flogging carried out in the relative privacy of the gaol or house of correction,
and when the court intended such a mitigation of the punishment, it would be
included in the sentence. A sailor convicted of theft in 1734 and sentenced ini-
tially to transportation had his punishment changed subsequently to an order
that he be ‘whipt privately’ and sent back to his ship.^57
In our Sample of one-third of the City of London cases tried at the Old
Bailey between 1714 and 1750 , 161 men and 128 women were convicted of petty
larceny, all but 22 of whom had been charged with a more serious offence that
had been reduced by their juries. Close to half were ordered to be whipped and
then discharged. That represented about 17 per cent of all property offenders
subjected to a non-capital punishment over the period we are dealing with. But
that total conceals the significant impact the Transportation Act had on this
form of punishment. Between the accession of George I in 1714 and the passage
of the Transportation Act less than four years later an unusually large number
of men and women charged with property offences had been convicted at the
Old Bailey of petty larceny. In our Sample of eleven sessions in those years, well
over half of those found guilty of a non-capital property crime had been con-
victed of petty larceny—a total of 63 , 70 per cent of whom were men—and, as
the law required, they had been condemned to be whipped and then dis-
charged. Juries selected the least serious offenders for this treatment, as they had
in previous years: virtually all of them had taken goods under two pounds in
value; almost half goods under ten shillings.^58 Juries clearly intended to convict
a significant number of defendants in a way that would subject them to this
painful and humiliating public punishment at a time of post-war concern about
crime levels. After each session of the Old Bailey between 1714 and April 1718
five or six convicted City defendants were subjected to whipping—close to 50
every year in the City, and perhaps two to three times as many in the metrop-
olis as a whole.
This increased incidence of whipping may well have encouraged William
Thomson to erase the ancient distinction between petty and grand larceny in
the Transportation Act by making both equally subject to a term ofbanishment
at the discretion of the bench. Henceforth a defendant found guilty of petty
larceny could be ordered to be whipped in the old way, or he or she could be
William Thomson and Transportation 445(September 1723 ), 65 (December 1723 ). Two men convicted in 1713 of fraudulently assuming the names
of two sailors in order to receive their bounty money were ordered to be whipped until their backs be
bloody at the whipping post near the Prize Office (CLRO: SM 79 , May 1713 ).
(^57) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, December 1734 (Bully).
(^58) A total of 269 defendants were tried for property offences between 1714 and April 1718 , when the
Transportation Act came into effect. Juries showed the same tendency as in previous periods to convict
outright those who stole goods with significant value and to find partial verdicts in more trivial cases.
Under 10 % of those indicted of theft under 10 s. were found guilty of that charge, as against 46 % of those
who stole more than £ 5 ; almost 40 % of defendants who stole goods of under £ 2 were found guilty of a
lesser charge, whereas in only 15 % of cases were thefts of £ 5 and more judged worthy of partial verdicts.
Data based on the eleven sessions in the Sample in this period.