other offenders prosecuted in London were simply sent to Bridewell rather than
to trial. It has been suggested, too, that during wars young men accused of crim-
inal offences were liable to be sent by magistrates to serve in the forces rather
than to trial.^85 That is possible, and it certainly would not be surprising, given
the discretionary powers the magistrates assumed in the capital in dealing with
minor charges. There is not a great deal of evidence, however, of its happening
in London.
The offenders who came before the courts, then, represented a tiny sample of
those who might have been charged. But even this sample is not easy to analyse.
The central record of the trial, the indictment, which was the document
retained most carefully by the court bureaucracy, and which survives in com-
plete runs for the Old Bailey in this period, reveals little about what actually had
occurred to give rise to the charge. The goods stolen were named and valued,
but other information that might help to distinguish one theft from another—
where and how the goods were taken, the occupation of the victim, the rela-
tionship, if any, between the victim and accused, for example—was excluded
from the indictment because it was unimportant to the issues involved in the
trial.
We can, however, fill out the formal record a little, and learn something about
the nature of cases coming to court from documents that were generated in the
procedure leading up to trial: from the depositions that victims of alleged crimes
and their witnesses gave to the examining magistrate when they laid their com-
plaints; from the examinations of the accused in which the magistrate noted any
explanation or defence he or she offered; and from recognizances which victim-
prosecutors entered into to guarantee their appearance in court to present their
evidence. Depositions vary greatly in the level of detail they report, and in any
case survive only haphazardly among the City of London sessions records for
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But there are at least a few
for virtually every session of the Old Bailey, and there is a strong run of surviv-
ing depositions and examinations for several years in the mid 1690 s—indeed
more than 300 for the three years 1694 – 6. I have taken as a sample of this evi-
dence the eight sessions of the court in 1694 , for which the largest number of
depositions and examinations survive in this period.
Of the roughly 150 City of London defendants tried at the Old Bailey in 1694 ,
112 were charged with simple larceny. Depositions and recognizances enable us
to identify the place where the alleged offence was committed and the occupa-
tion of the victim in about three-quarters of these cases. A picture emerges
from this one shaft of evidence of the kinds of offences that went to trial in
Introduction: The Crime Problem 33(^85) Joanna Innes and John Styles, ‘The Crime Wave: Recent Writing on Crime and Criminal Justice
in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Adrian Wilson (ed.), Rethinking Social History: English Society, 1570 – 1920
and its Interpretation(Manchester, 1993 ), 213 – 14 ; Peter King, ‘Newspaper Reporting, Prosecution Practice
and Perceptions of Urban Crime: The Colchester Crime Wave of 1765 ’, Continuity and Change, 2 / 3 ( 1987 ),
423 – 54 ; idem, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England 1740 – 1820 (Oxford, 2000 ), pp. 28, 91–2, 157.