from carrying convicts to the colonies and selling them into a form of servitude for
the term of their sentences. Indeed, it was also promoted for that reason as a solu-
tion not only to more minor forms of property crime, but to vagrancy as well. In a
‘Proposal’ addressed to the king and Council in 1664 , an anonymous projector en-
visaged ‘an office for transporting to the plantations all rogues, beggars and felons
convicted of petty larcenies’ who would be sent from all parts of the country to the
nearest seaport where they would be registered and transported. They would be
taken by ‘merchants, mariners or planters’ who, the petitioner assumed, would be
willing to pay to take such people to the colonies. The anticipated profits were pro-
posed to be divided between the king and the proprietors of the office.^90 This was
fanciful. But the fact that it occurred to someone in 1664 as a possible money-
maker does suggest the high level of optimism in some circles about the possibil-
ities offered by transportation as a solution to a range of domestic social problems.
Whether legislated or not, however, transportation was unlikely ever to have
flourished in the late seventeenth century because the conditions that had given
rise to the optimism of the 1660 s changed significantly over the following
decades. Colonies that might have been expected to take convicts—Jamaica and
Barbados, Maryland and Virginia—were in the process of establishing slave
economies by the 1670 s and became much less receptive to cargoes of English
convicts.^91 In these circumstances merchants became careful and selective about
who among the convicts they would take and where. They were no doubt always
reluctant to take the elderly and the infirm—a consideration suggested by a list
among the State Papers of convicts to be transported in 1664 that includes their
ages.^92 But they became even more selective by the late 1670 s and the 1680 s, mak-
ing it far from certain that a sentence of transportation would actually be carried
out. As a pamphleteer said in 1677 —in the course of arguing in favour of the es-
tablishment of county workhouses for the manufacture of linen cloth in which
convicted felons would be sentenced to work for life or a term of years—trans-
portation was no longer working because ‘Foreign Plantations have now so little
occasions [sic] for them [convicted offenders], that Merchants refuse to take
them off the Sheriffes hands, without being paid for their Passage’.^93 The result
was that while young, able-bodied, skilled males might be scooped from the gaols
and taken, elderly, infirm, and unskilled men and large numbers of women were
left to languish.^94 By the late 1670 s the government occasionally paid the gaol fees
294 The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century
(^90) CSPD 1664 – 5 , p. 147.
(^91) Maryland and Virginia indeed both passed ordinances in the 1670 s forbidding the landing of con-
victs (CSPC: America and the West Indies, 1669 – 74 , 63 – 4 ); the Virginia prohibition was confirmed by
the Privy Council, Acts of the Privy Council: Colonial, i. 553. And see Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 104.
(^92) SP 29 / 92 , fo. 125.
(^93) Proposals for Building in every County a Working-Alms-House or Hospital.. .( 1677 ), 8. I owe this reference
to Roger Ekirch.
(^94) In a warrant to sheriffs of London and Middlesex in 1684 it is revealed that the agent for transport-
ing offenders to St Christopher’s refused to take convicts unless ‘he may choose the most able and valu-
able of them and leave the others in prison’, and that ‘no merchants can be found who will transport
them, when the choice men are carried away.. .’ (CSPD 1684 – 5 , pp. 111 – 12 ).