conscience. It puts [men] upon stealing to satisfy their lusts.’^188 And George
Delacore, who had given the ordinary an account of his sinful life, also claimed
to have been ‘led away’ in the first place ‘by a lewd woman’.^189 Young men in-
variably appear in these accounts as unwitting victims of women ‘who pick up
and corrupt the youth’ and lead some to ‘utter ruin’.^190 Like Jane Wells, exe-
cuted in 1713 for theft from a house, women were blamed for ‘doing much Mis-
chief in the World by... debauching young Men’.^191 They were blamed for
exercising a power of temptation difficult to resist, a point that condemned men
clearly found it convenient to confirm. ‘Lewd Women abound, to the great
Scandal of good people’, the author of Hanging, Not Punishment Enoughcon-
cluded, ‘and I fear, They are very often the chief Causes, that... Men Murther,
Plunder, Rob and Steal.’^192
These denunciations of so-called ‘vitious women’ had wider implications and
consequences than we have considered so far, for they derive from a much
broader set of attitudes towards women. They drew on a deeply rooted patri-
archal anxiety about the irresistible sexual power and danger of women, particu-
larly of unmarried women who could be seen as living independently of fathers
or husbands or masters—women who were ‘loose’ in more than one sense of the
word. Large numbers of such women were visible in the capital in the difficult
years at the end of the seventeenth century, when there were insistent com-
plaints about the number of beggars and vagrants on the streets of London.
Their independence was as much an issue—though not articulated as such—as
the related matter of their prostitution and the deleterious effect their sexual
commerce would have on the morals and behaviour of young men. They
behaved in a way that outraged men, and that was linked to the growing insub-
ordination of the poor. They were the women whom recorder Jeffreys had in
mind when, in ordering public whippings for a group of women convicted of
petty larceny at the Old Bailey, he chastised them as having ‘the impudence to
smoke Tobacco, and gustle in Ale-houses’.^193 The condemnation of ‘loose
women’ by grand jurors and demands that they be brought under control as the
number of prosecutions for property offences mounted steadily in the last
decade of the century are testimony to the anxiety that the independence of
women could create in the city.
Women were thus implicated in the thefts and robberies committed by men.
But another aspect of female criminality even more directly increased the64 Introduction: The Crime Problem(^188) The Behaviour, Confession and Last Dying Speech of the Criminals that were Executed at Tyburn on Wednesday
28 February 1694.
(^189) The Behaviour, Confession, and Last Dying Speeches of the Criminals that were Executed at Tyburn 23 October 1689.
(^190) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, October 1694. (^191) Ordinary’s Account, September 1713.
(^192) Hanging, Not Punishment Enough, 24. It was for this reason that a man—who did not give his name—
advised a secretary of state after the Restoration to obtain a law that would make castration the penalty
for theft and robbery. A man so emasculated, in his view, would neither have the courage nor the need
to steal (SP 29 / 51 / 44 ).
(^193) An Exact Account of the Trials... at the Old-Bailey... Decemb. 11 , 1678 , 35.
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