youth’.^161 Similarly, in several presentments, the lord mayor and Court of
Aldermen were urged to prohibit ‘public stage plays’, because they corrupt ‘the
minds and manners of the youth of this City’, and deflect them from their work
and the duty they owed their masters. ‘Apprentices do frequently resort to the
Play Houses’, one jury assured the magistrates, ‘whereby they are corrupted
and entic’d to wickedness, not only by hearing and seeing diverse lewd repre-
sentations, but especially by meeting and conversing with many Lewd persons.. .’.^162 And whereby they also waste their time and money. Again and again this
refrain is repeated, not only in grand jurors’ complaints about the popular cul-
ture of the City, but by numerous commentators on the problems of poverty,
vagrancy, and labour, as well as crime. And so often these anxieties about time-
wasting and frivolous expenditure focused on crowds that gathered around en-
tertainers, street sellers, and con-men—in general, on the street life of the City.
All drew workers away from their duty, and the aldermen were frequently called
upon to provide regulation. In 1694 , for example, the aldermen appointed a
constable to prevent crowds forming on London Bridge when they were
informed that diverse Idle Vagrant persons, Ballad singers Pickpockets and others fre-
quenting London Bridge and parts thereabouts who under shew and pretence of Selling
Ginger bread Apples Oranges Ballads and other Knacks doe use certain Tricks and
devices to drawe crowdes of People togeather to the end to pick pocketts and commit
other cheats and Disorders to the great Injury and damage not only of the Inhabitants
there but of diverse honest People passing that way and Citizens servants who loose their
money and misspend their time.^163
The problems of crime were high on grand juries’ agendas in the 1690 s. It
comes as no surprise that these respectable citizens shared a widespread con-
viction—not for the first time nor the last—that crime was beginning to erode
the foundations of social order. They also subscribed to the common view that
the enlarging temptations of the City were to blame, especially in corrupting
servants and apprentices. As the calendars of indictments at the Old Bailey
swelled during the 1690 s, grand jurors were increasingly likely to blame the cor-
rosive effects of the popular entertainments of the City, the taverns, gaming
houses, the theatre, and perhaps above all the blandishments of ‘lewd
women’—all of which deflected the young from their work, and instilled in them
tastes and desires that could only be satisfied first by pilfering and then by
increasingly serious forms of theft.
Crime, for these grand jurors, was a product of moral weakness; it increased
because society was becoming more sinful, and individuals more corrupt.
It would be diminished, the grand jury presentments suggested, when men
and women were reformed and their ‘manners’ corrected—when vice was
56 Introduction: The Crime Problem(^161) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, September, 1697 (and see January 1703 , July 1703 ).
(^162) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, May 1699 (and see October 1698 , July 1703 ).
(^163) Rep 98 , p. 213.
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