frequently. In this he almost certainly echoed the views of a large segment of
London opinion, including the shopkeepers and merchants and tradesmen who
sat on the juries and whose verdicts in large part determined the forms that pun-
ishments would take. The fact that Old Bailey juries took advantage of the
Transportation Act to effect an immediate reduction in the incidence of public
whipping in the City suggests considerable concern among such men of mid-
dling station about the consequences of violent punishments carried out in pub-
lic. If there had been such a concern it seems likely to have been that the brutal
flogging of men and women through the streets was inappropriate in a com-
mercial world that increasingly valued orderliness and civility in human rela-
tionships. More immediately, perhaps, these shopkeepers and tradesmen may
have been dismayed by the way that whippings attracted crowds and inevitably
blocked some of the main streets of the City, encouraged disorderly behaviour,
wasted the time of employees and apprentices, and provided opportunities for
pickpockets and other dangerous persons.
Similar ideas about the even more disruptive consequences of ‘Tyburn Fair’
and the slow procession of the condemned through the metropolis were ex-
pressed in the first half of the eighteenth century by Bernard Mandeville in the
1720 s and Henry Fielding in 1751 —both of whom denounced the carnival at-
mosphere surrounding the procession to Tyburn and at the place of execution
itself—and in Hogarth’s well-known illustration of Tyburn in his Industry and
Idlenessseries.^13 The sharp reduction after 1718 at the Old Bailey in the numbers
of convicted petty thieves ordered to be whipped seems to point to similar views
being expressed by jurors and judges who were by then in a position to select
from a number of penal options. Though whipping was not repudiated, any
more than capital punishment, the frequency with which it was carried out in
the City diminished in the eighteenth century—a consequence of the changing
nature of the metropolis and of a statute that provided an acceptable alternative
sanction.^14
Changes in the punishment of convicted felons, as well as the attempts to en-
courage better surveillance and more active prosecution, reveal a persuasion
that had been emerging since the second quarter of the seventeenth century:
that deterrence by terror, whether that was created by execution or other phys-
ical punishments, did not provide sufficient defence against the kind of crime
that London had come to experience. There was no broad support for the aban-
donment of capital punishment, no diminution as yet in the assumption that
public executions provided the only effective brake on the appetites and pas-
sions of the most depraved men who committed serious crimes. But what was474 Conclusion(^13) Bernard Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn, reprint ed. Malvin
R. Zirker (Los Angeles, 1964 ) 18 – 28 ; Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers,
ed. Malvin R. Zirker (Oxford, 1988 ), 167 – 71.
(^14) For evidence of the further restrictions on public whipping after mid-eighteenth century, see the
work cited in Ch. 9 , n. 61.
ch10.y5 11/6/01 12:06 PM Page 474