transported. It is hardly surprising that Thomson as recorder immediately em-
ployed the new powers the legislation allowed. Whipping sentences at the Old
Bailey were immediately and significantly reduced when the Transportation
Act came into effect. Whereas five or six City defendants had been subjected to
the lash after every session of the Old Bailey in the four years before the act was
passed, not a single defendant was punished in that way in the sessions sampled
in the four years following its passage. It was only when the court began to alter
some of its initial transportation orders in 1722 , in the way we have described,
that whipping sentences appeared again, although now in more limited num-
bers. Indeed, no more than one offender was ordered to be whipped per session
on average over the next thirty years. Transportation became so firmly estab-
lished as the normal punishment for petty larceny that by the 1740 s the City
magistrates began to commit defendants to trial on that charge at the Old Bai-
ley in much larger numbers than ever before—almost certainly, in some cases,
instead of diverting the accused to the house of correction, as they had done so
commonly in the late seventeenth century and the early decades of the eight-
eenth. The dozen offenders in our Sample charged and convicted of petty lar-
ceny—all but one of whom were men—were ordered to be transported.
Whipping thus came to occupy a much-diminished place as a punishment for
property offences by the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Several sessions
of the Old Bailey could then go by without a whipping being ordered: between
1718 and the middle of the century such physical punishment for theft accounted
for only 10 per cent of all non-capital sanctions. At the same time courts in other
jurisdictions continued to rely on this long-established practice. The quarter ses-
sions and assizes of Surrey and Sussex, for example, continued to order private
and public floggings—for a third of convicted offenders in Surrey and 36 per cent
in Sussex. In Essex, a similar proportion of property offenders was subjected to
whipping in the 1740 s and into the 1750 s. And in Northumberland and Durham,
the quarter sessions and assizes together ordered more than half the defendants
convicted of theft in the two decades before 1750 to be whipped, though whipping
fell away sharply thereafter.^59 Chief Justice Ryder discovered to his surprise
when he first went on Circuit that the uses of whipping had been expanded in the
assize courts outside London to include grand larceny. Defendants at the Old
Bailey, he noted in 1754 , were never ordered to be whipped for grand larceny, a
punishment that he was surely right to say had no basis in law.^60
It seems reasonable to conclude that transportation had been valued in
London—and instigated at the encouragement of the City—in part because it
provided a punishment for petty theft that enabled the Old Bailey virtually to
446 William Thomson and Transportation
(^59) For Surrey and Sussex, see Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 508 – 9 , 544 – 5. For Essex, see Peter King,
Crime, Justice, and Discretion, 1740 – 1820 (Oxford, 2000 ), 272 – 3 and fig. 8.1n. For Northumberland (includ-
ing Newcastle) and Durham, see Morgan and Rushton, Rogues, Thieves and the Rule of Law, figures calcu-
lated from data in tables 3. 5 and 3. 6 , pp. 72 , 75.
(^60) Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 545.