authority to imprison certain convicted offenders in the houses of correction for
terms of up to two years. The statute represented a considerable departure in
penal policy in that it established a serious non-capital punishment for minor
property offences that could be imposed directly by the courts. But it was also
hobbled by the problem that had undermined transportation: the act failed to
provide financial support for local authorities who chose to put it into effect.
The result was that some did, though not without objection from the keepers of
houses of correction, and many others did not.
It was with respect to the use of national resources that the regime established
in 1714 was to make an immense difference—sufficient, indeed, to change the
paradigm upon which the criminal justice system had worked hitherto. The
transportation legislation of 1718 and 1720 not only created a sanction that could
be imposed by the courts on convicted felons, it introduced the significant inno-
vation that the costs of transporting felons from London and on the Home Cir-
cuit would be borne by the national government. The administration also used
its authority to remove other barriers to the implementation of this policy, and
large numbers of minor property offenders, as well as men and women par-
doned from a death penalty, were sent to the American colonies over the next
half century.
The Transportation Acts had been conceived by William Thomson, the
recorder of London and a man who had strong and clear views about dealing
with crime. His was a London policy. In establishing a form of non-capital pun-
ishment that the courts could impose on convicted felons, the transportation
legislation accomplished something that the City authorities had favoured for
decades. They had done so not out ofhostility to capital punishment; indeed, by
ensuring that transportation would be made to work and by including in the
1718 act a term of fourteen years’ banishment as a condition for pardon from a
death sentence, Thomson’s legislation might be said to have supported the ter-
ror of the death penalty since in the past so many of those pardoned had been
allowed simply to go free. A tough attitude towards pardons fitted with the
recorder’s general view of crime-fighting.
On the other hand, over the longer term the establishment of transportation
may well have encouraged the cabinet to exercise mercy with greater freedom
since a term of fourteen years’ banishment provided a serious alternative to cap-
ital punishment. The establishment of an effective conditional punishment that
could be imposed both on men and women, in peacetime as well as during wars,
helps to explain the reduction in the proportion of convicted property offenders
who were executed at Tyburn in the thirty years following 1718 compared to the
sixty years before the passage of the act (Table 10.1). It must be emphasized,
however, that the reduced proportion of men and women being executed did
not alter the central place of capital punishment in the penal system in the first
half of the eighteenth century. Indeed, the number, as opposed to the propor-
tion, of property offenders from the City of London who were executed at472 Conclusionch10.y5 11/6/01 12:06 PM Page 472