transportation—suggests that there was a widespread conviction that a more ef-
fective alternative to hanging was required for petty thieves, a need for a pun-
ishment to deal with offenders like the three men and seven women condemned
to be whipped at the December 1678 sessions whom Jeffreys as recorder
addressed as follows:
You the Prisoners at the Bar, I have observed in the time that I have attended here, that
your Pick-pockets, Shop-lifters, and you other Artists, which I am not so well acquainted
with, which fill up this place, throng it most with Women, and generally such as she
there, Mary Hipkins, with whom no admonitions will prevail. They are... [a] parcel of
Sluts, who make it their continual study to know how far they may steal, and yet save
their necks from the Halter, and are as perfect in that, as if they had never been doing
any thing else. But take notice of it, you that will take no warning, I pass my word for it;
if e’er I catch you here again, I shall take care you shall not easily escape.^123
That threat, which could only have meant hanging, was largely an empty ges-
ture. Women like Mary Hipkins revealed the weakness of the courts. Jane Jones
was another: she was arrested three times for shoplifting in as many years soon
after the Restoration, yet evaded punishment by jumping bail on one occasion,
being acquitted by the jury the next year (‘against the evidence’, it was of course
claimed), and being pardoned for pregnancy on the third occasion after refus-
ing to be transported. The recorder complained at the time that she had never
been burned in the hand, and that too many thieves like her were escaping
through the wide mesh of the law’s net because shopkeepers found the courts so
ineffective in dealing with them they thought it best to compound rather than
prosecute them.^124
It was the need for a punishment more moderate than hanging and more ef-
fective than clergy that explains the enthusiasm with which transportation was
embraced in the 1660 s. It also no doubt had the advantage for some observers
of getting rid of offenders with some hope that they would be reformed and con-
tribute to the imperial state. Transportation could in this way be conceived as a
form of punishment through labour, an idea that, as we have seen, had an ap-
peal in England as on the Continent.^125 Certainly, other versions of punish-
ments through work were floated from time to time for dealing with petty as well
as serious offenders. A form of labour discipline was already being employed in
London to deal with the most minor offenders since the magistrates in the City
and in Middlesex diverted a large number of those who might have been
charged with petty forms of theft from the courts and into the houses of correc-
tion, where they would be subject to some form of work discipline for a few days
or weeks as well as to physical correction. But that was more a matter of
opportunism than planning, and there are no signs in this period that the houses
of correction might have been developed as a possible site of systematic
The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century 309(^123) An Exact Account of the Trials... Decemb. 1678 , p. 35.
(^124) SP 29 / 97 , fo. 188. (^125) Above, p. 281.