immorality. Such widely shared notions were rehearsed most commonly in this
period in the accounts of the lives of those offenders condemned to death at the
Old Bailey and executed at Tyburn that the ordinary of Newgate, the prison
chaplain, published regularly from the 1670 s.^167 These brief biographies carried
several messages. In the first place, they reinforced the principal lesson that the
gallows was meant to impart: that the most serious offences invariably brought
their perpetrators to a terrifying and horrible end. These so-called Ordinary’s
Accountscould also be seen to have carried the inadvertent message (and this we
will have reason to explore later) that the courts and the penal law were ineffect-
ive in the face of petty crime. The biographies revealed that many of the men
and women executed at Tyburn had committed a series of previous offences for
which they had been convicted and punished—though punished so ineffectu-
ally that they had not been deterred from committing further offences. The
ordinaries’ intentions in cataloguing earlier convictions were not, however, to
establish the weakness of the law, but to underline what was clearly the central
message of these brief biographies of the condemned: that offenders who were
hanged had been deaf to warnings and had gone on to commit more serious
offences because their moral sense had been corrupted.^168
The Ordinary’s Accountreinforced the widely shared understanding of crime
by providing case-studies in which men and women revealed the course of their
downfall in what was presented as their own words. Occasionally, the ordinary
allowed the condemned to say that poverty and desperate circumstances had
led to their robbing and stealing. But more commonly, the convicts were led to
speak in the clergyman’s own language and through his categories. It was, after
all, his account.
The readers of these accounts of the lives and crimes and confessions of the
offenders put to death at Tyburn could have drawn only one conclusion about
why these men and women had got themselves into such difficulties. The
common explanation of why they came to be hanged is a story of moral decay,
beginning most often with sabbath-breaking—that sure signal of the loss of
religious commitment—and moving on through a downward spiral of gratifica-
tion and pleasure. The condemned men and women so frequently accepted
such explanations of their downfall in their ‘last dying speeches’ that, if they had
any part in actually constructing this element of the Account, they had clearly
been offered a menu of moral failings from which they might choose a version
of how they had gone wrong, how they had been tempted, and why they suc-
cumbed. Sometimes this was explicit. One man, about to be hanged for mur-
dering the woman he had promised to marry in order to marry another, wasIntroduction: The Crime Problem 59(^167) See above, text at n. 7.
(^168) For that theme in the ‘dying speeches’ of the condemned in pamphlet accounts of executions in the
seventeenth century, see Sharpe, ‘ “Last Dying Speeches” ’, 150 – 1 ; and Rawlings, Drunks, Whores and Idle
Apprentices, 19 – 22.
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