seems reasonable to speculate, given that this was George Jeffreys’s first session
as recorder ofLondon after his election on the recommendation of Charles II,
that someone at court, or Jeffreys himself, thought a full account of the trials at the
Old Bailey, including the new recorder’s speeches to the condemned prisoners,
would provide an opportunity for him to speak out against violence and dis-
order in the City in the wake of the revelations of the so-called Popish Plot.^88
Whatever the motivation, the outcome was a pamphlet of thirty-eight pages
that provided readers with a fuller account of the ordinary run of trials in Lon-
don than had ever been published. This pamphlet (along with the few depos-
itions that remain for that session of the court) also helps us to get behind the
formal record, to see what kinds of non-capital larcenies were being brought to
trial, and to put some flesh on the structure provided by indictments.^89
This account of the December 1678 Old Bailey session largely confirms the
pattern of the 1694 cases: of the twenty-seven defendants tried for larceny (in
this case from both the City and the County of Middlesex), five were indicted for
shoplifting, four were servants accused of stealing from their employers, three
were lodgers, and six were accused of thefts from taverns. Thus, in two-thirds of
the cases the defendant was known to some degree to the prosecutor, or could
be placed at the scene of the offence. The fact that only four of the thefts in-
volved goods under a pound in value also conforms to a pattern of prosecution
that saw petty offenders either not charged at all or sent to the house of correc-
tion rather than being indicted at the Old Bailey.
In 1678 , as in 1694 , shoplifting and theft by servants made up a significant
proportion of the court calendar. The former were especially numerous in the
1690 s, and their prominence suggests that the preponderance of shopkeepers
among the prosecutors in 1694 was no aberration. Shopkeepers and their em-
ployees gave dozens of depositions in the last decade of the century alleging of-
fences being committed largely, though not entirely, by women. Typical of these
was the complaint lodged in 1693 by Francis Johnson, a widow, who charged
that Mary Ellis had come into her mistress’s shop and pretended to buy a parcel
of lace. She had seen several, but they could not agree on the price. Suspecting
her of theft, Johnson charged her with it, and after some time Mary Ellis took a
parcel of lace of about six and a half yards, valued at forty shillings, from her
‘pocket’ and confessed she had stolen it.^90 Similarly, in 1696 , John Prudom told
a magistrate that Elizabeth Askew and Elizabeth Grimes came to his shop and
looked at some silks. Believing that Askew had stolen some, he followed them
Introduction: The Crime Problem 35(^88) For Jeffreys’s appointment as recorder and the king’s intervention on his behalf, see G. W. Keeton,
Lord Chancellor Jeffreys and the Stuart Cause( 1965 ), 122.
(^89) An Exact Account of the Trials of the several Persons Arraigned at the Sessions-house in the Old-Bailey for London and
Middlesex, beginning on Wednesday, Decemb. 11 , 1678 , and ending the 12 th of the same month( 1678 ). This pamphlet has
been effectively analysed by Langbein in ‘Criminal Trial Before the Lawyers’, particularly for what it re-
veals about trial procedure and the relationship of judges and juries in the period before lawyers pros-
ecuted or could act for defendants in the English criminal courts. And see below, Ch. 6 , text at notes 8 – 9.
(^90) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, January 1693.