anxiety about the behaviour of women in London and dissatisfaction with the
way the authorities and the courts dealt with crime in the capital: that is, the
very large number of women who were themselves brought before the courts in
the last decade of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth
charged with an offence against property. At other times in the century we are
examining—in the years after the Restoration and after 1714 —women accounted
for about a third of such defendants from the City of London (Table 1. 4 ).That was itself an unusually high level: studies from across several centuries
have found that women were rarely as prominent as that among offenders
accused of serious crimes.^194 But that level was to be significantly exceeded in the
quarter century following the Revolution of 1689 , when women property
defendants outnumbered men before the Old Bailey.
No doubt some of the increasing proportion of women among the accused in
the generation after 1689 is explained by this being largely a period of war and
by the recruitment oflarge numbers of young men into the forces. But that can-
not explain why the absolute number of women rose strikingly, not merely their
proportion among the prisoners on trial, and why even in the five years of peace
between 1697 and 1702 close to half the accused at the Old Bailey were women.Introduction: The Crime Problem 65(^194) For work on women and crime, see Barbara A. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities,
1300 – 1348 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979 ), 115 – 25 ; Carol Z. Wiener, ‘Sex Roles and Crime in Late Eliza-
bethan Hertfordshire’, Journal of Social History, 8 / 4 ( 1975 ), 38 – 60 ; Peter Lawson, ‘Patriarchy, Crime, and
the Courts: The Criminality of Women in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in Greg T. Smith,
Allyson N. May, and Simon Devereaux (eds.), Criminal Justice in the Old World and the New(Centre of Crim-
inology, Toronto, 1998 ) 16 – 57 ; J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: A County Study(Cam-
bridge, 1983 ), 95 , table 4 ; Morgan and Rushton, Rogues, Thieves and the Rule of Law, ch. 5 ; Feeley and Little,
‘The Vanishing Female: The Decline ofWomen in the Criminal Process, 1687 – 1912 ’; King, Crime, Just-
ice, and Discretion, 196 – 207 , idem, ‘Gender, Crime and Justice in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-
century England’; David Philips, Crime and Authority in Victorian England: The Black Country, 1835 – 1860
( 1977 ), 147 – 51 ; Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime, and Custody in Victorian England(Oxford, 1991 ). In the rural
parishes of Surrey over the period we are dealing with, about 14 % of the accused were women; and in
Sussex, 13 %: see J. M. Beattie, ‘The Criminality of Women in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of
Social History, 8 / 4 ( 1975 ), 80 – 116. For an analysis of women’s involvement in property crime that goes
beyond previous work by taking account of their social roles and relationships, see Garthine Walker,
‘Women, Theft and the World of Stolen Goods’, in Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds.), Women,
Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England( 1994 ), 81 – 105.
Table1.4.Male and female defendants in property offences: City of
London cases at the Old Bailey
Year Male Female Total % Male % Female
1670‒1689 1,645 806 2,451 67.1 32.9
1690‒1713 1,548 1,622 3,170 48.8 51.2
1714‒50 3,626 1,998 5,624 64.5 35.5
Total 6,819 4,426 11,245 60.6 39.4
Source: CLRO: Sessions Minute Books (SM)
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