Thus beggary and Vice will decay [they predicted], and Industry and Virtue florish...
and all the useless and Idle hands being wholy Imployed, Honest Men may sit down
Safe and Contented with the Happy Injoyment of what They possess without any fear
of Rapin, and Theft, and other Molestation. And this Good Work being now happyly
begun and finished in this City, Wee cannot doubt, but the Whole Nation will soon
follow Your Glorious Example.^166
There is no suggestion here, amidst the self-congratulation, that the oppor-
tunities for work and the low costs of provisions might have contributed to the
falling away of prosecutions for property offences in these early years of the war.
Nor, we might note in passing, is there any sense, among men who would not
have been embarrassed to acknowledge such a ploy, that the reduction in in-
dictments had been mainly the result of decisions by victims and magistrates to
force young men into the army rather than prosecuting them for such offences.
As far as the grand jurymen of the City were concerned—these shopkeepers
and craftsmen and other men of property whose knowledge of the realities of
crime did not wholly depend on the fluctuating calendars of the Old Bailey—
there had been some significant reductions in the level of offences in the years
since the war began in Europe.
Grand jurors’ presentments were shaped by the circumstances of the moment,
as they and their neighbours read them. The jurors themselves changed
from session to session, though individuals might well have served on previous
juries and would return to others. Juries were always liable to be divided by
political differences in this period of sharp conflict between whigs and tories in the
City, and the make-up of juries must certainly have reflected those differences
over time. It is hardly surprising, then, that the presentments of the London
grand juries ranged over a variety of subjects, and took up a number of causes.
But even if a complete record of presentments could be recovered, the available
evidence suggests that it would be difficult to detect sharp differences on the
question of property crime and what to do about it. It is possible that grand
jurors from particular wards or with differing political views favoured one explan-
ation over others, or one solution over others: certainly, the campaigns for the
reformation of manners proved in the end to be politically divisive, and these div-
isions may have been reflected in London grand jury presentments. But if there
were divisions, they are likely to have been more of emphasis than substance.
The jurors shared some fundamental assumptions about crime. They spoke as
men of property—albeit of modest property in the case of some of them. Above
all, perhaps, they spoke as householders and employers with a settled place in
the community, reflecting on what they took to be the foundations of crime and
the threats to social peace and stability it posed.
It was a commonplace that those foundations lay in the flouting of religious
principles and practice, and that the greatest sins grew from small shoots of58 Introduction: The Crime Problem(^166) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, May 1706.
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