it was furthered by a presentment from the City grand jury at the following ses-
sion in December. In their presentment, the jurors returned to the issue of the
weaknesses of the available secondary punishments: the inadequacy of clergy,
the counterproductive character of burning on the cheek, and the failures of
transportation as it was then established. They did so, they said, following com-
plaints ‘by many Eminent Tradesmen’ in the City that the laws in force did not
sufficiently discourage crime against property.^38 Although this grand jury was
willing to leave it to the aldermen to take such action as they ‘thought most
proper and expedient’, it was clear they favoured more effective ways of
punishing thieves short of death.
The grand jury presentment was followed by a petition to the House of Com-
mons from ‘the Grand Jury, Citizens, and Shopkeepers of the City of London’
arguing that branding felons on the cheek ‘hath been found by Experience not
to have the intended Effect’ since the permanent and visible brand made it im-
possible for them to find employment and thus ‘made them desperate’ and con-
firmed them as thieves. The way the courts had administered branding on the
cheek suggests that that view would have been widely supported. But the peti-
tioners went on to propose not simply that the branding be returned to the
thumb of the convicted offender, but that in addition, at the judges’ discretion,
clergied felons should be ‘kept to hard labour’ for a year for the first offence, for
two years for the second, and put to death if they were convicted for a third time.^39
The timing of this initiative not only to revert the branding of clergy from the
cheek to the thumb but to introduce an entirely new set of punishments for clergy-
able felonies is puzzling at first sight since earlier efforts to change the crim-
inal law had generally arisen in periods in which there was clear anxiety about
the numbers of offences. This was no such period. Indeed, grand juries in 1703
and again in 1706 went out of their way to comment on the low levels of crime
in the City. Why then was such an undertaking successful in this period? One
answer must be that the failure ofbranding on the cheek made some form of
legislation essential. In addition, and paradoxically, the apparently low level of
crime after more than a decade of very high and worrying levels made a hard
labour argument persuasive because the sharp falling away of prosecutions was
attributed by some to the recent establishment of the London Corporation of
the Poor and the opening of the Bishopsgate Street workhouse. A campaign to
create these institutions, led by alderman Sir Robert Clayton, had come to
fruition at a time in the late 1690 s when the streets of London were filled
with beggars and the gaols were crowded with suspected thieves and robbers.^40
To its supporters, the workhouse had been an immense success, not only in
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London 331(^38) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, December 1704. (^39) JHL, 14 ( 1702 – 4 ), p. 463.
(^40) Joanna Innes, ‘Prisons for the Poor: English Bridewells, 1555 – 1800 ’, in Francis Snyder and Douglas
Hay (eds.), Labour, Law and Crime: An Historical Perspective( 1987 ), 88 – 90 ; Macfarlane, ‘Social Policy and the
Poor in the Later Seventeenth Century’, in Beier and Finlay (eds.), London, 1500 – 1700 , 263 – 70 ; and for
Clayton, above, n. 27.