vigorous advocacy of a system supported by treasury money—created a pre-
sumption that clergyable offenders would be banished to the colonies unless
there were compelling reasons to relent. This inclination in favour of trans-
portation explains not why it became the most common non-capital punish-
ment in London—it was that in other jurisdictions—but why it became so
dominant in the metropolis, accounting as it did for three-quarters of the pun-
ishments imposed on defendants convicted of non-capital property crimes be-
tween 1714 and 1750 , compared, for example, to 56 per cent in the nearby
county of Surrey.^55 The reliance on transportation also helps to account for two
other features of the patterns of punishment for non-capital offences revealed in
Table 9. 2 that are particularly notable given the previous practice of the court.
One is the similarity in the treatment of men and women, who made up two-
thirds and one-third respectively of the offenders sentenced. With only slight
variations, men and women were punished in virtually the same way in each cat-
egory of offence. Women were more likely than men to be allowed a clergyable
discharge when convicted partially on a capital charge; men were more likely to
be whipped. The reverse was true when the original charge had been grand lar-
ceny. But in the case of both offences, roughly the same proportion of men and
women were ordered to be transported; and overall, as their numbers among the
convicted would predict, women made up almost exactly one-third of all prop-
erty offenders sent to America. Gender as such played little part in the decision
to transport convicted offenders rather than allowing them to be whipped or
clergied and then released: women were as likely as men to be perceived as en-
gaging in the kind of persistent offending that transportation was principally de-
signed to counteract. If there was a gender bias it may have worked in favour of
mothers whose transportation would threaten to leave young children in the
care of parish authorities. Thomson’s opposition to efforts to save such women
from being sent to America suggests how strongly that bias was at work.
A second feature of the data in Table 9. 2 is connected with the first: the con-
tinuing decline of whipping as a sanction in property cases in London. I sug-
gested earlier that, although whipping sentences at the Old Bailey did not
normally specify how and where that punishment was to be administered, it
seems clear that in the late seventeenth century and the early decades of the
eighteenth the punishment was inflicted upon the naked backs of convicted
men and women as they were dragged through the streets tied to the back of a
cart. The French traveller Misson, writing about 1698 , described the typical
whipping as being ‘thro’ the Streets by the Hands of the Hangman’; and whip-
ping sentences ordered at the Middlesex sessions in the 1720 s for attempted rob-
bery and wounding in one case, and for an assault on a bailiff in another, were
to be at a cart’s tail over a stated course.^56 It was perhaps a concession to have the
444 William Thomson and Transportation
(^55) Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 507 , Table 9. 6.
(^56) Henri Misson, Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England( 1719 ), 359 ; British Journal, 51