If one could add the defendants who were every year diverted to the house of
correction and away from jury trial in the reigns of William and Anne that fig-
ure would likely be even higher.^195 The availability of magistrates and courts in
London might help to explain the generally high levels of prosecution of women
in the century after the Restoration since ease of reporting might be expected to
increase the number of victims of minor offences who would take the trouble to
complain and prosecute.^196 But that would not explain the particularly high
level in this period. A more likely encouragement was provided by a significant
change in the law governing the eligibility of women to plead benefit of clergy in
simple larceny cases. Until this was changed by statute in 1691 , women, unlike
men, were not allowed clergy if they were convicted of theft of more than ten
shillings. A woman convicted of such an offence was in danger ofbeing hanged.
No doubt, the extension of clergy to women on the same basis as men encour-
aged prosecutions—as it was no doubt intended to do.^197 The attitudes towards
women that were expressed by the grand juries of London and the ordinary of
Newgate in this period, and indeed, the campaigns against vice and immorality
by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, could only have encouraged
a view that women, particularly single women, needed to be brought under
control, and, if only indirectly, encouraged the prosecution of women caught
stealing.
Such attitudes help to explain the passage of two statutes in this period that
increased the severity of punishments that many women would suffer by
removing benefit of clergy from shoplifting and servants’ theft (in 1699 and 1713 ,
respectively), the effect of which was to threaten those convicted of these66 Introduction: The Crime Problem(^195) In 1694 women accounted for 72 % of those appearing before the City Bridewell court charged
with some form of property crime, and in 1703 – 5 , 70 % (Bridewell Court Book, 1694 – 5 , 1703 – 5 ). These
were years of war and it is possible that the preponderance of women in Bridewell was exaggerated by
young men having been forced into the army or navy rather than being prosecuted. None the less, Shoe-
maker found that more than half of those committed to the Middlesex house of correction between 1670
and 1721 for offences against property were women (Prosecution and Punishment, 185 , table 7. 3 ). In his forth-
coming book on Bridewell, Paul Griffiths shows that women were increasingly prominent among those
committed there on property-related charges in the first half of the seventeenth century, and that they
were in the majority in the early 1650 s (The First Bridewell: Petty Crime, Policing, and Prison in London,
1550 – 1660 ).
(^196) Peter King has shown that in towns with their own quarter sessions in Essex, women were pros-
ecuted at a much higher rate than in urban centres without their own local courts—in which prosecutors
would have to take cases to the county courts (King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion, 198 – 9 ). Morgan and
Rushton’s data from the north-east between 1718 and 1800 show a similar pattern. Women accounted
for roughly a quarter of the defendants at the assizes held for Newcastle and Durham, and about a fifth
in Northumberland; at the quarter sessions of the two counties they made up just under 40 %. But at the
Newcastle sessions, 55 % of the defendants accused of theft were women (Rogues, thieves and the rule of law,
68 ). The explanation, in their view, is not simply the availability of the sessions court, and thus the con-
venience for prosecutors, but the poverty of the town (p. 104 ). Evidence for a high level of prosecutions
against women in urban settings in this period has also been provided by a study of Leiden, in which
women accounted for 47 % of property charges in the period 1678 – 1794 (Els Kloek, ‘Criminality and
Gender in Leiden’s Confessieboeken, 1678 – 1794 ’, Criminal Justice History, 11 ( 1990 ), 1 – 29 ).
(^197) See Ch. 7.
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