convicted offender was that after 1718 the overwhelming condition on which
the pardon was granted was transportation. The near certainty that the alter-
native punishment would be carried out may have encouraged the cabinet to
grant more pardons and may explain why women came to form a smaller pro-
portion of the offenders executed at Tyburn in the years after the passage of
the act than they had in the two periods we surveyed earlier. In our sample ses-
sions between 1714 and 1750 , women formed some 12 per cent of the defendants
from the City of London who suffered death at Tyburn for property crimes; be-
tween 1660 and 1713 they had accounted for more than a quarter of the total
(Tables 6. 4 , 7. 6 ).
The imposition of the death sentence on both men and women after 1714 was
significantly influenced by the statutes passed in 1699 and 1713 to combat
shoplifting and servants’ theft. A third of the defendants in our sample hanged
at Tyburn suffered under those statutes, with women much more likely than
men to be hanged for shoplifting, and men for the offence of stealing goods
worth more than two pounds from houses. Indeed, by the second quarter of the
century, domestic thefts rivalled the long-established non-clergyable offences,
particularly robbery and burglary, for which men had been hanged in the past,
though such violent offences remained at the top of the list of crimes for which
men were executed, particularly robbery. The frequently expressed anxiety
about such violence, as well as the rewards offered by the government, explain
why so many robberies were prosecuted and why they occupied a prominent
place among the offences that carried men—and they were mainly men—to
the gallows.
Our Sample of City cases suggests that between 1714 and the middle of the
century an average ofbetween five and six defendants from the City of London
were condemned to die at Tyburn for crimes against property every year. Data
for the metropolis as a whole and for all offences tried at the Old Bailey suggest,
as one would expect—given the shifting balance we have seen between the City
and Middlesex—that offenders condemned from the City formed a smaller
proportion of the total of men and women executed at Tyburn by the second
quarter of the eighteenth century than fifty years earlier. A reasonable estimate
would seem to be that just over thirty defendants were executed on average
every year at Tyburn between 1714 and 1750 , including perhaps twenty-six who
had committed crimes against property.^89
458 William Thomson and Transportation
(^89) This is based on figures in Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth
Century( 1991 ), 91 , and on reports in the Gentleman’s Magazineand the London Magazine. The accounts in the
two magazines suggest that an average of thirty-two men and women were executed at Tyburn (for
all offences) between 1731 and 1750. On the assumption that property crimes accounted for about
80 % of all executions in the eighteenth century, it seems a plausible estimate that on average some-
thing over twenty-six robbers, burglars, and thieves were among those put to death every year at
Tyburn in the period 1714 – 50. (I owe the data from the Gentleman’s andLondon Magazinesto Simon
Devereaux.)