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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 30.4 (2000) 617-634



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A Predatory Social Structure:
Informers in Westminster, 1737-1741

Jessica Warner, Frank Ivis, and Andrée Demers *

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This research note has two purposes. It examines how the Gin Act of 1736 helped create a predatory social structure in Westminster, and it illustrates how social network analysis can be used to uncover links between individuals in past communities. Informers played a central role in the legal system of early modern England. In the absence of prosecutions initiated and financed by the state, informers were employed to help enforce a variety of unpopular laws, receiving, in most instances, direct compensation from the individuals whom they successfully prosecuted. Since the late medieval period, they had been involved in the prosecution of various economic offenses, and in the last decade of the seventeenth and first three decades of the eighteenth centuries, they were also widely used by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners. Shrouded in secrecy by their very nature, the operations of informers have gone largely unstudied. The Gin Act of 1736, however, brought them under heavy scrutiny, both in the press and among the justiciary, thus affording a rare opportunity to see how they affected the community on which they preyed. 1 [End Page 617]

Contemporary newspapers and pamphlets mention the existence of a particular "gang" of informers that operated in and around London between 1736 and 1742; prosecutions from this period provide further evidence for links among informers. The latter records reveal certain individuals alternating in dyads and triads in the prosecution of retailers in violation of the Gin Act of 1736. This phenomenon suggests the presence of a social network. 2

Although social network analysis can uncover links among informers, the results of this study are based on limited and incomplete data; they can only hint at a full depiction of the informers. Tentative as they are, however, the results represent a foray into a new area of legal and social history. They underscore the need for further research into the connections among informers and individual magistrates.

Informers were generally reviled because they undermined the trust and solidarity that held the larger community together. In the case of the Gin Act of 1736, informers committed the additional transgression of undermining the sanctity of the public houses and other drinking establishments where members of the community reaffirmed existing alliances and forged new ones.

Background

The informers in our sample responded to inducements contained in the Gin Acts of 1736, 1737, and 1738. Just three weeks after the Gin Act of 1736 became law, it was reported that there were already "upwards of twenty Informers about Town, who make it their sole Business to give Informations against Persons who presume to sell spirituous Liquors contrary [End Page 618] to the late Act." Prosecutions under the Gin Act of 1736 were sufficiently numerous at this juncture to provoke scattered attacks against informers and their agents--most notably, excisemen and constables. But not until the commissioners of Excise were mandated to reward informers whose victims refused to do so themselves did large numbers of informers enter the field. This development coincided with the enactment of a new Gin Act in June 1737. 3

The informers rewarded by the three Gin Acts appear to have enjoyed the full support of the central government through March 1738. At that time, the Privy Council directed local magistrates to protect both informers and constables from "diverse disorderly and Malicious Persons [who] have lately within the City of Westminster and the Liberty thereof and in other Parts of the Realm in a Tumultuous and Riotous Manner Assembled themselves at various times to Rescue Offenders against the said Law and to Insult and Abuse those who have been Concerned in bringing them to Justice." Less than five months later, however, the Privy Council was urging the justices of Middlesex "to prevent the great Abuses and Perjuries committed by Informers against the supposed Retailers of Spirituous Liquors." 4

Official support for the informers...

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