The numbers convicted for offences in the City fell noticeably over the course
of this period. Indeed, two-thirds of City property offenders hanged between
1714 and the mid-century were executed in the first fifteen years, when rob-
beries and gang violence were thought to be at their height.^90 In the 1730 s and
1740 s the number of City offenders fell away more sharply than the overall met-
ropolitan total. It is possible that that owed something to the improvements in
the watch and lighting in the City in this period, one effect of which may have
been to discourage the most dangerous forms of street crime that typically
brought men, if not women, to the gallows. That can only be speculation. What
is clear is that the gallows at Tyburn provide further evidence of the way the
City’s place in the larger metropolis was changing in the second quarter of the
century.
As we have seen in previous periods, annual averages disguise significant fluc-
tuations in executions. That was no less true of the decades after 1714. Reports
in the Gentleman’s Magazineand the London Magazine, for example, suggest that
while an average of six men and women were hanged together on each execu-
tion day between 1731 (when their evidence first becomes available) and 1750 ,
the number ranged widely: indeed, the number of hangings on the days of
‘Tyburn Fair’ ranged between one and as many as twenty-one. On twenty-three
hanging days over the two decades 1731 – 50 no more than one or two men and
women were put to death on the gallows; on an equal number of hanging days,
ten or more were put to death together. Annual totals similarly fluctuated
widely, ranging between a low of eighteen (in 1743 , in the midst of the War of
Austrian Succession) and sixty-three (in 1750 , in the crime crisis that followed
the peace).^91 It was very clear in mid-century London that, while the terror of
the gallows might have it limits, hanging remained the principal resource
against dangerous offenders and the principal means by which the state demon-
strated the power of the law—‘unsheathing the sword of justice’, as judges and
magistrates never tired of repeating.
How the message of the gallows was framed depended on the number of cap-
ital offenders charged and convicted at each session of the Old Bailey and the
number ordered to be hanged by the cabinet. At every stage of the criminal
process, from prosecution to verdict to the pardon deliberations, discretionary
judgments came into play that could easily increase or diminish the number of
men and women condemned to be hanged at Tyburn. Those judgments were
influenced by the level of prosecutions, not merely because more defendants
meant an increase in the number of men and women being condemned, but
William Thomson and Transportation 459(^90) There was a particularly high rate of confirmation of death sentences by the cabinet and lords just-
ices in the years 1720 – 2 and after several sessions in later years in the decade. After the September 1720
sessions, for example, four out of five condemned were left to be hanged, and in the following month, all
nine of the defendants reported by the deputy recorder (from the City and Middlesex together) were or-
dered to be hanged (SP 44 / 284 , 20 October 1720 ).
(^91) These annual totals are based on mayoral years (December–December).