sessions of the peace because of the structural peculiarities of the court system in
the metropolis, under which the sessions of the peace in the City and in
Middlesex were held in conjunction with the gaol delivery session at the Old
Bailey. In the rest of the country, the county quarter sessions of the peace were
held four times a year and lasted as many days as the magistrates required to get
through the pending criminal and administrative business; sessions of assizes
and gaol delivery and sessions of the peace were entirely separate and independ-
ent. In the metropolis, however, the sessions of the peace in the Guildhall (in the
City) or in Hicks’ Hall (in Middlesex) and the sessions of gaol delivery and oyer
and terminer at the Old Bailey were in effect one continuous session. Unlike the
county jurisdictions in which four quarter sessions and the two assize sessions
were spread throughout the year and were typically held in different places in
the county in a way that would allow a sharing of the work, the same group of
magistrates in the City were called on eight times a year, roughly every six
weeks, to attend at sessions of the peace and gaol delivery for what could easily
take a week or more. There was clearly a limit to the time that the lord mayor
and the aldermen-magistrates would be willing to devote to criminal adminis-
tration in the City, given that they were not country gentlemen but virtually all
of them merchants and financiers. There were also limits to the physical resources
of the City—limits, for example, to the number of prisoners who could be
housed in Newgate and the two City compters as they awaited trial.^62
The settled habit of dealing informally with petty thefts, which came to be a
distinguishing characteristic of criminal justice administration in the capital,
may well have begun as the population of the City and the number of such prop-
erty offences were both beginning to increase strongly in the mid-sixteenth cen-
tury. It may also have been facilitated by the creation in 1553 of an institution
that was itself a response to the visible signs of social disorder—the house of cor-
rection known as the Bridewell hospital. Bridewell was established as a place
where vagrants, disobedient servants, prostitutes, bastard-bearers, and others
whose behaviour threatened social order in the City could be disciplined by
being made to work and subjected to corporal punishment in the form of whip-
ping. Whether or not the Bridewell was established with petty property offend-
ers in mind, men and women labelled as pilferers were being committed there
from its early days.^63 That pattern may have been ever more firmly established
Introduction: The Crime Problem 25(^62) See below, text at nn. 138 – 42. The policy with respect to simple larceny cases (that is clergyable lar-
cenies) changed in the last decades of the eighteenth century when the City sessions of the peace began
to try such cases. None the less, the Old Bailey continued to be dominated by non-capital larceny. Such
offences accounted for about 64 % of the property cases tried at the Old Bailey between the 1780 s and the
1820 s, compared to levels of about 40 % in the five counties on the Home Circuit in which the quarter
sessions had long dealt with a large number of simple larcenies. See Peter King, ‘Gender, Crime and Just-
ice in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-century England’, in Margaret L. Arnot and Cornelie
Usborne (eds.), Gender and Crime in Modern Europe(London, 1999 ), 45.
(^63) Bridewell got its name from its establishment on the site of an ancient religious foundation, the
Bridewell convent. For the changing character of the English bridewells over their long history, as well