392 Crime and the State
among the expenses that the administration would defray. Efforts to improve
the effectiveness of prosecutions in particular cases meant an expanded role for
pre-trial work by attorneys—for lawyers to gather evidence, interview wit-
nesses, and construct a brief that would organize the way a case should be laid
out in court and specify who should be put on the witness stand to prove what
point. A brief among the State Papers in 1735 in the prosecution ofJohn Black-
bourne, an accused robber and thief, lays out the evidence deposed by one of
Blackbourne’s accomplices before the examining magistrate and sets out how
the various elements of the charge can be proved by evidence to be given by
several witnesses.^76 Professional help of that kind was exactly what the adminis-
tration intended to provide in order to eliminate some of the weaknesses of a
prosecution system that depended entirely on the amateur and hit-and-miss
efforts of private individuals, and thus to improve the chances of winning
convictions.
The engagement of lawyers in the preparation of briefs can also be seen in
the work of the City solicitor, whose duty it was to prepare cases in which the
mayor and Corporation had an interest. Only a few of the briefs he prepared in
this period remain among the Sessions Papers, and for the most part they per-
tain to the kinds of civil suits or misdemeanours in which the City’s authority or
its officials were challenged and that would long have been his responsibility. His
briefs in the 1740 s, for example, include cases in which he organized the pros-
ecution of chairmen who persisted in obstructing the streets and footpaths, an-
other involving a dispute between parish and ward authorities over the fees
collected when a man refused to act as a constable, and one concerning the
prosecution of a man for keeping a bawdy house—all of them forms oflitigation
in which lawyers had customarily been involved.^77 But it was a recent extension
of his duty that required him to prepare a brief for the prosecution of William
Meneer for a felony—the theft of five iron weights from Newgate market, the
goods of the mayor and citizens of London, and valued at ten shillings—which
was tried at the Old Bailey in June 1738. The City solicitor either examined the
depositions or the witnesses themselves; he wrote a brief that set out who should
be called to prove the City’s ownership of the weights and to prove that they
were found in the defendant’s ironmonger’s shop in Fleet Street; and he drafted
the indictment. The solicitor included in his brief the information that similar
market weights had been found in the defendant’s shop once before, some of
which (along with those recently lost) were to be produced in court. This was in-
formation that was no doubt to be disclosed to the jury. It also surely explains
why the City authorities were sufficiently anxious to convict Meneer that they
paid the City solicitor to draw up this brief.^78
(^76) SP 36 / 35 / 105. For a more extensive discussion of solicitors’ briefs in this period, see Langbein,
‘Prosecutorial Origins of Defense Counsel’, 325 – 56.
(^77) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, September 1740 , February 1742 , September 1742.
(^78) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, June 1738.