Crime and the State 409treasury’s obligations during the war, a time of heavy expenditure. But (since it
was never again to be instituted for an open-ended term) it also had a deeper
and longer term purpose. It seems clearly to have been a response to long-
standing complaints about the ill effects of large rewards, and in particular
about conspiracies among thief-takers to draw men into committing offences
for which they could easily be prosecuted and convicted. Such anxieties—and
the related issue that the rewards were not as effectively administered as they
might be—were repeated by the Westminster and Middlesex benches and in
communications to the secretary of state from several individual justices in the
midst of the panic created by the Black Boy Alley gang.
Three magistrates wrote to the Duke of Newcastle in October, for example,
to recommend a change in the levels of rewards and the way they were admin-
istered. They were concerned about two problems: not only the way large re-
wards had drawn some thief-takers into corrupt and malicious prosecutions, a
problem they seemed to blame on the way the distribution of shares among the
claimants was being decided in the privacy of the judges’ chambers; but also the
discouraging effects of delays in payment. They offered two solutions. The first
paralleled the offer of a five-pound reward by the City for the apprehension of
someone accused of street robbery. The Middlesex magistrates suggested that a
similar payment be made immediately to the prosecutor by the magistrate who
committed an accused robber to trial. That was a response to delays in the pay-
ment of large rewards by the treasury, but it also met the objection that rewards
paid after conviction, even if timely, did not encourage prosecution by those
with little ready money because of the fees and other costs they would have to
cover immediately. These magistrates also offered a suggestion that was in-
tended to curb some of the negative effects of the one-hundred pound reward.
The Middlesex magistrates proposed that the large reward be reduced—to
forty pounds, to match the statutory reward—and that payments once again be
put in the hands of the solicitor of the treasury so they could be delivered
‘immediately on Conviction of the above Offenders in Open Court without Fee
or any Deduction, the proportions to be settled by the Judge trying the Cause’.
These justices clearly wanted not only a speedier but a more transparent reward
system—smaller payments made in open court to those with an immediate
claim to the royal bounty. They did not state this as an aim, but the effect of their
proposals would have been to prevent associations of thief-takers dominating
the reward system by influencing distributions in the privacy of the judges’ or
the recorders’ chambers.^128
(^128) SP 36 / 64 / 339. Two other men—Jacob Harvey and John Elliot—who wrote to Newcastle in the
same week as these magistrates to offer their services as thief-takers also made a point about the discour-
aging effects of delayed payments of rewards. They claimed to know the houses the Black Boy Alley gang
frequented, and they and several other persons were ready to apprehend them ‘were they assured of ye
Rewards being pay’d without any fees immediately upon Conviction by the direction of ye Judges’
(SP 36 / 64 / 324 ).