vagrants and beggars received into the workhouse in its early years were dozens
of people like Ann Gainsford, aged 10 years, John Shaw, aged 12 , andJames
Price, aged 14.^75 Some were committed on suspicion of picking pockets, others
simply with pilfering, but more and more with theft from warehouses and quays
along the river when the London aldermen who were the governors of the
workhouse court specifically ordered in 1704 that ‘the Vagrant Children com-
monly called the Black Guard [who] begin to come upon the Keys be taken up
and sent into the Workhouse.. .’.^76 Ann Gainsford and the two boys had been
taken for stealing sugar and tobacco and other goods on the quays. They were
brought in by constables and beadles and by men paid by the governors of the
workhouse to clear the streets of vagrants, and they joined large numbers of
other youngsters who had been living rough.^77
How many accused offenders were dealt with by this form of summary justice
over the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it is impossible to say.
The Bridewell book is a record of court decisions taken on the days the court
met; it does not include the names of those who had been committed and dis-
charged between court sittings. If the evidence of the lord mayor’s Charge Book
is any guide, that could have amounted to a significant number. Among the 123
apparent property offenders named in the Bridewell Court Book in 1694 , seven
had been sent by the lord mayor. But, according to his own record, the mayor
had committed a total of twenty-seven men and women on property-related
charges over the same period, twenty of whom had already been discharged
when the court sat, no doubt on the lord mayor’s further orders.^78 The lord
mayor was usually one of the busiest magistrates during his year in office, but he
was not invariably the most active, and in 1694 he seems to have been outdone
in frequency of commitments both to the Bridewell and to the Old Bailey by one
or two others. Nine other magistrates besides the lord mayor made commit-
ments to the Bridewell in that year, and clearly if others had also discharged
many of those they committed before the court met, as seems likely, the cases
recorded in the court book seriously understate the numbers who had been in
the Bridewell for a brief stay.^79
This propensity on the part of London magistrates to send petty offenders to
the house of correction rather than to trial produced a remarkable prosecution
pattern in the metropolis. Compared to other jurisdictions, in which relatively
30 Introduction: The Crime Problem
(^75) CLRO, Court of the President and Governors for the Poor of London, 1702 – 5 , fos. 250 , 252.
(^76) CLRO, Court of the President and Governors for the Poor of London, 1702 – 5 , fo. 158. The court
also appointed an officer specifically to help take up ‘the Black Guard Children at the Keys.. .’ (fo. 175 ).
(^77) Something in the order of two dozen of those committed to the workhouse over the two years
1703 – 5 were charged with a form of theft in addition to being vagrants and living on the streets.
(^78) CLRO, Charge Book, 1692 – 5 , January–September 1694.
(^79) This is confirmed by the evidence of the Middlesex and Westminster houses of correction. The
latter kept a reception calendar, noting the names of everyone committed. In the late seventeenth
century,Joanna Innes has calculated, that amounted to something on the order of forty to fifty a month
(‘Prisons for the Poor’, 85 ). For property offenders sent to the Middlesex house of correction, see
Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment, 176 , table 7. 2.