eradicated, and prostitution, vagrancy, and begging were no longer tolerated in
the streets of the capital. Nothing makes this point clearer than the responses of
grand juries to the sharp falling away of indictments in the early years of Anne’s
reign. In May 1703 the grand jury wrote an unusually general and congratula-
tory presentment which linked English successes in the War of Spanish Succes-
sion to ‘the perfect peace we live in at home’, a peace visible, they went on to say,
in ‘the inconsiderable number of Criminals in the list of this and diverse former
Sessions’.^164 Both were ‘signal instances of the special favour of almighty God to
our Sovereign and her Kingdomes’. And both were due, in their view, to Queen
Anne’s example ‘of piety and virtue’ and her support for the work of suppressing
profanity and vice, as well as to the City magistrates’ own efforts in that regard.
The jury of the following session also found cause in the reduced calendar of
offences to celebrate ‘the visible decrease of vice and prophaneness amongst us’,
a theme returned to even more warmly in 1706 , when indictments were at their
lowest point for at least thirty years. This jury found the reason not so much in a
general improvement in behaviour as in the removal of problems from the
streets, and especially the work of the London Corporation of the Poor, and the
workhouse they had established in Bishopsgate Street. It was due to the work-
house, they thought, that they had found ‘none of those young Criminals which
were formerly used to be brought before Us, and our Attendance here hath
been so very short’. The workhouse had taken in more than 500 children over
twelve months in 1703 – 4 , and had taught some of them to read and others to
spin, and had put out some to apprenticeships.^165 The fact that the workhouse
took children and other vagrants off the streets was sufficient explanation for the
grand jurors for the shrinking Old Bailey calendars. The workhouse, they said,
had
received therein, All those poor, and Vagrant Children, which lay up and down in the
Streets of this City (Commonly called by the Name of the Black Guard) and hath edu-
cated, Imployed, and fitted them for Trades and other Imployments, These being for-
merly trained up to Wickedness and Vice, and after haveing been frequently before this
Court and often pardoned upon Account of their Tender Years, have at Last (takeing
no Warning) made their Exit at the Gallows.
The success of the governors of the workhouse in clearing the streets of
‘Beggars, and other Idle and Disorderly persons’, the jurors thought, had led to
the happy results to be seen in the very few felons whose cases they had dealt
with in the brief session of the court. They went on to urge the mayor and
aldermen to seek the co-operation of the magistrates of Middlesex and West-
minster to join with the governors of the poor in London in a wider metropol-
itan campaign.Introduction: The Crime Problem 57(^164) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, May 1703.
(^165) London Workhouse Bishopsgate Street, Account for the year ending March27, 1704(Broadside).
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