Violent robbery was thought to be particularly common in the streets of the
capital, where targets were plentiful and escape relatively easy, as well as on the
major roads in and around the metropolis. In the winters of 1691 and 1692 street
robberies and reports of people being seriously wounded were sufficiently
alarming that the City aldermen agreed to arrange for men with halberds to
walk the streets in their wards from dusk until the watch was set at 9 o’clock and
then (most unusually, as we will see) to ensure that a full watch was kept through
the night.^53
Robbery was one source of danger. So too were burglary and housebreaking,
both of which caused anxiety not only because they represented an invasion of
the private realm that put everyone there at risk, including women and children,
but because—like street robbery—they were often carried out by small gangs of
men, indeed often the same men who robbed in the streets. The public read
about such dangerous individuals in the biographies of notorious offenders and
in accounts of gangs of robbers and pickpockets that became increasingly com-
mon in the late seventeenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth, as
well as in the Sessions Papers. The magistrates of the City learned about them
in more detail when they examined robbers or burglars who were induced by
the promise of a pardon and a reward to impeach their accomplices. In 1700 , for
example, a man admitted having taken part in a series of burglaries, house-
breaking, and thefts from ships with five other men; some years later another
man admitted committing thirty-six burglaries in a sixteen-month period with
a group of eight men acting in various combinations; two others told of another
set of eight men who, again in variously formed smaller groups, robbed on the
highways, burgaled houses and shops, and stole horses; and many others recited
similar stories.^54
Such accounts must have shaped the magistrates’ views of crime and—as
similar reports appeared in the Sessions Papers, in the ordinary’s account of the
careers of the condemned, in pamphlet accounts of the trials of famous or infam-
ous offenders, and eventually in the collections of criminal lives that these
sources made possible—they also shaped the public’s sense of crime as a grow-
ing social problem. Crime reporting and criminal biographies fed the panic and
alarm that are so evident in a pamphlet like Hanging, Not Punishment Enough, a
document that expressed not simply anger at the loss of property (though that
was not absent), but the fear of violence in a society largely without protection.
At the heart of this pamphlet is a deep anxiety induced by the experiences of a
violent decade.
The several non-violent offences that had been removed from clergy in the
past and made subject to capital punishment were much less likely to create a
22 Introduction: The Crime Problem
(^53) Jor 51 , fos. 109 , 119 ; and see below ch. 4.
(^54) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, October 1700 , April 1706 , February and September 1708 , October
1711 , April 1713 , July 1713 , February 1715.