accompanied by violence at home, as the number of reported robberies and
other property crimes rose alarmingly. The level of prosecutions generally mod-
erated slightly as the immediate peacetime crisis passed, but peacetime levels
were virtually always higher than those experienced during wars. War thus pro-
vided some relief from the conditions that normally ruled in the London labour
market—under-employment and shortages of work—and some relief too from
the relatively high levels of prosecutions for offences against property that were
also the norm in the capital.^111
The quarter century after 1689 was largely a period of warfare as Britain was
engaged in two long and bloody conflicts in a European coalition against Louis
XIV: the so-called War of the League of Augsburg ( 1689 – 97 ); and the War of
Spanish Succession ( 1702 – 13 ). In the first of these wars, prosecutions for prop-
erty crime did not, however, follow the pattern of all succeeding conflicts be-
tween 1702 and 1815. As Figure 1. 1 reveals, prosecutions continued to rise during
the war. They conformed to later experience by increasing even more sharply
with the coming of the peace, but the movement of indictments was none the
less strikingly different in the war of the 1690 s from the patterns that would fol-
low in the wars of the eighteenth century. It is impossible to be certain why this
was the case. One reason may have been that, unlike the eighteenth-century ex-
perience, the war that William III took England into when he and Mary as-
sumed the throne in 1689 began in the midst of a disbandment, or
disintegration ofJames II’s army.^112 But a more fundamental reason was almost
certainly that the 1690 s were an extremely difficult decade for the working popu-
lation. Any advantage gained by the removal of young men from the labour
market was more than offset during the war by harvest failures that kept food
prices at a high level, and by trade disruptions due to blockades and naval action
before a convoy system could be worked out to keep the trade routes open.^113
The economy was also seriously disrupted by a crisis in the coinage that had
been building for some years but that came to a head in the 1690 s under the
pressure of the war.^114 The underlying problem was the growing gap between
the value of silver as bullion and the face value of silver coins—a premium in
favour of bullion which tempted large numbers of people to clip or file the coins
in circulation. The old coins were vulnerable to such treatment because theyIntroduction: The Crime Problem 43(^111) For the effects of war and peace on prosecution levels, see Hay, ‘War, Dearth and Theft’, 135 – 46 ;
and Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 213 – 35. And for sceptical views, see Innes and Styles, ‘The Crime Wave’,
208 – 15 ; King, Crime, Justice and Discretion, 153 – 61 ; John Childs, ‘War, Crime Waves and the English Army
in the Late Seventeenth Century’, War and Society, 15 / 2 ( 1997 ), 1 – 17.
(^112) See below, text at n. 125.
(^113) D. W. Jones, ‘London Merchants and the Crisis of the 1690 s’, in Peter Clark and Paul Slack (eds.),
Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500 – 1700 (Toronto, 1972 ), 319 – 20 , 324 – 6.
(^114) On the crisis in the coinage in the 1690 s, see Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology
in Seventeenth-Century England(Princeton, 1978 ), ch. 8 ; Malcolm Gladwell, Crime and Mentalities in Early Mod-
ern England( 2000 ), chs 4 – 5 ; D. W. Jones, War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough(Oxford,
1988 ), 228 – 39 ; C. E. Challis, A New History of the Royal Mint(Cambridge, 1992 ), 335 – 97 ; Linebaugh,
The London Hanged, 51 – 2, 54– 8.
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