So too were: Suella Bellington, who confessed before Sir Edward Clarke, a City
magistrate, to stealing pewter pots belonging to Philip Weston; the two men
accused of pilfering three cheeses worth eight shillings found in their possession;
a women accused of stealing a gold ring and six shillings in money; another of
stealing a fowl from a stall in Newgate Street; and a man who confessed to steal-
ing a brass candlestick from an ironmonger’s shop. And so on.^70 None of these
accused appeared at the Guildhall Sessions or the Old Bailey to face their
accusers and to have their guilt or innocence determined by a jury.
If anything, the magistrates were widening the scope of such commitments by
the early decades of the eighteenth century. Among those committed to the
Bridewell in 1713 , for example, Ann Jones had confessed to stealing a pewter pot
from a house, an allegation that on the face of it might have been prosecuted as
grand larceny, possibly even as a capital offence, if she had been committed for
trial at the Old Bailey.^71 Other offences that resulted in brief spells in the
Bridewell rather than a jury trial included a charge brought by a constable
against a man ‘busy in picking pockets’, and another, charged before a City
magistrate by Mary Hunter, who claimed that a man came into her shop, took
up a pair of worsted hose and walked off with them before he was pursued and
taken.^72 By the early decades of the eighteenth century, numbers of men and
women were also being committed to Bridewell after being accused of stealing
from ships in the Thames, or from goods piled up on the quays.^73
In addition, a new institution was brought into play to extend this work. The
London workhouse was established in Bishopsgate Street in 1699 under the aus-
pices of the recently formed Corporation of the Poor.^74 Its principal purpose was
to be a place in which vagrants and children found living in the streets could be
housed, taught to read, given work that might inure them to industry, perhaps
be set up in an apprenticeship—in general be given help to allow them to sup-
port themselves. But, since idleness and disorderly conduct included pilfering
and petty theft that was not otherwise punished, the workhouse was also pressed
into service, just as the house of correction had been, to receive offenders who
might have been charged with property offences if prosecutors and the author-
ities had chosen to do so. The workhouse was brought into service particularly
for the punishment and training of young offenders found living on the streets—
the ‘black guard’ as they were sometimes called. Among the hundreds of
Introduction: The Crime Problem 29(^70) Bridewell Court Book, November 1693 –September 1694. At least two of the accused committed to
Bridewell were even accused of having stolen ‘feloniously’.
(^71) Bridewell Court Book, 20 November 1713 (Ann Jones).
(^72) Bridewell Court Book, 4 December 1713 ( John Jones), 15 January 1714 (Thomas Hall).
(^73) Bridewell Court Book, 26 February 1714 ( John Bossom, Adam Thompson,Jane Short).
(^74) Stephen M. Macfarlane, ‘Studies in Poverty and Poor Relief in London at the end of the Seven-
teenth Century’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1982 ), ch. 7 ; and idem, ‘Social Policy and the Poor in the Later
Seventeenth Century’, 263 – 5. On the workhouse movement in this period, see Timothy V. Hitchcock,
‘The English Workhouse: A Study in Institutional Poor Relief in Selected Counties, 1696 – 1750 ’, D.Phil.
thesis (Oxford, 1985 ).