They had done so, Thomson himself said, because applications to the Old Bai-
ley for reductions of punishments had become so numerous, particularly from
parish officials, that the court ‘came to a Resolution that no Sentence ofTrans-
portation should be changed but at the same Sessions as the Tryal and when any
real object of mercy is observed that sentence is usually mitigated accord-
ingly’.^44 Subsequent modifications of transportation sentences had now to be
sought entirely from the king as pardons.^45
There is little reason to doubt that petitions to alter transportation orders
were numerous and troublesome by the 1730 s. They required someone to take
the lead who was both experienced and a regular attender at the Old Bailey. If
punishments were going to be modified without taking up a good deal of the
bench’s time, someone would have to do the investigatorial work required and
make a recommendation about the case, since the judges at the new session
would not necessarily be those who had been on the bench when the original
order was made and would know nothing about the circumstances involved.
The court could deal with straightforward petitions, like that received by the
lord mayor in January 1729 from a man in favour of his son, aged 13 , who had
been convicted of petty larceny but not yet sentenced. It was marked ‘Nothing
can be done in this affaire untill next Session and then if his Relations will take
care of him the Court will indulge them.’^46 But one might presume that large
numbers of more complex cases would be difficult to manage in the midst of a
busy court session. Thomson had taken on the management of petitions in the
decade and more after the passage of the act, but with his appointment to the
bench of the court of exchequer, in 1729 , the time he could devote to it clearly di-
minished, even though he remained active as recorder.^47 Aldermen Billers and
Brocas, the two most active City magistrates in the early 1730 s, were not in the
same position as the recorder to take on the business themselves, and in any
case, as we have seen, they were largely running the pre-trial administration of
the law by the early 1730 s. It was presumably the absence of an active manager
that brought the manipulation of sentences to an end in 1734.
The Old Bailey’s system of sentence modification was a temporary phase in
the administration of transportation, but it had helped to shape the way in
which punishment had been deployed in London. It had been managed by a
William Thomson and Transportation 441(^44) SP 36 / 35 / 141.
(^45) See, for example, the petition of Ann Sikes to the king for pardon from the sentence of transporta-
tion pronounced against her at the Old Bailey in 1743 , referred to the lord mayor and reported on by him
(SP 36 / 62 / 161 , 184 – 5 ).
(^46) CLRO: London Sess. Papers,January 1729 (Hubbard). For other petitions in this period mainly
addressed to the sitting lord mayor, see ibid., August 1730 (Ward), Undated Papers 1730 (Fenton; Evans;
Gauthorn), September 1732 (Smith), April 1734 (Field), December 1734 (Bully, Cole).
(^47) In February 1731 a victim of a theft wrote to Thomson to urge him to prevent the offender, who had
been convicted at the previous session and sentenced to transportation, from having his sentence re-
duced at the session coming up. Thomson had told him to write on the eve of the session to remind him
of the case. He got his wish (CLRO: London Sess. Papers, February 1731 (Bell) ).