The problem of women
The ordinary’s account of the immoral lives and shameful deaths of the Tyburn
hanged, the grand jurors’ presentments to the magistrates, the pronouncements
of those who urged the importance of a reformation of manners, and the var-
iety of admonitions to apprentices to shun temptations agreed on the catalogue
of vices that led to crime. High on the list were the indulgences that drew the
young from work, wasted their money and time, and encouraged tastes that
could only be satisfied by their turning to crime. Drunkenness, gaming, street
entertainments, and the theatre were favourite targets. But no target was more
commonly or more vigorously denounced in the late seventeenth century and
the early decades of the eighteenth than London prostitutes. Long before
George Lillo blamed Millwood for drawing poor innocent Barnwell into com-
mitting the worst of offences, the London grand jury regularly issued condem-
nations of those they variously labelled ‘lewd women’, ‘vitious women’, or
‘nightwalkers’. Some of this reflected the commonplace belief that prostitutes
were also invariably thieves.^184 But more often the grand jurors were concerned
with the influence of these ‘lewd women’ over young men, especially appren-
tices and servants, who, it was widely agreed, were not only being led in very
large numbers into immoral habits but also, inevitably, into the commission of
serious offences. They had in mind such women as Hester and Sarah Bennett,
labelled by the sessions of the peace in 1693 as ‘common incontinent livers’ who
‘draw and seduce their Majesties Subjects to waste... great sums of money in
Taverns and other lewd and disorderly houses’.^185 Or Philadelphia Pyke, the
wife of Benjamin Pyke, who was charged before the lord mayor in 1694 with
being a disorderly, lewd, woman, and ‘to have seduced and drawn aside
Thomas Prichett, ye Apprentice of Mr Garrett in Ivy Mary Lane, scrivenor’.^186
Such women were commonly identified as the reason for many a young man’s
downfall. Even worse was Elizabeth Nicholls, charged some years later with
picking up a young man in the street and advising him to rob his master and
bring her his linens and other goods which she would dispose of through a third
party.^187
The ordinary added his quota of examples to the grand juries’ general com-
plaint. One condemned man whose last dying speech was reported by the ordin-
ary in 1694 warned the spectators to ‘Take heed how you keep Company with
lewd women, and become unclean with them. This sin now much wounds myIntroduction: The Crime Problem 63(^184) Jane Bowman, executed at Tyburn in 1692 , aged 26 , told the ordinary—as he reported, at least—
that she had come to London seven years earlier from Scotland, and had got immediately into bad com-
pany and began ‘stealing and whoring; two things that generally go together, so far at least as this; that
though not every Thief may be a Whore or Whoremaster; yet every Whore or Whoremaster is a thief ’
(Ordinary’s Account, 2 March 1692 ).
(^185) CLRO: SM 64 , September 1693.
(^186) CLRO, Charge Book, 1692 – 5 (under date 8 April 1694 ).
(^187) CLRO: SF 424 , February 1697 (gaol calendar).
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