of resources—the significant sums spent on rewards, for example, and the
establishment of non-capital punishments. The principal explanations, however,
are to be found in the City itself—in the character of the problems in the urban
world and, perhaps most crucially, in the changing social character of the City.
The impetus driving changes in the policing and other criminal justice insti-
tutions was the experience of crime, especially crime against property. Offences
appeared to be sufficiently common and sufficiently threatening or annoying to
create a sense that the civil authorities might be overwhelmed by the violent
depredations of street gangs, or by large numbers of burglaries and house-
breaking, or even by more minor forms of theft. Such offences constituted the
heart of the urban crime problem. They were the crimes most commonly re-
ported in newspapers, the offences that made up the bulk of the charges before
the gaol delivery sessions at the Old Bailey, and for which the vast majority of
men and women executed at Tyburn had been condemned. Property crime
also appeared to fluctuate, and reports of increasing numbers of incidents and
prosecutions gave rise to periods of anxiety that could be sustained over months
and years. Anxiety about crime explains the timing of many of the initiatives
that led to changes in the criminal law and its administration, and explains why
the policing and penal institutions in the City were in several ways very different
in 1750 than they had been ninety years earlier.
There was, however, nothing pre-ordained or inevitable about what those
changes would be—either those that arose for autonomous reasons within the
City or from the engagement of the City with parliament or the central govern-
ment. The existence of a ‘problem’ does not explain the form taken by what
may appear to be the ‘responses’ to it. The question remains why some options
and not others were taken up in the period we have been examining; why the in-
stitutions of policing changed as they did; why some forms of punishment were
preferred over others.
An important part of the answer to such questions must lie in the changes we
have noted from time to time in the economy of the City, and particularly in the
attitudes and behaviour of the broad middling ranks of its population. The al-
terations we have followed in the institutions of criminal administration are to
be explained in part by pressure exerted by men who were in a position to influ-
ence events—the aldermen, for example, and the men who ran the wards and
who sat on the grand juries and the Common Council. They are also to be ex-
plained, more nebulously, by the thousands of individual choices made by men
who had traditionally served in a variety of local offices, many of whom were
opting in this period to hire substitutes. Such decisions were gradually changing
the character of some of the City’s most important institutions of criminal jus-
tice and the bases upon which they were constituted.
The changes in policing and in penal practices were mediated and shaped
in these ways by changes in the society and culture of the City in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. One underlying development of466 Conclusionch10.y5 11/6/01 12:05 PM Page 466