offences with capital punishment. We will return in a later chapter to parlia-
mentary responses to what were thought to be the problems of crime in these
years. But it is worth noting the passage of those two statutes because they surely
suggest the concern with which women’s offences were regarded. Certainly the
shoplifting statute was aimed at women, who were always more frequently
charged with that offence than men; and female servants were clearly a central
target of the second of these statutes. The deployment of the heavy weapon of
the gallows suggests that the propertied classes of London and members of par-
liament thought not only that women were implicated in property crime gener-
ally but that offences committed by women themselves had extended beyond all
expectation and needed to be reined in.^198
The public anxieties about women that led to the passage of this legislation
might well at the same time have encouraged victims to prosecute and magis-
trates to send women to trial rather than to the Bridewell. It is also true that an
accused could be more readily identified and apprehended in some of the
offences that women typically committed—shoplifting, pilfering by employees,
the robbery of a client by a prostitute—than in many of the more violent
offences that men often engaged in. If there were widespread determination to
prosecute these offences in order to discourage others, a number of accused
would almost certainly be readily at hand. Women suspected of such thefts were
particularly vulnerable to prosecution.
Such considerations must have shaped the number of charges brought to
trial. But can they in themselves explain the patterns of Old Bailey cases over
these years—not simply the generally high proportion of women among the
accused, which they might, but the fluctuating numbers of women prosecuted
over the period and the fact that those fluctuations almost exactly mirrored
those of men? As Figure 1. 2 reveals, in the quarter century after the Revolution
of 1689 —through two wars ( 1689 – 97 , 1702 – 13 ) separated by a brief period of
peace—the number of men and women brought to trial moved in broadly simi-
lar ways, rising in the difficult years of the 1690 s, declining after 1700.^199 It seems
to me as likely that the concern about women in the City and the pattern of their
prosecution for property offences at the Old Bailey, particularly in the 1690 s,
both reflect the difficulties that women faced in the capital in the last years of the
seventeenth century. Perceptions of women’s behaviour were surely important,
but they could hardly fail to be influenced by the consequences of the difficulties
that women faced in a decade in which they were unusually hard-pressed to
make ends meet in London. Theft was only one option for such women: theIntroduction: The Crime Problem 67(^198) For the shoplifting and servants’ theft statutes, see below, Ch. 7.
(^199) The only other jurisdictions with similar gender patterns of prosecution in the eighteenth century
of which I am aware were in the north-east, where Morgan and Rushton found that women accounted
for half the defendants on property charges in Newcastle at the assizes and quarter sessions together,
and a third in the neighbouring counties of Northumberland and Durham (Morgan and Rushton,
Rogues, Thieves and the Rule of Law, 68 : table 3. 3 ).
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