house within Temple Bar was in the backside of St. Clements by
New Inn gate struck down and the mony taken from him.^51
In later years he reported frequent examples of ‘robbery... in and about the
town by Highwaymen and footpadders’ and other serious violence—including
a murder committed by robbers, and an account of an assault on forty-two
people who had been ‘stript by robbers on the highway’ near Tyburn and
‘turned into a common feild’.^52
Introduction: The Crime Problem 21(^48) Ibid., 1.
(^49) See, for example, The Post Boy, 8 – 10 December 1702 , where it is reported that ‘Several Robberies
have of late been Committed on the Roads leading to this City, there being a great Gang of Highway-
men abroad.’
(^50) Russell J. Kerr and Ida Coffin Duncan (eds.), The Portledge Papers, being Extracts from the Letters of
Richard Lapthorne, Gent, of Hatton Garden, London, to Richard Coffin, Esq. of Portledge, Bideford, Devon, from
December 10 th 1687 –August 7 th 1697 ( 1928 ), 31.
(^51) Ibid., 95. (^52) Ibid., 187 – 8 ; and see pp. 128 , 158 , 164 , 217.