CHAPTER SEVENThe Revolution, Crime, and Punishment
in London, 1690 – 1713
The system of criminal administration in late seventeenth-century London had
been shaped by changes in the law and in the practice of the courts over the pre-
vious two centuries in what might be regarded as a first phase of an early mod-
ern response to the problems of urban crime. With respect to serious violence
against the person, or property offences accompanied by the threat of violence,
the criminal law had been altered in the sixteenth century by the powerful idea
that benefit of clergy could be controlled and limited by statute. In a stream of
Tudor enactments the saving power of clerical privilege was sharply restricted
by being granted only to men who could prove their literacy in court (adapting
its ecclesiastical origins to a social purpose) and, even more tellingly, by being
removed altogether from the most heinous and feared crimes. Tudor parliaments
thereby put in place the core of the ‘bloody code’ that was to be massively ex-
tended after 1689 and enforced into the early decades of the nineteenth century.^1
The gallows did their deadly work in every part of England and Wales, but
the consequences of the regime of deterrence-through-terror were always more
visible in London than in the rest of the country. Several times a year in the late
seventeenth century men and women were hanged at Tyburn for what were re-
garded as the most serious offences: treason, murder, infanticide, robbery,
burglary, housebreaking, pocket-picking, horse-theft, coining, some forms of
larceny, and occasionally for rape and sodomy. With respect to lesser felonies
and minor property crime in general, the administration of the criminal law had
developed in an altogether distinctive way in the capital. As we have seen, petty
offences were simply not prosecuted in the London courts in the late seven-
teenth century as they were elsewhere at county quarter sessions and assizes. In
the decades after the Restoration a few men and women accused of such minor
offences were punished without trial by being treated as vagrants and sent off for
a brief spell in the Bridewell—a practice that may well have been of long standing
(^1) Radzinowicz, History, i; Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal
Winslow, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England( 1975 ); E. P. Thompson, Whigs
and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act( 1975 ); James Fitzjames Stephen, A History of the Criminal Law of
England( 3 vols., 1883 ), i. ch. 13 ; Beattie, Crime and the Courts, ch. 4.