tankards provided too great a temptation to customers, and that this temptation
should be removed.^148 Presentments in 1695 urged the court of aldermen to seek
new laws to deal with the clippers who were diminishing the coinage and threat-
ening trade.^149 Grand juries presented taverns and alehouses that they thought
were sheltering highwaymen and clippers, and others that acted as conduits for
stolen goods.^150 They made recommendations with respect to the watch, and
chastised constables for neglect of their duty when burglary seemed to increase
strongly in the winter of 1699.^151 And they spoke from time to time about the
City’s gaols, especially as they became crowded in the last years of the 1690 s.^152
Occasionally, the grand jury reflected more broadly on crime and the system
of criminal prosecution, and pointed to problems that were eventually taken up
in legislation. In December 1704 , for example, the City grand jury, following the
lead of their fellow jurors in Westminster, complained about the ineffectiveness
of the punishments available to the courts, in particular about the problems of
benefit of clergy, and the way sentences of transportation to the colonies were
being evaded. These complaints were taken up by the Court of Aldermen, and
their petitions to parliament led directly to a statute in 1706 that, as we will see,
significantly broadened the range of punishments available (Chapter 7 ).
The problems of property crime and violence were never far from the minds
of the City’s grand jurors in this period when they formulated their brief pre-
sentments at the eight annual sessions of the Old Bailey. They linked such of-
fences to other social problems and commonly explained them as the inevitable
consequence of forms ofbehaviour they sought to prohibit. In the difficult years
of the 1690 s, when the disruptions of trade during the war and high food prices
following several harvest failures combined to make this a decade of serious de-
privation for many in London,^153 grand juries frequently commented on the vis-
ible effects of poverty on the streets of the metropolis in complaining about the
growing problems of vagrancy in the capital and the increase of begging. As a
grievance to be addressed, they presented ‘the neglect of the poor, and their
being suffered to begg in great numbers up and down the streets’ in July 1693 ;
and, two years later, in a presentment dealing with a variety of social problems,
a grand jury urged the aldermen/magistrates to seek further powers from par-
liament to enable them to conduct ‘Frequent Examination of loose and unset-
tled persons that have noe habitation nor business but live on Pillfering or
begging’; and also, to obtain powers to send the men to the army, and the large
numbers of ‘loose vitiouse women and Black Gard boys’ to the colonies.^154 AsIntroduction: The Crime Problem 53(^148) CLRO: London Sess. Papers,January 1689 , July 1689 , December 1692.
(^149) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, February 1695.
(^150) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, February 1695.
(^151) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, December 1699.
(^152) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, February 1698.
(^153) Macfarlane, ‘Social Policy and the Poor’, 259.
(^154) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, July 1693 , February 1695.
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