convicted from the consequences of a felony conviction. Most men and women
granted clergy were immediately discharged from the court, though not before
suffering the undoubted pain of a branding with a hot iron on the brawn of the
thumb.
Petty larceny, on the other hand, was not a felony, and thus not a capital of-
fence at common law. It was, Blackstone was to say, an ‘inferior species of
theft’.^58 It was, however, subject to public whipping, and conviction for this ap-
parently minor offence could bring a more painful and perhaps more humiliat-
ing consequence than the usual punishment for the more serious charge of
grand larceny. But in fact, that was rarely a consideration at the prosecution
stage in London, for virtually no defendant in either the City of London or the
County of Middlesex, either at the quarter sessions or at the Old Bailey, was
charged with petty larceny in this period.^59 This was one of the most striking
characteristics of the administration of the criminal law in the metropolis. It is
also the clearest possible evidence of the flexible nature of the system of criminal
justice in early modern England.
Unless we are to believe that such minor thefts just did not happen in Lon-
don—when they accounted for as many as half the prosecutions for property
crime in other jurisdictions^60 —it is clear that charges of petty larceny were not
sent to trial because the London magistrates chose to send virtually all of those
accused of petty thefts to the Bridewell, the City’s house of correction. By the
late seventeenth century that was a well-established practice: petty larceny cases
had not apparently been sent to trial in London for at least a century.^61 It had de-
veloped and was continued presumably because the magistrates of London had
early concluded that offences for which the established punishment was whip-
ping did not need to be tried before the royal judges, and to avoid overloading
the calendar at Old Bailey with minor matters they chose not to send such cases
there.
What is more of a puzzle is why they did not send these cases to their own ses-
sions of the peace, as magistrates would have done in the counties. The answer
to that seems likely to have been that their sessions were already fully taken up
with the trial of other misdemeanours—with assault, trespass, fraud, cheating,
and similar charges. Further, and crucially, it was difficult to expand the City
24 Introduction: The Crime Problem
(^58) William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England(Oxford, 1765 – 9 ; facsimile of first edn.,
University of Chicago Press, 1979 ), iv. 238.
(^59) For Middlesex, see Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment, 130 , table 6. 2. Norman Landau informs
me that by the second quarter of the eighteenth century Middlesex magistrates were sending a number
of petty larceny cases to trial at quarter sessions.
(^60) Petty larceny made up about one-fifth of the simple larceny cases that came before the Surrey
courts in this period, and fully half in Sussex (Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 284 , table 6. 1 ).
(^61) Petty larceny cases do not appear to have been tried at the Old Bailey in Elizabeth’s reign. I infer
that from a table summarizing the treatment of a sample of London property offenders between 1560
and 1599 in Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London(Cambridge, 1991 ),
table 6. 4 , 246 – 7. The table includes 1,340men and women charged with grand larceny, but not a single
defendant indicted for petty larceny.