414 Crime and the State
one-hundred pound reward—may thus have encouraged the ‘thief-making’
conspiracies that resulted in a major scandal soon after 1750.^142 The scandal
came to public attention in a major way only when Joseph Cox, the high con-
stable of Blackheath, took it upon himself in 1754 to expose the conspiracies or-
ganized by Stephen McDaniel and his gang. Cox and his assistants arrested
McDaniel and others at the conclusion of a case in which they had conspired to
cause two young petty thieves to rob one of the conspirators in Kent in circum-
stances and in a location carefully chosen to enhance the reward they would
earn. The two hapless young men had been tried and convicted, but before sen-
tence could be passed Cox revealed the depth of the conspiracy—a conspiracy
involving the so-called victim, the accomplice who gave evidence, the receiver
of the stolen goods, and McDaniel who had made the arrest. Cox’s determined
detective work resulted in that conspiracy being exposed. In addition, he was
able to show that the same conspirators had been responsible for the conviction
of another innocent man in the previous year who had been hanged at Tyburn.
Cox got several of these thief-takers charged with his murder.^143 From her exam-
ination of these and other cases, Paley concludes that the reward system had
provided ‘an incentive not to the detection of crime but to the organization of
thief-making conspiracies’; and, further, that ‘the everyday business of the Lon-
don thief-taker amounted to nothing less that a systematic manipulation of the
administration of the criminal law for personal gain’.^144
It is possible that such conclusions apply more to the middle decades of the
century, when the hundred-pound proclamation reward stuttered to an end,
than to earlier decades. It is clear that the City grand jury and William Thom-
son, the recorder, suspected that fictitious charges were being laid in the early
1730 s. Blatant cases of false prosecution for the sake of rewards came to light
over the next twenty years. Looking back from the mid-century, Joseph Cox was
(^142) The proclamation reward, terminated in May 1745 , had been renewed in February 1749 and again
in December 1750 in the midst of an even more serious and longer lasting crime wave in London—or at
least of a panic about the extent of violent offences being committed in the streets (London Gazette,
1 February 1749 , and 18 – 22 December 1750 ; Nicholas Rogers, ‘Confronting the Crime Wave: The
Debate Over Social Reform and Regulation, 1749 – 1753 ’, in Lee Davison et al. (eds.), Stilling the Grumbling
Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689 – 1750 (Stroud, 1992 ), 77 – 81 ). In each case
it ran for a year only, and the policy of large rewards was brought finally to an end with the expiration of
the last proclamation in December 1752. It was replaced by a system of payments of some of the costs
involved in the prosecution of felons, the intention of which was to encourage genuine victims to report
offences and undertake prosecutions ( 25 Geo. II, c. 36 ( 1752 ), s. 11 —a clause in the Disorderly Houses
Act; see Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 42 ).
(^143) They were convicted, but judgment against them was respited. Instead of being executed, they
were sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment and to stand twice in the pillory. McDaniel and Berry, the
two leaders, were protected while they stood in the pillory—further evidence, Ruth Paley suggests, of
their corrupt connections with the authorities. The two other, lesser, conspirators were not given the full
protection of constables on their appearance on the pillory, and the onlookers treated them so harshly
that one was killed in the frame and the other died the next day (Paley, ‘Thief-takers in London’, 334 – 5 ).
For Cox’s own account, see A Faithful Narrative; and see also Langbein, ‘Shaping the Eighteenth-Century
Criminal Trail’, 105 – 14.
(^144) Paley, ‘Thief-takers in London’, 323 , 327.