warrant under which they committed many of those charged with minor
property offences to the Bridewell (in the City) and to the county house of cor-
rection (in Middlesex) instead of sending them to Newgate to await trial before
a jury.
They continued to do so in the decades after the Restoration and it had a
striking effect on the formal criminal calendar at the London courts in the
period with which we are dealing. The principal consequence was that very few
petty larceny charges came before the judges at the Old Bailey, or before the just-
ices at their sessions of the peace, either in the City or in Westminster or Mid-
dlesex. Instead, in the late decades of the seventeenth century, numbers of men
and women were being sent to Bridewell for property-related offences, vari-
ously labelled as pilferers or as idle and disorderly persons.^66 The magistrates
committed them; the precise form of the punishment they would endure was
determined by the Bridewell Court—the governors of the institution, who in-
cluded the lord mayor and several aldermen—who assigned punishments for
those who were present on the day they met, generally at two or three week
intervals in the late seventeenth century.^67
Two sources make it clear that minor property cases were being diverted in
this way from the Old Bailey in the late seventeenth century: the records of the
lord mayor’s sittings as a magistrate, which are preserved in quite complete runs
in the late seventeenth century and which record the cases he sent on to the
house of correction as well as those sent for trial at the Old Bailey and the ses-
sions; and the accounts of the meetings of the Bridewell court, in which the
Introduction: The Crime Problem 27(^66) Pilfering and pilferer were terms without settled meanings in the late seventeenth century. The
label ‘pilferer’ was a character assessment, indicating untrustworthiness, someone who stole habitually,
though usually goods of little value. When John Green was tried for housebreaking in 1687 , it was
reported that he was ‘looked upon as a pilfering fellow’ (OBSP, October 1687 , p. 2 ); and a woman at the
same session charged with burglary was said to be a ‘Notorious Pilferer’ (OBSP, October 1687 , p. 3
(Tally) ). Another woman had been acquitted in the previous year when her prosecutor was accused
of being ‘little better than a pilferer’ (OBSP, May 1686 , p. 3 (Short) ). It was this meaning of the word
that the London magistrates were invoking when they committed men and women to the house of
correction as ‘idle, disorderly, and pilfering persons’. In some contexts pilfering had a slightly more spe-
cific meaning—something close to petty larceny. That seems to be the implication of its use in the case
of Giles Hancock, who was charged with shoplifting in 1685. When, at his trial, the prosecutor was
willing to swear only to goods of 9 d. in value, the Sessions Paper reported that ‘the prisoner [was] found
to be a pilferer’ and was convicted of petty larceny (OBSP, December 1685 , p. 2 ). The easy connection
between pilfering and petty larceny in the metropolis helps to explain, and perhaps in contemporary
minds to justify, why so few cases of petty larceny were prosecuted at the Old Bailey or the sessions of the
peace.
(^67) The Bridewell had been established by royal charter under an independent board of governors, un-
like subsequent houses of correction, which were under the authority and direction of magistrates. In the
City, the magistrates committed the accused to the care of the governors. They could also authorize their
subsequent discharge if they chose to do so. But any punishment imposed on each new inmate (as
opposed to their mere incarceration) was decided by the Bridewell court. The governors heard the evi-
dence brought against them by the victim who claimed to have been harmed, and either imposed a term
of work under the direction of the ‘artsmasters’ (generally, beating hemp), ordered them to be ‘punished’
by being whipped, or simply discharged them, their few days or weeks of incarceration being judged to
have been sufficient punishment in itself (see work cited in n. 63 above).