frequency with which women were brought before the courts suggests too that
women found themselves in difficulties in London much more often than in
small towns and rural parishes. For single women especially, the capital offered
a greater degree of independence and privacy—a certain freedom from the sur-
veillance and controls of patriarchal and paternalistic social relationships. At
the same time, however, and as an inevitable consequence, the urban world
forced on them a greater need for self-reliance.^213 That must have been true of
single women and widows in particular, and it is hardly surprising that not only
were larger numbers of women drawn into theft in London, but that fully 80 per
cent of the women before the Old Bailey on property charges in this period were
unmarried.^214
The unusually high level of prosecution of women in this period may thus
derive from a combination of factors: from a pattern of immigration that resulted
in a large number of women enjoying relative freedom in the city from the con-
straints that hedged in the lives of most women, married and single, in the vil-
lages and small towns in which most of the population lived; from the severe
difficulties that many such women experienced in London from time to time,
given the irregularity of work and the low wages they could command; and from
the responses of the propertied classes of London to the efforts of women in
trouble to make ends meet—responses made all the more severe by the appar-
ent weakness of the courts and of the criminal justice system in the capital. Anx-
iety no doubt contributed to the sense of panic that was so often expressed about
the threat of crime, and that perhaps encouraged victims to complain, and the
authorities to take more vigorous action than they might otherwise have done.
But the charges brought to the Old Bailey against women as well as men arose
too from the reality of offences being committed. The patterns of prosecution
suggest that property offences in London in this period arose very largely as a re-
sponse to the changing conditions under which a large part of the labouring
poor lived and worked, and to the inequalities under which they laboured.Conclusion
London crime was not unique: every major court in England and Wales dealt
with violent offences and more petty, but still aggravating and troublesome,Introduction: The Crime Problem 71(^213) For the particular difficulties of single women in London, see George, London Life, 159 , 165 ,
172 , 207.
(^214) This is based on the Old Bailey records for the two years 1694 and 1704 in which a total of 188
women were indicted for property offences from the City of London. Of these, roughly 75 % were in-
dicted as spinsters, 5 % as widows, and the remaining 20 % as married. These figures can be regarded as
only approximate, since the identification of a woman’s married status in the indictment is not entirely
trustworthy. It is also possible that many of the women identified as spinsters were in common law rela-
tionships. Clearly, too much credence should not be given to the precise proportions reported above.
Peter King has found that at the Essex assizes in the last quarter of the eighteenth century roughly 62 %
of the women brought to trial were single, 9 % were widowed, and 30 % were married (King, Crime,
Justice, and Discretion, 203 , table 6.6).
ch1(a).y5 11/6/01 12:44 PM Page 71