set good examples, and that prisoners be provided with good books for their
reformation and instruction.^157
More than half the presentments that have survived from William’s reign and
the first half of Anne’s include some reflection on the problem of crime that rests
on the assumption that property offences arose from the failings of the offender:
from the weakening of their moral senses, from laziness, insubordination, and
other forms of anti-social behaviour. Jurors reiterated the view that the leading
causes of such corruption, especially of the young, were the loss of religious prin-
ciples in the face of the temptations and immorality of the city. They identified
particularly the corrosive effect of the profanation of the Lord’s day by those
who insisted on drinking in coffee-houses, taverns, and tippling houses during
the time of divine service. In 1689 they were inclined to blame the regime of the
Catholic James II for this laxness, and for what they saw as a scandal on the
Protestant religion and the good government of the City. The Revolution un-
leashed a powerful anxiety to prevent vice and immorality in the future, to mark
the great deliverance from the Catholic danger and to prove England’s worthi-
ness to continue to receive further marks of God’s blessing.^158 The Protestant
nation, in this reading, was still in danger at home and abroad, and would be
preserved only by proving itself worthy of God’s continuing favour. Over the fol-
lowing decade grand juries continued to repeat the need for moral cleansing,
urging support for the proclamations endorsing the reform campaigns issued by
William and again by Anne at the beginning of her reign, and for the reformers
who were going about the work of rooting out blasphemy and vice wherever
they could find it.^159
The most persistent recommendations of these juries of shopkeepers, em-
ployers, and housekeepers, however, urged the suppression of temptations that
drew the young into crime, especially apprentices and servants. Brothels, tav-
erns, lotteries, and gaming houses were condemned because they were attract-
ive to youth, who, in order to support immoral habits were ‘induced to defraud
their masters, to neglect their business, and to become acquainted with idle and
loose persons to their ruin’.^160 Other sources of youthful corruption were
denounced for similar reasons: St Bartholomew’s Fair, for example, for encourag-
ing late-night revelling, and for its music houses and gaming, all of which en-
couraged lewdness and debauchery, and led ‘to the great corruption ofIntroduction: The Crime Problem 55(^157) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, February 1698.
(^158) See Henry Care, English Liberties; or, the Free-Born Subject’s Inheritance( 1700 edn., enlarged by Ben-
jamin Harris; 1 st edn., 1682 ): in the dedication (to the House of Commons), William III was praised for
having restored liberty and property and ‘Put a Stop, in a great Measure, to that Current of Vice, which
often brings Judgments down from Heaven upon a Nation, by Good and Wholesome Laws against Pro-
phaneness and Immorality’.
(^159) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, January 1689 , July 1689 , December 1692 , January 1693 , July 1693 ,
October 1694 , January 1695 , February 1695 , May 1697 , February 1698 , July 1699 , October 1701 ,
January 1703.
(^160) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, October 1694 (and see January 1689 , February 1695 ).
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