Crime and the State 403( 4 per cent) of those named as having received part of a reward between 1730
and 1733 were women, of whom seven had been the victim in the case or were
named as the prosecutor.
It remains something of a mystery how these distributions were arrived at,
but it is very clear that the judges went out of their way to spread the money as
widely as possible. Indeed, they most often awarded a portion of the proclam-
ation reward (and of the forty-pound statutory reward) to many more men and
women than were named as having played some part in the apprehension of the
offenders in the printed accounts of the trials or who were listed on the indict-
ments as witnesses.^109 The judges may have learned about individuals whose
silent contributions were worthy of recognition from those who did appear at
the trial; indeed, some of the distributions of rewards are so elaborate that it is
hard to avoid the conclusion that the judges may often simply have accepted lists
of people to be compensated submitted by prosecutors or someone close to
them. There seems little doubt, at any event, that rewards were spread widely as
a matter of policy.
With an average of eight recipients sharing each reward, many shares were
no more than a few pounds. A third of the claimants in Middlesex in 1730 – 3 re-
ceived five pounds or less; another third between five and ten pounds; and only
12 per cent more than twenty pounds (Table 8. 1 ). Only seven of the 449 pay-
ments were forty pounds or more. The prosecutor—usually the victim in these
property cases—often got the largest share, but not invariably, and only rarely
was his or her award significantly larger than others. Whatever the initial inten-
tion behind the decision to encourage prosecutions by the promise of a very
large sum of money to those willing to bring prosecutions and carry them
through to conviction, in practice the tendency was for the judges to increase
the number of recipients rather than to award individuals very large prizes.^110
None the less, the average award of twelve pounds ten shillings was still a
great deal of money for the vast majority of the population. Many claimants also
profited more handsomely than the average amount suggests by receiving more
than one share—close to half the rewards distributed between 1730 and 1733
were for the conviction of robbers who had committed more than one offence or
for offences in which more than one robber had taken part. Robert Chambers
(^109) It is possible that not all the names of witnesses sworn to give evidence in a particular case were
recorded on the indictment, though Ruth Paley has observed that the clerks on the Middlesex side of the
Old Bailey were more attentive to this aspect of their work than those in the City (Ruth Paley, ‘Thief-
takers in London in the Age of the McDaniel Gang, c. 1745 – 54 ’, in Douglas Hay and Francis Snyder
(eds.), Policing and Prosecution in Britain, 1750 – 1850 (Oxford, 1989 ), 321 ). For the procedure by which the £ 40
statutory rewards were distributed in the 1740 s, see ibid., 319 – 21.
(^110) The same pattern of reward distribution was repeated with respect to the statutory rewards of £ 40
for the conviction of robbers and burglars. Eight surviving judges’ certificates in the City in 1732 show the
rewards being shared among witnesses and others who had presumably played some part in the arrest
and conviction of the offenders. The number of recipients sharing each reward ranged between five and
seventeen and averaged nine. The largest portion in each case was paid to the victim of the offence with
the remainder distributed in a variety of small awards (CLRO, Misc. MSS 152. 5 ).