sentences imposed on new inmates committed not only by the Lord Mayor but
all the London magistrates are recorded.^68
We will deal more fully with the lord mayor’s work as a magistrate in the next
chapter. Here we might just note that his ‘Charge Book’ reveals him dealing in
the late seventeenth century with criminal charges, along with the range of
other matters that came to him each day—allegations of prostitution or ‘night-
walking’, ‘disobedience’ of servants, charges of being ‘idle and disorderly’, and
the like. He managed the allegations of theft and other property crime in two
ways. For the most part in the late seventeenth century a serious charge of felony
made on oath—of robbery or burglary, say, or a significant theft—would result
in the commitment of the accused to Newgate or to one of the City compters to
await trial. That is what the law required. The charge book also reveals, how-
ever, that lords mayor exercised a great deal of discretion in the case of more
minor property offences and that they sent a significant number of men and
women accused of some form of theft to Bridewell to be punished, rather than
to Newgate to be held for trial. Over the first eight months of 1694 , for example,
the Bridewell Court Book reveals that nine magistrates besides the lord mayor
committed offenders to the house of correction, including 123 men and women
present on the days the court met who had been sent there on charges that in-
cluded some form of property offence. This had often amounted to the merest
suspicion, occasionally not even that: in some cases a man or women was com-
mitted for ‘pilfering’ some unspecified object, or for being a ‘pilfering person’,
an allegation that would not have sustained a charge of larceny at the sessions or
the Old Bailey and that was simply an addition to the charge of being ‘idle and
disorderly’ laid under the 1609 statute.
But a large number of those committed to the City’s house of correction were
charged with more specific offences that appear to have been serious enough to
have been taken to court—indeed, according to the strict letter of the Tudor bail
and commitment statutes that still governed magistrates’ practice in these mat-
ters, should have been taken to court.^69 Mary Cooper, for example, had been
charged by Patience Kemp before the lord mayor with pilfering clothes and
cloth worth six shillings: however flimsy the evidence, that charge should have
been sent to the Guildhall sessions or to the gaol delivery sessions at the Old Bai-
ley for adjudication. Instead, she was committed to Bridewell and remained
there a few days until she was discharged by the governors at their next meeting.
28 Introduction: The Crime Problem
(^68) The Lord Mayor’s Charge Books survive for the years 1664 – 89 , 1692 – 1705 , and 1728 – 33. For those
records and the Bridewell Court Books, in which the sentences imposed on inmates committed by the
City magistrates are recorded, see the bibliography of manuscript sources.
(^69) Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance, ch. 1 ; Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 270 – 3. One of the
leading justices’ manuals of the early eighteenth century continued to instruct magistrates that an
accused felon was not to be discharged without a trial, even if brought simply ‘upon suspicion’ and
though it ‘appears he is not guilty’. Nor does this handbook include ‘pilferers’ among those who could be
sent to the house of correction, or the offence of pilfering itself (William Nelson, The Office and Authority of
a Justice of Peace, 2 nd edn. ( 1707 ), 261 , 337 – 8 ).