The defendants brought to trial at the Old Bailey for theft were likely to
have stolen goods with a reasonably large value; they were also the most easily
identified and prosecuted, those most vulnerable to detection and arrest. The
calendar at the Old Bailey was thus neither an accurate cross-section of the
offences actually committed nor an accurate guide to their frequency. Whether
certain offences were prosecuted in large numbers because they were particu-
larly numerous in fact, or because they were committed against people of
middling status who felt vulnerable or annoyed and who could bear the costs
of prosecution more easily than other victims, is difficult to know. What is
important is that, along with robbery and burglary, offences like shoplifting
and servants’ theft gave a distinctive character to urban crime and formed
its public face. The fact that so many such offences were committed by
women made them not only difficult to deal with but also deepened the persua-
sion that high levels of crime revealed serious weaknesses in the moral bases of
society.The meaning of crime
The crime problem of the capital was made visible by the decisions of victims
and magistrates who together selected the offences that would come to public
attention from a much larger pool of offending behaviour. The result was a pat-
tern of prosecutions at the Old Bailey that made London crime seem more seri-
ous, at least more prevalent, than elsewhere in the country, even accounting for
differences in population. The fact that prosecutions in the metropolis also fluc-
tuated from time to time, and sometimes quite sharply, made the crime problem
seem especially serious in some periods. Some years saw many more accused of-
fenders in court than others, and several unusually busy years together could
put a strain on the institutional and human resources available to deal with
them. In other periods prosecutions fell to modest numbers. As Fig. 1. 1 reveals,
the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first of the eighteenth saw
particularly sharp fluctuations in prosecutions. The 1670 s and 1690 s were
decades of higher than average levels, with the last years of the century sustain-
ing a notably strong increase in prosecutions; the 1680 s and the first decade of
the eighteenth century were almost their mirror image.
Given the immense discretion we have seen being exercised by prosecutors
and magistrates with respect to petty theft, there was clearly no simple relation-
ship between the number of events that might have sustained plausible criminal
charges and the number of cases that actually came to court. Indeed, it is not un-
reasonable to think that changing levels of indictments are more likely to be ex-
plained by the changing propensity of victims to complain and magistrates to
charge suspects than by the activities of those who broke the law. But crime also
had its own determinants, its own history, and it is worth considering the extent
to which changes in the number of offences—or of events that might have been40 Introduction: The Crime Problemch1(a).y5 11/6/01 12:44 PM Page 40