London every year in the early eighteenth century, many of them young men in
their teenage and young adult years coming to serve apprenticeships and
women seeking work as domestic servants.^108 Not all succeeded in finding set-
tled places. Unemployment and under-employment were normal features of
the lives of many of the working poor in the metropolis, and the circumstances
that gave rise to those conditions fluctuated from season to season and from year
to year.^109
Two main considerations determined the relative ease with which the work-
ing population of London could sustain themselves: food prices and the avail-
ability of employment. The price of basic foodstuffs was largely determined by
the state of the harvests, and in a number of years over this period bad weather
led to some significant shortages and very high prices. The strong increase in
prices in the second half of the 1690 s, for example, helped to make that decade
a very difficult period for the working population of London, particularly the
poor harvest years of 1697 and 1698. There followed a number of years in which
harvests were good and food plentiful. Over most of the first decade of the eight-
eenth century prices fell relatively sharply, until further bad harvests in 1709 and
1710 drove prices up again before they moderated once more. Changes in food
prices would be felt acutely by the very poorest, those whose wages were so low
that even if they could continue to work, they would soon feel the effects of a
sudden increase in the price of necessities.
Those conditions were influenced even more directly by another factor: the
market for labour. It is impossible to get a measure of the changing availability
of work for that large segment of the London population that depended on
wages. But some indication of the importance of shifting work opportunities for
the level of prosecution is suggested by differences in the numbers of indict-
ments for property crimes in alternating periods of war and peace across the
eighteenth century. War had a direct effect on the labour market and the com-
petition for work in London.^110 As wars began and the forces were recruited,
large numbers of young men were carried off to the army and navy, willingly or
not. Their removal from the capital must have created better chances to find
work for those left behind, especially since war also stimulated some aspects of
the economy. On the other hand, the coming of peace created a problem for all
of those seeking work in London. The forces were always demobilized rapidly,
and in London this increased competition in the labour market just as war-
stimulated work was coming to an end. The invariable experience in the eight-
eenth century was that prosecutions for property offences fell away as wars began
and increased sharply as they came to an end: peace abroad was commonly42 Introduction: The Crime Problem(^108) Wrigley, ‘A Simple Model of London’s Importance’, 46 ; A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay, ‘Introduc-
tion: The Significance of the Metropolis’, in Beier and Finlay (eds.), London, 1500 – 1700 , 9 – 10 ; M. J. Kitch,
‘Capital and Kingdom: Migration to Later Stuart London’, ibid., 226.
(^109) George, London Life, 156 – 9 , 168 – 70 , 211 – 13 , 269 – 70.
(^110) Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation, 95 – 101.
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