offences. But the level of cases that came before the eight annual sessions of the
Old Bailey made London very different from every other jurisdiction in the
country. And when the level of prosecutions increased sharply and produced
overcrowding in the gaols, full calendars at the Old Bailey, and gruesome dis-
plays at Tyburn of the terror of the gallows anxieties also increased about the
ability of the courts and the criminal law to cope with the problem. Concerns
were raised about the straightforward loss of their goods by respectable citizens
of middling wealth and about the threat of violence inherent in some forms of
property crime. But they arose also for more complex reasons relating to the
way crime was read, and the meaning that was attached to it.
This reading amounted to a considerable anxiety in some quarters about
the health of a society in which there was a large and concentrated floating
population which exercised considerable independence, and engaged in activ-
ities that gave rise to alarm on the part of the respectable and settled members of
society. Of particular concern were youth and women, two groups who should
have been in dependent relationships to parents, employers, or husbands, but
many of whom, for a variety of reasons to do with the nature of the metropolis
itself, lived apparently independently of such controls. To the propertied house-
holders of the City, the problem of crime was a problem wilfully produced by
the attitudes and behaviour of the poorer members of the working population
because of their attachment to the developing pleasures and opportunities
for consumption offered by the metropolis. Part of the answer was a moral
answer: bad people had to be made good by a determined effort of magistrates
and engaged citizens to reform their manners; or by a charity school to teach
the children of the poor obedience; or by a workhouse or house of correction
to teach the lazy to labour. As important as such ideas continued to be, it was
also becoming clear in the late seventeenth century that other efforts were
needed.
What those efforts were is the subject of the following chapters. They were
not part of a single notion of how urban crime might be combatted—far from
it. They tackled a number of discrete problems. But together they led to several
departures that began to shape what was recognizably a different approach to
dealing with criminal offences in a new and rapidly changing urban culture
which produced new problems, but at the same time created increasingly
high expectations about order and civility and the necessary resources and
the determination to see them fulfilled. The experimentation and innovation
that followed involved the City, parliament, and the central government, and
resulted in new forms of surveillance, new forms of policing, new encourage-
ments to prosecution, new forms of punishment. Broadly speaking, efforts to
stimulate more prosecution and to develop better forms of urban surveillance
were directed against street crime and the threat of violence. Less serious
forms of theft—aggravating and harmful to the moral health of society if not
posing an immediate physical menace—were met by punishments aimed at72 Introduction: The Crime Problemch1(a).y5 11/6/01 12:44 PM Page 72