1730 , for example, when two men charged with shoplifting but found guilty on
the reduced charge of larceny by their juries and allowed clergy were forced to
enter into recognizances with sureties to oblige them to return to court at the
end of three years.^64 The intention presumably was to add pain to what was be-
coming an insignificant punishment compared to the alternative of transporta-
tion, and to discourage them from offending again. It was a gesture, and one not
repeated. Indeed, by then, benefit of clergy was becoming uncommon at the
Old Bailey, especially when the court abandoned its practice of sentence revi-
sion. After the mid- 1730 s one could say that, in the City at least, clergyable dis-
charges essentially disappeared.
The reduction of both whipping and clergy reinforced and underscored the
dominance of transportation as the principal non-capital punishment in Lon-
don in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. There were situations in
which the transportation system ran less smoothly than others—times when the
contractor found it expedient not to send his ships regularly—and patterns of
verdicts and punishments could easily vary from one session to another.^65 But
the establishment of the transportation sanction for clergyable offences and of
the contracting system diminished the experimentation and the ad hocmanipu-
lations of verdicts and sentences that had for long characterized penal practice
in London. The Transportation Act transformed the administration of the
criminal law, with significant consequences for those men and women convicted
of non-capital crimes against property. The act had implications for those con-
victed of capital offences, too, since transportation had long functioned as the
preferred condition of a royal pardon. And to that subject—the consequences
of the new penal system for those in danger of being hanged for crimes against
property—we must now turn.
Tyburn: the uses of capital punishment
A quarter of the men and 9 per cent of the women charged with capital offences
against property were convicted in the period 1714 – 50 and were sentenced
to be executed at Tyburn (Table 9. 1 ). Whether they would actually suffer that
448 William Thomson and Transportation
(^64) CLRO, Charge Book, 1728 – 33 , 5 – 6 July, and 7 July 1730.
(^65) Even with the subsidy paid by the government for each convict transported, the contractor,
Jonathan Forward, must have benefited from the sentencing system at the Old Bailey in the 1720 s and
early 1730 s, since it had the effect of saving some of the least valuable convicts—women especially—from
transportation. Not every defendant ordered to be carried to America was equally capable of fetching a
high price in the dockside negotiations by which they were sold to American masters for the term of their
sentence (Ekirch, Bound for America, 124 – 9 ). The ending of the informal system of sentence revision may
explain why he was becoming more balky soon thereafter about sending his ships to America as regu-
larly as he had done earlier, and why he seems to have left a number of convicts in Newgate untrans-
ported; on the other hand, there may have been more serious causes than that—the fluctuating price of
tobacco being the most likely culprit, a consideration that had led Thomson to argue in favour of the gov-
ernment’s subsidy in the first place (CTP 1714 – 19 , p. 389 ). At any event, Forward was chastized from time
to time for not clearing Newgate as quickly as the Court of Aldermen thought necessary. See, for ex-
ample, Rep 140 , pp. 5 , 21 – 2 ; Rep 142 , pp. 303 , 305 ; Rep 141 , p. 270 – 1 ; Rep 153 , pp. 236 , 269.