clothes.^99 Complaints were common about servants who gave false references,
stayed only a few days, and then left with valuables—in one case with silver
worth more than fifty pounds.^100
In John Dayley’s own account of his involvement in the theft in the house in
which Jane Roberts was a servant, she emerged as a much more active partici-
pant in the planning and execution of the offence than she let on in her own
examination. But it was the imagined weakness and vulnerability of a young
woman in the face of the blandishments of a lover or pretended lover that raised
the greatest fears. The abiding anxiety was that a young female servant would
have a lover who was a member of a gang, and that he and his accomplices
would pour into a house at night and threaten its inhabitants with violence.^101
Such concerns about servants led to efforts in parliament in this period to create
a statutory system of regulation that would assure employers that a prospective
servant could be trusted not to open their houses to nightly invasion. The alder-
men were responsible for at least one such bill, the preamble of which declared
that controls were necessary because ‘unwary housekeepers’ hire servants
‘having no knowledge or good Account of them and who oftentimes prove
persons of evill dispositions and shift from place to place ’till they have opportunity
to put into practice their wicked designes’ to plunder the household.^102
Apart from their anxiety about accomplices, London magistrates seem to
have been particularly concerned to discover how servants disposed of the
goods they took. In examination after examination accused servants named
their receivers, almost certainly because they had been pressed to do so, perhaps
with more than a hint that it would be to their advantage when they came to be
sentenced. And, of course, magistrates showed special interest in receivers who
(according to accused servants) had actually encouraged the thefts—as in the
case of Elizabeth Hudlestone, who confessed that she had taken ‘a peece of
Stuffe out of the Shopp of her Master’ at the instigation of Katherine Douxell,
and that she prompted her ‘to take a better peece’ and to throw it out of the win-
dow, which she did; or of George Knight, who confessed ‘that by the persuasion
and instigation of one John Howell’, he had taken out of his master’s shop two
or three pairs of men’s and women’s shoes every week for two years, occasion-
ally as many as seven or eight pairs, and delivered them to Howell.^103
38 Introduction: The Crime Problem
(^99) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, April 1712. (^100) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, May 1711.
(^101) The True Confession of Margaret Clark( 1680 ). I owe this reference to Trish Crawford.
(^102) CLRO, Papers of the Court of Aldermen, 1704. For these efforts to create public offices at which
servants would be registered, see M. Dorothy George, ‘The Early History of Registry Offices’, Economic
Journal (Supplement), 1 ( 1926 – 9 ), 570 – 6 ; and J. Jean Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century
England( 1956 ), 29 – 32. There was an employment office for servants in London in 1692. In Judith Rose’s
examination before alderman Turner in 1692 (above, text at n. 96 ), she described how she had been
counselled by a woman to engage as a servant and to use a false name. She had sent her ‘to the Intelli-
gence Office’, where she learned that Edward Fleming, the victualler, was in need of a servant, to whom
she ‘preferred her service’ (CLRO: London Sess. Papers, August 1692 ).
(^103) CLRO: London Sess. Papers,July 1711 , September 1711.