into the street and stopped them, took them into a neighbour’s shop and
‘searching her did find about her under her [ petticoat?]’ a piece ofhis silk. Philip
Jackson, Prudom’s servant who was working in the shop, added that the women
had looked at a lot of silk and offered about half of what was being asked. Grimes
held up pieces in such a way that he was not always able to see what Askew was
doing. But he saw her put a piece of silk under her petticoat and carry it out of
the shop. Elizabeth Askew confessed; Elizabeth Grimes did not.^91 In another
case, typical of many, Mary Rowse, wife of Thomas Rowse, ofLawrence Lane,
mercer, and her servant Honor Burget, deposed in 1695 that Jane Browne and
Elizabeth Hutton came to their shop and looked at a great deal of‘Grazet stuff ’,
none of which they liked. When they had gone, a piece of silk ‘lying upon the
Compter neere them whilst they were in the Shop there was missing’.^92
Shoplifting was hardly a new phenomenon in the 1690 s in London. It was
given a prominent place in a description of common offences published as a
warning to housekeepers and other potential victims in 1676 , which makes it
clear that the women shoplifters complained about above conformed to what
was by then a well-established pattern. This pamphlet described ‘a lifter’ as
one who goes from shop to shop, pretending to buy, but it is to steal, they will cheapen
[i.e. haggle over the price of ] several sorts of Goods as you sell till they have opportunity
to convey away some of them into their Coats, which are turn’d up a purpose for their
design.... They are most women that go upon this design, and commonly they go two
together, and when the Shop-keeper turns his back, one of them conveys what she can
get, and so goes away, so the other pretends there’s nothing that pleases her....^93
The prominence of shoplifting charges among the larcenies that were tried in
the most important court in London must have helped to form and confirm the
public’s sense of one aspect of the crime problem in the capital. Most immedi-
ately, the problem of shop theft also shaped the views of some of the most import-
ant decision-makers in London. Successive lords mayor and the aldermen who
served as magistrates heard shoplifting stories over and over again in the 1690 s as
complainants made their depositions before them. And grand jurors and trial
jurors, many of whom were shopkeepers themselves or otherwise men of modest
property,^94 regularly had confirmation in the courtroom of what they must often
have heard and perhaps observed in their daily lives: that shoplifting was an ever-
growing scourge that threatened the livelihood of men and women like them-
selves, and more generally the commerce and prosperity of the City. They almost
certainly would have agreed with the author of The Great Grievance of Traders and
Shopkeepersthat ‘the notorious increase’ of shoplifting in the last decades of the
seventeenth century required serious attention by parliament. As we will see,
36 Introduction: The Crime Problem
(^91) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, February 1696.
(^92) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, August 1695.
(^93) A Warningfor House-Keepers, or, a Discovery of all sorts of Thieves and Robbers... ( 1676 ), 6 – 7.
(^94) For juries, see below, Ch. 6.