Crime and the State 377real and imagined.^23 Three lines of attack on violent crime emerged in London
after 1714 which together anticipated in their practice Beccarian ideas about the
need to persuade potential offenders that if they broke the law they would be
caught, if caught they would be brought to trial and convicted, and if convicted,
punished. Perhaps the most immediately important innovation was a successful
transportation policy that addressed the third of these ambitions, and that we
will examine in the following chapter. Here we will take up changes in the crim-
inal justice system after 1714 aimed at encouraging the arrest and prosecution of
offenders and ensuring their conviction. These included an expanded rewards
policy that had important consequences for the policing of the metropolis; and
connected with that, government support for the effective prosecution of those
whose offences were thought to threaten the security of the regime. These in-
terventions in the criminal process grew from the government’s willingness to
commit resources to the short-term project of ensuring the stability of the
regime. They had immense long-term consequences for the future working of
the system of criminal administration—for the policing of the metropolis, for
the way felony trials would be conducted, and for the penal consequences faced
by the convicted.
We might begin with the rewards policy. As we have seen, a series of statutes
between 1692 and 1706 had established forty-pound rewards for the conviction
of robbers, burglars, and coiners. A significant number of payments under those
statutes were made in the years after 1713 , when prosecutions for robbery and
burglary increased in London; indeed, claims for rewards increased to such an
extent in the country that sheriffs complained about the burden this imposed on
them. Reward payments were expected to be made from the funds that sheriffs
amassed during their year in office from fines and other sources. The problem
was that when the demands for rewards outstripped the money they collected—
as clearly was the case in London after 1713 —the sheriffs would have to meet
those demands from their own resources and then wait for reimbursement
when their accounts were cleared some years later. They were given some relief
from that by the passage of a statute in 1716 that allowed them to apply directly
to the treasury for the immediate repayment of the reward money they ex-
pended—a statute that underlines the pressures caused by violence in the streets
of the capital in those years.^24
The statute is a further reminder of the belief in the value of rewards as a
means of encouraging the arrest and prosecution of offenders, and of the need
for convictions if the law was to have any deterrent effect. These years were to
see other efforts to encourage policing and effective prosecution—other ways of
encouraging the apprehension of serious offenders, and of helping to ensure
(^23) J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman( 1956 ), ch. 6 ; J. M. Beattie, The English Court
in the Reign of George I(Cambridge, 1967 ), ch. 7 ; Paul S. Fritz, The English Ministers and Jacobitism between the
Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 (Toronto, 1975 ); Ragnhild Hatton, George I, Elector and King( 1978 ), ch. 7.
(^243) Geo. I, c. 15 ( 1716 ), s. 4.