eliminate public whipping. It is possible that the street violence that had marked
the years after the accession of George I had encouraged a move to limit a pun-
ishment that inevitably attracted crowds. But there were deeper and longer
term reasons for controlling the frequency of displays of violence in the streets
that must have seemed disruptive of business or at least inconvenient to the
shopkeepers, merchants, and craftsmen who dominated the City’s commerce,
ran its local government, and sat on its juries. It was presumably to those inter-
ests that Thomson had responded in the Transportation Act. And if the con-
cerns of such men had shaped the act, they continued to influence the way it was
used at the Old Bailey to limit displays of state-sponsored violence in the streets
of the capital. At any event, public whippings became less common in the City.^61
Another consequence of the Transportation Act was its virtual elimination of
the branding and discharge of benefit of clergy. This had been very common in
the late seventeenth century, and remained so until the act went into effect.
Transportation had such a dramatic effect on the incidence of clergyable dis-
charge, that almost as many convicted offenders were branded on the thumb in
the four years before the act was passed as in the more than thirty years we have
sampled between 1718 and the middle of the century. Clergyable discharges
continued to have their uses as a way of removing someone from Newgate who
could neither be easily transported nor whipped for reasons of age or ill health
or physical disability. After 1718 a handful of defendants were essentially allowed
to leave the court every year without further punishment than the days or weeks
they had spent in Newgate and the shame of having been convicted of a felony.
And in some cases the branding on the brawn of the thumb appears to have
been laid aside in favour of an entirely symbolic touching of the hand with a cold
iron. In his account of a session at the Old Bailey in 1710 the German traveller
Uffenbach noted that some convicted thieves actually were branded, while
others, guilty of ‘petty crime’, were ‘only touched with a cold iron to put them to
shame’.^62 This was what the Newgate clerk whose advice to a petitioner we
quoted earlier meant by being punished in ‘as favourable a manner as the
court thinks fitt’. A convict shown mercy still ‘must be burnt’, he said, ‘tho with
an Iron near cold’.^63 The inconsequential nature of clergyable discharges
occasionally drew some reaction from the court and the City magistrates, as in
William Thomson and Transportation 447(^61) For evidence of the further decline of public whipping in London in the second half of the eight-
eenth century, which he links to its increasingly commercial character and the changing nature of pub-
lic space, see Gregory Smith, ‘The State and the Culture of Violence in London, 1760 – 1940 ’ (Ph.D.
thesis, University of Toronto, 1999 ), 388 – 419 ; and idem, ‘Civilized People Don’t Want to See That Sort
of Thing: The Decline of Physical Punishment in London, 1760 – 1840 ’, in Carolyn Strange (ed.),
Qualities of Mercy: Justice, Punishment, and Discretion(Vancouver, 1996 ), 21‒51. See also Robert Shoemaker,
‘Streets of Shame? The Court and Public Punishments in London, 1700 – 1820 ’, in Simon Devereaux and
Paul Griffiths (eds.), Punishment, Pardon, and Pain(forthcoming).
(^62) Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, London in 1710 , trans. by W. H. Quarrell and Margaret Mare
( 1934 ), 125.
(^63) SP 35 / 26 / 19.