streets of London and Westminster (and other cities) to be regarded as ‘high-
ways’ within the meaning of the 1692 reward statute—a clear encouragement,
in conjunction with the one hundred pound proclamation reward promulgated
just a few months earlier, to victims and accomplices to apprehend, prosecute,
and give evidence against robbers (s. 8 ).
The new system ensured that, after a century of what had been partial suc-
cess at best, the punishment of transportation to the American colonies would
now be made to work by guaranteeing that the merchant who obtained the con-
tract to take offenders to America would be well rewarded in return for taking
all the convicts sentenced by the courts.^19 In London, it was made to work by
William Thomson. Having established the legal foundations for the enforce-
ment of transportation, he went on to oversee the details of its implementation
in the capital. He was later to claim that he even read ‘the names in every bond
that is given by the merchant for transportation, and see with my own eyes, that
everything is right’.^20
The transportation system was the product of a government under seige and
on the defensive. It can be seen as one aspect of a policy of tough-mindedness
with respect to perceived threats to domestic tranquillity and to the survival of
the Hanoverian succession and of the Revolution of 1689 itself—a mindset that
produced the Riot Act of 1715 and the infamous Black Act of 1723. It was the
product of a government with the political will and capacity to support a con-
siderable infusion of public money into the administration of the criminal law.
It was also in no small measure a product of a crisis of crime in the capital and,
all the evidence suggests, of the ideas and determination of William Thomson,
who had taken advantage of his influential position as recorder, solicitor-
general, and member of parliament to propose and to push through the two
statutes that established the new system. They embodied ideas about law en-
forcement that Thomson had held for some time and that he had expressed
soon after coming to London when he was asked about how lighting could be
improved in the City. His advice, then, had encouraged the expansion of the
government’s reach, increasing the resources being brought to bear to diminish
crime. The Transportation Act and its implementation achieved a similar
result.
One further initiative that seems almost certainly to have been instituted by
Thomson soon after he came to the City was closely tied to his proposals to de-
velop the more effective punishment of offenders. This was the creation of an al-
phabetical record of the names of all offenders who came before the City courts
that would be brought up to date annually, a record that would make it possible
to identify recidivists more easily if there were any doubt about how particular
William Thomson and Transportation 431(^19) Outside the capital, the costs of transportation were to be paid by the county in which the offender
had been convicted. The subsidy for London transportees rose to £ 4 in 1721 and £ 5 in 1727 (Ekirch,
Bound for America, 71 ; and see Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 504 – 5 ).
(^20) Ekirch, Bound for America, 71 ; and see below n. 27.