the most part crime in the capital was at a much lower level, pardon decisions
resulted in 24 per cent of the men and women sentenced to be hanged actually
being executed at Tyburn.
Extrapolation from our Sample, and the evidence of contemporaries, sug-
gests that on average about three executions took place in the metropolis of
London in this period after the eight annual sessions of the Old Bailey—roughly
the level we found in the decades after the Restoration.^101 But averages do not
accurately represent the public impact of executions in London or convey the
experiences that made the Tyburn hanging day a fixture in the calendar of
London life. In the first place, execution days did not invariably follow each ses-
sion of the court; men and women condemned at two and sometimes three ses-
sions of the Old Bailey were occasionally executed together.^102 When one adds
to that the typically sharp fluctuations in the numbers of offenders tried and
condemned, the result could be some very heavy execution days. Richard
Lapthorne, who acted as the London agent of a Devon country gentleman, fre-
quently remarked on such days as part of his roundup of crime news from the
capital for his patron. He reported the December 1690 Old Bailey session as
‘greater than usuall’, with twenty-two men and women condemned to death
and eighteen of them being executed at Tyburn over two days.^103 Again, in July
1694 , he reported the sessions at the Old Bailey as ‘great’: twenty-five had been
condemned, of whom fifteen were executed. But apart from sharp fluctuations
in the kinds of property offences with which we have been concerned, there was
a particular reason why there were some especially bloody execution days that
struck observers like Lapthorne as distinctly unusual: clipping and coining be-
came increasingly common in the 1680 s and 1690 s—or at least commonly
prosecuted when informers were encouraged by a parliamentary reward to
turn in those they suspected, and thief-takers became active in hunting down
360 The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London
(^101) See above, Ch. 6 , text at n. 105. The figure of 47 men and women executed over the twenty-four
years 1690 – 1713 derives from a one-third sample of City cases. As we saw in Ch. 6 , the City accounted
for about 40 % of the cases at the Old Bailey from the larger metropolis in this period. My estimate is that
something in the order of 600 – 700 men and women suffered at Tyburn between 1690 and 1713 for all of-
fences—perhaps 25 – 9 a year on average. Such a figure accords broadly with two contemporary ac-
counts: with Narcissus Luttrell’s records of London convictions and executions between 1678 and 1714 ,
and with evidence for much of Anne’s reign published by the ordinary of Newgate. Narcissus Luttrell’s
account of convictions and executions in London is included in his Brief Historical Relation. Luttrell’s fig-
ures are more accurate with respect to the number of defendants condemned at the conclusion of the
Old Bailey sessions than the number executed at Tyburn. In the twelve years 1690 – 1701 he failed to in-
clude at least ten Tyburn hanging days. The second source is more trustworthy for the first two decades
of the eighteenth century, during which Paul Lorrain, the ordinary of Newgate, published cumulative
annual totals from time to time of men and women condemned to death and executed in his Ordinary’s
Accounts. (See, the pamphlets ofDecember 1710 and October 1712 , for example). In October 1718 he pub-
lished totals for the period 1700 – 18 , which reveal that 494 men and women were executed over those
years for all offences in both the City and Middlesex—that is, just over 27 a year. I owe my account of
Lorrain’s figures to Andrea McKenzie, ‘Lives of the Most Notorious Offenders: Popular Literature of
Crime in England, 1675 – 1775 ’, Ph.D. thesis (Toronto, 1999 ), 498 , Table 1.
(^102) Evidence from Luttrell, Brief Historical Relation, and the Ordinary’s Account.
(^103) Kerr and Duncan (eds.), The Portledge Papers, 95.