in the country—that is, how few charges of petty larceny were sent on to the
court by either London or Middlesex magistrates. Does this perhaps suggest
some anxiety to limit the number of offenders sentenced to be whipped in pub-
lic at the end of every session of the Old Bailey? There is no reason to think that
whipping was regarded as too brutal or shocking for the sensibilities of the popu-
lation, or thought likely to encourage violence in others. These were all senti-
ments of the future. But gathering large crowds together, as we might assume
public whippings did, particularly the sexually charged performance of whip-
ping women, who were naked from the waist up, had a different meaning and
consequence in London than in a small town. At the very least, public whip-
pings would have blocked the streets for some considerable time and may have
been coming to seem too disruptive in the urban and commercial world at the
end of the seventeenth century. That may have acted as a restraint on the wider
use of public chastisement as a penal weapon. Certainly, had petty larceny been
charged as it might have been, there would have been dozens (at the very least)
of public whippings to be carried out at the end of every court session. Limiting
whipping to the number of defendants chosen for this treatment by juries
provided a means of keeping it within tolerable limits.
I know of no evidence to support such a view, but it would not be surprising if
there had been concern about the disruptions to street traffic that public dis-
plays of violence would have caused. There were to be complaints throughout
the eighteenth century about the disruptive consequences of the Tyburn pro-
cession—the drunkenness it encouraged, the loss of work time it entailed, the
opportunities it provided for pickpockets.^120 It is possible that some of the ap-
parent reluctance on the part of the court and the government to hang or to
whip large numbers of offenders in the late seventeenth century reflected such
concerns. A similar reluctance may have influenced the way the City magis-
trates administered a third form of public punishment, the pillory. This was typ-
ically imposed on men and women convicted of a variety of misdemeanours,
including seditious libel, forgery, and forms of fraud or cheating, rather than the
convicted felons with whom we are mainly concerned. But it seems significant
in the context of public punishment in the City in general that the pillory, too,
came under some restrictions in this period. Until the end of the seventeenth
century the court often sentenced offenders to three separate exposures on the
pillory at the most public places in the City—the Exchange, Cheapside, Fleet
Street at the end of Chancery Lane—quite often for two hours each, and at a
time that would guarantee the largest crowd.^121 By the early decades of the
eighteenth century sentences were more likely to be restricted to one session and
for one hour. Again, that does not suggest that the essential character of the
The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century 307(^120) Bernard Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn( 1725 ), ed. by Malvin
R. Zirker, Jun., The Augustan Reprint Society (Los Angeles, 1964 ), 16 – 25 ; Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into
the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, 1751 , ed. by Malvin R. Zirker (Oxford, 1988 ), 167 – 72.
(^121) For several such sentences in 1693 – 5 , see the Sessions Minute Book (CLRO: SM 64 – 6 ).