offenders should be punished. Again, there is no direct evidence that it was
Thomson’s idea. But this ‘Index ofIndictments’, as it came to be called (though
it is actually an index to offenders rather than indictments), certainly dates from
the beginning of his term, and it so clearly fits with other elements in his prac-
tice that it seems certain to have been begun at Thomson’s suggestion. The
book was purpose-made for easy reference: it was long and narrow, and with al-
phabetical tabs down the right hand edge. At the end of each mayoral year the
clerks who kept the court records entered the names of the year’s defendants at
both the sessions of the peace held at the Guildhall and the gaol delivery and
oyer and terminer sessions at the Old Bailey, with a note of the date of the ses-
sion, the category of the offence (felony, assault, riot, and so on), the verdict, and
the punishment imposed. As a criminal record it was no doubt rough and ready,
but it provided a more effective way of tracking offenders and an aid to sen-
tencing and pardoning than recorders had ever had available. And if it was, as I
suppose, created at Thomson’s suggestion, it tells one a good deal about his in-
tentions and attitudes as he took up the recordership.^21
Thomson and the new penal order
The consequences of the Transportation Act of 1718 were felt immediately at
the Old Bailey. As soon as it was promulgated, the aldermen confirmed its im-
portance for the City’s propertied inhabitants by ordering that an abstract of the
‘Felon’s Act’, as they called it, be printed and widely distributed.^22 The bench at
the Old Bailey, with the recorder very much to the fore, added its own endorse-
ment by putting the provisions of the act immediately to work. In the first two
sessions of 1718 , held before the act came into force, men and women convicted
of non-capital property offences had been sentenced to what had long been the
familiar sanctions: twenty-one were granted clergy, burned in the hand and dis-
charged, and six were ordered to be whipped. In stark contrast, at the April ses-
sion the twenty-seven men and women convicted of non-capital theft were
sentenced under the provisions of the new legislation. All were ordered to be
transported; not a single offender was either clergied or whipped.^23 Clergyable
branding and whipping were not in fact to disappear entirely for property of-
fences, but the immediate move to embrace transportation established the dom-
inance of the new punishment—a dominance that was to endure into the 1770 s.
This new penal regime at the Old Bailey emerged as a consequence of the dis-
cretionary powers exercised by both the juries and the bench. One of the cen-
tral elements in the Transportation Act was the authority given to the courts to
sentence defendants convicted of all forms of larceny to seven years in Amer-
ica—not only grand larceny but those convicted of petty larceny, too. That
432 William Thomson and Transportation
(^21) CLRO, Index ofIndictments, 5 vols., 1714 – 1834. (^22) Rep 122 , fo. 297.
(^23) OBSP,January, March, and April 1718.