charged as offences—were also reflected in the pattern of prosecutions, if only
via their influence on the decisions made by victims and the authorities.^106
One reason for anticipating fluctuating levels of offences against property
derives from the circumstances in which a large proportion of the labouring popu-
lation of the metropolis lived and worked. Many men and women depended
on unskilled or semi-skilled work that was seasonal and casual by its nature.
Work in the important textile and clothing trades was closely tied to the fashions
and the activities of the social Season; work on the river was also irregular, de-
pendent as it was on seasonal flows of trade; and jobs in the market gardens that
ringed the city, in carrying and selling fresh vegetables and fish and the hawking
of other products that provided employment for so many, especially women, as
well as work in the building trades and similar sources of employment, were
inevitably irregular.^107 At the best of times such casual employment inevitably
supported those who had to depend on it at a precarious level. Many trades
were overstocked. But there was competition for all work because of the steady
immigration to the city of large numbers of young men and women from all over
the British Isles. It has been estimated that some 8,000immigrants arrived inIntroduction: The Crime Problem 41(^106) For discussion of the relationship between prosecutions and offences, see Douglas Hay, ‘War,
Dearth, and Theft: The Record of the English Courts’, Past and Present, 95 (May 1982 ), 117 – 60 ; Peter Law-
son, ‘Property Crime and Hard Times in England, 1559 – 1624 ’, Law and History Review, 4 ( 1986 ), 95 – 127 ;
Beattie, Crime and the Courts, ch. 5 ; idem, ‘Crime and Inequality in Eighteenth-Century London’, in John
Hagan and Ruth D. Peterson (eds.), Crime and Inequality(Stanford, Calif., 1995 ), 116 – 39 ; Innes and Styles,
‘The Crime Wave’, 208 – 15 ; King, ‘Newspaper Reporting, Prosecution Practice and Perceptions of
Urban Crime’, King, Crime, Justice and Discretion, ch. 5.
(^107) For the seasonality of work in London, see Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation, 103 – 16.
Number of accused
1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
200
220
240
260
Year
Fig.1.1.Number of accused offenders: property offences in the City ofLondon
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