402 Crime and the State
award needed to be identified. The recipients were, however, named in the gaol
books in Middlesex for a few years and even longer in the sessions’ instruction
and minute books in the City, and that evidence allows us to examine the reward
system in practice, particularly in the early 1730 s.^108
As one would expect from the patterns of prosecution, rewards were un-
evenly distributed: several sessions could go by with very few orders being made;
others included a very large number, as in December 1730 , when the judges au-
thorized the solicitor to pay the prosecutors of no fewer than thirteen robbers
convicted at the Old Bailey. It may, indeed, have been the thirteen hundred
pounds awarded at that session (and the suspicion that some of the prosecutions
were not entirely above-board) that persuaded the judges to order a record to be
kept of those in receipt of rewards. That was done over the next three years until
another change of policy apparently made it seem superfluous to the clerks who
kept the Middlesex gaol books. But for three years—between December 1730
and December 1733 —the names of the recipients and the amounts they
received were recorded. This evidence reveals that 449 payments were made in
those three years to 320 individuals in 56 Middlesex cases. As this suggests, a
striking aspect of the pattern of rewards was the number of claimants who came
forward in each case. In the majority of trials in which rewards were paid, in-
deed in 60 per cent of them, groups ofbetween six and ten recipients shared the
one hundred pounds (and the forty-pound statutory reward which was divided
in the same proportion). The remainder were divided between roughly equal
numbers of smaller groups—two-to-five recipients—and others that were very
much larger—between eleven and seventeen (Table 8. 1 ). Only seventeen
(^108) LMA: MJ/GBB/ 312 – 13 (gaol books of the Middlesex cases at the Old Bailey); CLRO, Sessions
Instruction Book, vols. 4 , 6 ( 1730 s passim); CLRO: SM 107 – 18 ( 1740 – 51 passim).
Table 8. 1 .Proclamation rewards in Middlesex cases, 1730 – 1733
A.Share of each £ 100 reward received per recipient:
£ 5 or less Over £ 5 to £ 10 Over £ 10 to £ 20 Over £ 20 Total no. of
shares
141 148 106 54 449
31. 4 % 33. 0 % 23. 6 % 12. 0 % 100. 0 %
B.Number of Recipients per case:
2 – 5 6 – 10 11 – 17 Total number of cases
10 34 12 56
17. 9 % 60. 7 % 21. 4 % 100. 0 %
Average number of recipients per case: 8. 0
Median number per case: 7
Source: LMA: MJ/GBB/ 312 – 13.