408 Crime and the State
warrants that would enable them more easily to arrest those who could be pun-
ished as rogues and vagabonds or idle and disorderly persons under the recent
vagrancy legislation that had been passed in order to increase the penalties for
anyone who could be so labelled.^123
Virtually every edition in September and October of the thrice-weekly
London Evening Postincluded accounts of groups of men, armed most often with
cutlasses, occasionally pistols, beating and robbing in several parts of the me-
tropolis and acting with apparent impunity, as though they had no fear of
arrest.^124 That the Black Boy Alley gang was responsible for many of these was
to be confirmed when one of them—William Harper, alias Old Daddy or Old
Man (a reference apparently not to his age but to his grave demeanour)—was
arrested by Alexander Forfar. Within days he was saving his neck (and lining his
pocket) by providing the evidence that led to the capture of several of his col-
leagues. In two long examinations in Newgate and Guildhall, he implicated ten
members of the ‘gang’ (as he called it) in robberies in the City—in Aldersgate,
Bishopsgate, Fenchurch, and Threadneedle Streets, in Smithfield market and
further west, in Drury Lane and the Covent Garden area. On several occasions,
he confessed, they committed six or more robberies in an evening, roaming the
streets armed with sticks and cutlasses, stopping men and taking their watches.
If their victims resisted or called for help, they beat them. Harper also described
burglaries and other offences, and named several receivers, principally one in
Sharps Alley, near Cow Cross Street.^125
The persistence over several months of what appeared to be a serious men-
ace in the streets helps to explain why, as a reminder to the public, the govern-
ment reissued the proclamation that offered a hundred pound reward for the
conviction of anyone committing robbery or attempting to rob with an offensive
weapon. It was published early in November,^126 though many of its immediate
targets—the members of the Black Boy Alley gang—had in fact been arrested a
few days earlier following the capture of William Harper.^127 But apart from the
encouragement it was expected to give to those who might be able to apprehend
the dangerous men terrorizing the streets at that moment, the proclamation had
another purpose. It also introduced a new policy by including a terminal date
for the payment of the supplementary one-hundred pound reward: it was to
apply only to offences committed since 1 October and until the end of the fol-
lowing April. The intention behind that may have been simply to reduce the
(^123) SP 36 / 64 / 310 – 11. For the vagrancy legislation of 1740 and 1744 , see Nicholas Rogers, ‘Policing the
Poor in Eighteenth-Century London: The Vagrancy Laws and their Administration’, Histoire sociale/
Social History, no. 47 (May 1991 ), 127 – 47 ; idem, ‘Vagrancy, Impressment and the Regulation of Labour in
Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Slavery and Abolition, 15 / 2 (August 1994 ), 102 – 13 ; J. Ribton-Turner, A History
of Vagrants and Vagrancy, and Beggars and Begging( 1887 ), 198 – 203 ; Sydney and Beatrice Webb, English Local
Government: English Poor Law History: Part I, The Old Poor Law( 1927 ), 351 – 6.
(^124) See, for example, the ten successive editions from 18 – 20 September to 11 – 13 October 1744.
(^125) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, December 1744 (examinations dated 30 October and 4 December).
(^126) London Gazette, 6 – 10 November 1744. (^127) CLRO: SF 807 (calendar).