proposed legislation that, on the surface, would have supplemented this en-
couragement to the prosecution of highwaymen ‘by changing the present pun-
ishment of death; and, instead thereof, to confine [convicted offenders] to hard
labour, with marks of ignominy’.^11 The scope of the alteration proposed is
unclear and the arguments justifying it unknown.
About this bill a contemporary observed that ‘The Commons have fallen on
many excellent points lately, whereof one is, that there bee a middle punishment
for highway men, betwixt hanging and acquitting [i.e. clergy], viz: exposed to
labour and that workhouses be set up for that purpose.. .’.^12 A middle punish-
ment—between hanging and the ineffective branding of clergy which seemed
to this man, as to so many others, as tantamount to acquittal—is clearly what
many contemporaries sought, whatever their ideas about capital punishment
itself. And, as in this 1694 bill, the punishment that seemed to some MPs likely
to be most effective both as a deterrent and as a means of training and rehabilitat-
ing offenders was hard labour. This bill got no further than leave to submit; nor
did another attempt to introduce a non-capital punishment in place ofhanging
for serious property offences get very far when, in 1698 , in a bill to grant a ten-
pound reward for the conviction of housebreakers, a motion to instruct the
committee to which the bill was sent after second reading to ‘consider of some
other Punishment than Death for Burglars and Highwaymen’ was rejected.^13
A search for a substitute for hanging does not perhaps signal a principled op-
position to capital punishment, of which there is little overt evidence in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.^14 But the advocacy oflabour-based
punishments carries at least an implicit challenge to reliance on terror and ex-
presses the strong sense one finds in this period—a sense felt perhaps particu-
larly keenly by some men in the City—that the criminal law was too narrow
and too rigid: on the one hand, that the gallows could be expected to play only
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London 321(^11) JHC, 11 ( 1693 – 7 ), pp. 95 – 6.
(^12) Russell J. Kerr and Ida Coffin Duncan (eds.), The Portledge Papers, being Extracts from the Letters of
Richard Lapthorne, Gent, of Hatton Garden London, to Richard Coffin Esq. of Portledge, Bideford, Devon( 1928 ), 170.
(^13) JHC, 12 ( 1697 – 9 ), p. 196.
(^14) There were signs of dissatisfaction with the way capital punishment was administered, of the kind
that Mandeville, Henry Fielding, and others were to voice in the eighteenth century—including the
notion that the terror of the law was diminished by delays between sentence and execution. A draft pro-
posal among the papers of William Brockman, the Kent MP, entitled ‘An Effectual way to Ridd the
kingdom ofTheives Robbers Murderers and all other pernicious Malefactors’, written in 1694 , put for-
ward the notions that those convicted of capital offences should be executed the following day, and that
highwaymen be executed near the place of the robbery and to be left hanging in chains on the gibbet ‘for
a Terrour’. It included the further suggestion that every three months an account of all persons executed
(throughout the country) be published—again, ‘for a Terror to Malefactors and an Admonition to all
Persons’. Several other ideas advanced in that document anticipated the future by more than a century:
that new gaols should be built in every county (and in London) that would provide separate accommo-
dation in cells for each accused, and that gaolers should be salaried. No suggestions were made as to how
the resources for such a project would be raised, nor for one further proposal—that special ‘criminal
judges’ should deliver these gaols so regularly that no prisoner would wait more than ten days for his or
her trial (BL, Add. MSS 42593 , fos. 4 – 5 ).