involved the introduction of substantial rewards, guaranteed by statute, for evi-
dence that would result in the conviction of particularly dangerous offenders.
They were aimed at getting victims to report crimes to magistrates and to un-
dertake prosecutions, but the reward statutes also included inducements to of-
fenders to turn king’s evidence and provide the testimony in court that would
convict their accomplices. Rewards to encourage prosecution were not new.
Not even parliamentary rewards were without precedent, since they had been
enacted under Cromwell. But rewards paid by the state for the conviction of
whole classes of offenders had not been reinstated when the interregnum
legislation was nullified at the Restoration.^5
Other statutes after 1689 also sought to encourage prosecutions and convic-
tions, though not so obviously or directly as by the offer of rewards and pardons.
On the face of it, the granting ofbenefit of clergy to women on the same basis
as men, in 1691 ,^6 looks more like a concession to defendants; after all, women
who stole goods over ten shillings in value were in danger of being hanged,
whereas men convicted of the same offence could plead their clergy, be branded
on the thumb, and go free, if it were their first offence and the court accepted
their proof of literacy. To grant women the same right to clergy looks like simple
justice. But the statute of 1691 was almost certainly intended not so much to save
women from the gallows as to encourage prosecutions and convictions as a way
of increasing deterrence. As we have seen, women were blamed for much of the
property crime in London in the late seventeenth century. Removing the threat
of the gallows from women charged with theft over ten shillings seems most
likely to have been an effort to encourage prosecutions by their victims and to
make it more likely that juries would be willing to convict them. It is impossible
to estimate the extent to which this alteration in the law contributed to the con-
siderable increase in prosecutions of women in the decade that followed. What
isclear is that the removal of hanging from all simple larcenies committed by
women encouraged juries to convict: in the two years before the act of 1692 was
passed, close to a third of women charged with theft over ten shillings had been
acquitted; in the five sessions that followed its passage acquittals fell to 14
per cent. And whereas over the previous two years, twenty women had been
convicted and sentenced to death (of whom seven had actually been hanged), no
woman was hanged in the five sessions immediately after the passage of the act.
Over two-thirds of women convicted of grand larceny were allowed their clergy
and discharged under the new statute.^7
318 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London
felony’, Eyre added; and Powell said the same in the case of ‘housebreakers, robbers and clippers’
(HMC: Manuscripts of the House of Lords, 1693 – 5 ( 1900 ), 410 – 11 ). For the parliamentary process on
both bills, see JHC, 10 ( 1688 – 93 ), pp. 706 , 734 , 747 , 759 , 764 , 768 , 783 ; JHL, 15 ( 1691 – 6 ), pp. 443 , 445 , 448 ,
449 – 59 , 456 , 465 – 6.
(^5) See above, p. 230. (^6) By 3 & 4 Wm & Mary, c. 9 , s. 6 ( 1691 ).
(^7) Based on the data in the sessions Minute Book: CLRO: SM 60 – 2 , 1690 – 2 : a total of 65 cases Janu-
ary 1690 –April 1692 , and 29 cases May–December 1692.