Crime and the State 421Elizabethan laws that attempted to prevent corruption by informers. Even
more damaging for society, he argued, was the odium attaching to thief-takers,
to men who sought out and prosecuted serious criminals rather than simply
informing on those who infringed economic regulations. And he could explain
such attitudes only by thinking that they had been manufactured by the self-
interest of offenders who took advantage of popular (and ignorant) opinion to
amplify hostility to those who most effectively threatened them with arrest.
Thief-takers had been thus confused with informers and their public service
forgotten: ‘the general Cry being once raised against Prosecutors on penal
Laws, the Thieves themselves have... put their Prosecutors on the Footing of all
the others: Nay I much question whether in the Acceptation of the Vulgar, a
Thief-catcher be not a more odious and contemptible Name than even that of
Informer’.^163 To this he opposed a view of the thief-taker as a man ofhonour. He
worked for a reward, it was true, but in that he was like so many other public
servants (soldiers, for example) who were doing ‘Good to Society’. In fact, the
thief-takers were ‘among the most honourable Officers in Government’, and
they should be praised not despised.^164
This says a good deal about Henry Fielding’s work and intentions at Bow
Street, intentions that were to be further developed by his half-brother. Apart
from creating what was by far the most thorough and extensive source of infor-
mation about offences and offenders ever devised,^165 they brought together and
supported a group of thief-takers who acted under their orders to seek out and
arrest wanted men in London and, if called upon, elsewhere. First brought to-
gether by Henry Fielding soon after he came to Bow Street in the winter of
1748 – 9 , these so-called Bow Street Runners were given firmer institutional sup-
port in 1753 , when the government, through the secretary of state, the Duke of
Newcastle, provided six hundred pounds for their maintenance and asked
Fielding to draw up a plan to deal with the violent crime that seemed to have
grown by then to even greater heights in the metropolis.^166
The establishment of a group of detective policemen, led by Saunders Welch,
the high constable of Holborn, was later described by Sir John Fielding after he
succeeded his half-brother. Fielding prefaced a tract published in 1755 that set
out his ideas about extending the regular reporting and pursuit ofhighway rob-
bers within 20 miles of the capital, with a defence of the Bow Street thief-
takers—a defence required, as he acknowledged, by the recently disclosed
McDaniel gang scandal. Unlike ‘McDaniel and his crew’, he set out to show, the
(^163) Ibid., 153.
(^164) Ibid., 154.
(^165) On this aspect of the Fielding’s work, see Radzinowicz, History, iii. 44 – 54 , and particularly John
Styles, ‘Sir John Fielding and the Problem of Criminal Investigation in Eighteenth-Century England’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5 th ser., 33 ( 1983 ), 127 – 50.
(^166) Radzinowicz, History, iii. 54 – 8 ; and see Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe Battestin, Henry Fielding: A
Life( 1988 ), 499 – 502 ; and Leslie-Melville, Life and Work of Sir John Fielding, ch. 4.