Crime and the State 395the prosecution of crime in this period—not least the very large rewards offered
through the 1720 s and 1730 s for the conviction of street and highway robbers in
London. With one hundred and forty pounds for one or two hundred and
eighty pounds for a pair on offer, even an ordinary victim might be tempted to
help ensure the convictions that alone brought the prize by turning to lawyers to
prepare and argue the case, especially if they were taking advice from someone
experienced in the ways of the criminal justice system, a thief-taker, perhaps.
Such prosecutors had the same end in view as the government; that is, to get
their cases presented as effectively as possible. Both the size of the rewards avail-
able in London in that period under the royal proclamation and the fact that
convictions were by no means automatic—indeed Old Bailey juries did not
convict more than half the capital offenders they tried, as we will see—must
have made the hiring of professional help seem an investment worth making,
especially when the government led the way.
It is unclear how much the move towards the more effective preparation of
prosecution cases was due in the late 1720 s and early years of the 1730 s to the ac-
tivities of the proto-policemen known to contemporaries as thief-takers or thief-
catchers. There is good reason to think that the opportunities (legitimate and
corrupt) to profit from the prosecution of crime did encourage thief-taking then.
That at least was the view of critics of criminal administration in London in this
period, troubled by changes in prosecution practices—some of which could be
ascribed to the intrusion oflawyers; others that seem more directly the result of
the self-interest of other agents of various kinds offering their services to private
prosecutors.^85
The shopkeepers who petitioned the House of Commons at the end of the
seventeenth century for more effective means of preventing shoplifting com-
plained that not only were the penal sanctions attached to clergyable felonies in-
adequate, but that accused men and women often escaped conviction
altogether because they had the help of ‘solicitors’.^86 The nature of the involve-
ment of these solicitors was not elaborated in this one-page broadside, but sim-
ilar concerns about the intrusion of such men into the prosecution process were
to be made more explicitly in the coming decades. The earliest extensive criti-
cism of their work was made in an anonymous pamphlet published in 1728
under the title Directions for Prosecuting Thieves.^87 The author sets out to give advice
(^85) John Langbein offers a similar and more fully worked out explanation of the judges’ willingness to
allow defendants to engage counsel to cross-examine and test the prosecution evidence—that is, that
they sought to restore a balance in the courtroom that had been displaced by the engagement oflawyers
on the prosecution side and by large rewards that threatened the conviction of innocent men with per-
jured evidence (‘Prosecutorial Origins of Defense Counsel’, 317 – 21 ).
(^86) The Great Grievance of Traders and Shopkeepers, by the Notorious Practice of Stealing the Goods out of their
Shops.. .(? 1699 ).
(^87) Directions for Prosecuting Thieves without the Help of those False Guides, the Newgate Sollicitors, with a great deal
of Ease, and little Expence: wherein is laid down The Manner of Indicting a FELON at Guild-Hall, Hicks’s-Hall, or the
Old Bailey( 1728 ). It was dedicated to Sir William Thomson, the recorder of the City of London, in tribute