by those concerns, a circumstance that was to have considerable consequences
for the identification of problems that demanded attention and the formulation
of solutions to deal with them.
The broader framework within which responses to property crime took place
was formed by attitudes towards poverty and the poor, and in particular the hos-
tility of the propertied and employing class towards vagrancy and begging, and
what appeared to be the unwillingness of some men to support themselves and
their dependants, and to contribute through labour to the strength of the na-
tion.^143 Concern about poverty and employment merged with concern about
crime: vagrancy and prostitution formed one end of a spectrum that included
crimes against property and serious violence at the other. All were linked in a
great chain of immorality and illegality—a linking commonly conceptualized
as a slippery slope that began with apparently minor acts of wilfulness and dis-
obedience that were to be taken seriously because they gave rein to the passions
and, if not checked, would lead to the erosion of moral sense and of the prin-
ciples of right behaviour that derived from religious beliefs and practice. It was
this sense of the inevitability of falling into the worst possible forms of behaviour
unless one struggled hard against the temptations of the world and the devil, of
losing one’s way, that linked blasphemy, idleness, vice, vagrancy, and crime. The
danger of embarking on this slippery slope to damnation was a persistent theme
of moralists and social commentators in the late seventeenth century and first
half of the eighteenth. Ned Ward wrote in the early years of Anne’s reign about
the ‘City Black-Guard’—children living on the streets and sleeping where
they could—that ‘from beggary they proceed to theft, and from theft to the
gallows’.^144 Much of the comment focused on young men and on young women
in domestic service, who were thought to be most susceptible to temptations. A
writer in a monthly religious paper in 1704 , commenting on five offenders
recently hanged at Tyburn, saw in their offences evidence of
how the Devil baits his Hook according to the different Inclinations ofMen, and how he
leads ’em from one Sin to another, ’till at last their Consciences are so hardned, that they
can whore, murder, steal, and commit those horrid Impieties that send Men to the Gallows,
and from thence (except with these Criminals, they loath their Sins) to Hell.^145
We can get a sense of the meaning that contemporaries attached to changing
levels of prosecutions and to crime more broadly in the late seventeenth and the
early eighteenth centuries by examining the pronouncements of men who were
very close indeed to the heart of criminal administration: the grand jury of the
City. This body of seventeen men was chosen from the twenty-six City wards inIntroduction: The Crime Problem 51(^143) Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England(Princeton, NJ,
1978 ), 135 – 57 ; Stephen Macfarlane, ‘Social Policy and the Poor in the Late Seventeenth Century’, in
Beier and Finlay (eds.), London, 1500 – 1700 , ch. 9 ; Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England
( 1988 ).
(^144) Ned Ward, The London Spy(ed. Paul Hyland, from the 4 th edn. 1709 ; East Lansing, 1993 ), 37.
(^145) The Post-Angel, January 1702 , 33.
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