Parliament and the criminal law: ideas and experiments
Something in the order of forty bills concerned with central matters of criminal
administration were introduced into parliament in the quarter century after
1689.^3 An even larger number focused on matters outside the immediate
purview of the criminal law but carried significant implications for the way the
law was administered—bills concerning the makeup of juries, for example, the
problem of vagrancy, the control of servants, and what was widely agreed to be
an increasing and dangerous level of immorality and vice. Such legislative ac-
tivity presents a strikingly different picture of parliamentary concern for social
issues of this kind from that evident in the parliaments of the Restoration. A sim-
ple count ofbills has only limited value as an indicator of changing activity, since
some proposals were introduced once and got nowhere at all while others were
introduced into several parliamentary sessions before finally being successful or
being dropped. Perhaps more revealing of the importance of this period in
broadening the ambit and strengthening the powers of the criminal law is the
legislation that reached the statute books. We have had occasion in earlier chap-
ters on crime and policing to notice most of these enactments in their appropri-
ate contexts. What I intend here is to characterize the central intentions at work
behind some of the key pieces of criminal legislation passed in the reigns of
William III and Anne, and to ask who introduced and supported them; what in-
terests these statutes represented; and what intentions they expressed? I will em-
phasize the engagement and influence of the City of London in this legislative
process, though the discussion ought also to reveal some of the general impulses
behind the options being taken up in this period, and the broader issues
surrounding the promotion oflegislation.
The statutes enacted in the generation after the Revolution of 1689 made
substantial changes in several aspects of the criminal law and its administration.
There was no programme, no planned campaign, no co-ordination, no sus-
tained public discussion of ideas. But the broad intentions and consequences of
the legislation went all in one direction: towards strengthening policing, pros-
ecution, and the consequences of conviction. Most of the statutes can be seen as
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London 315(^3) For an important study of parliamentary legislation carried out by Joanna Innes, Julian Hoppit,
with the assistance of Edmund Green, Nyani Samarasinghe, and John Styles, which has produced an in-
valuable list of ‘failed bills’ in the period 1660 – 1800 , see Julian Hoppit (ed.), Failed Legislation, 1660 – 1800 :
Extracted from the Commons and Lords Journals( 1997 ), with an introduction by Hoppit and Innes. See also,
Julian Hoppit, ‘Patterns of Parliamentary Legislation, 1660 – 1800 ’, Historical Journal, 39 ( 1996 ), 109 – 31 ;
Julian Hoppit, Joanna Innes, and John Styles, ‘Towards a History of Parliamentary Legislation,
1660 – 1800 ’, Parliamentary History, 13 ( 1994 ), 312 – 21 ; Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement:Public
Welfare in Early Modern England(Oxford, 1999 ), ch. 5. For two masterly articles that illuminate the shape
of legislation in the eighteenth century and provide a helpful discussion of the range and nature of pro-
posals bearing on social issues, see Joanna Innes, ‘Parliament and the Shaping of Eighteenth-Century
English Social Policy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5 th ser., 40 ( 1990 ), 63 – 92 , and idem, ‘The
Domestic Face of the Military-Fiscal State: Government and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in
Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 ( 1994 ), 96 – 127.