Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (review)

John Beattie’s magisterial Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986) was the first major monograph to arise from the vigorous research culture which developed around the study of crime and criminal justice in early modern England during the 1970s and 80s. This, his second, equally magisterial work on this theme builds upon his earlier study but also offers fresh perspectives. It is compulsory reading for all students of early modern English criminal justice, has much to offer students of urban society, sheds interesting light on the history of women and, finally, provides some unexpected insights into mainstream politics and government.

Crime and the Courts persuasively established two major claims. First, that trial and penal practice underwent significant development throughout the period 1660–1800: change was underway long before the dawning of the ‘age of reform’. Secondly, that although the character of and motives for these changes are difficult to recover from printed sources before about 1780, nonetheless it is possible, through arduous work on official records, not merely to reconstruct patterns of change but also to speculate persuasively about their causes. Beattie interpreted many of the developments that he recorded as the outcome of efforts by practical men to cope with problems arising from both social change and the effects of previous administrative decisions, against a background of changing values. In this way, he shed a flood of light not only upon his immediate subject matter but also upon the character of late seventeenth and eighteenth-century English governance.

This second study delves more deeply into the first part of the period covered in the earlier study: that hardest to reconstruct from surviving sources and, consequently, least well charted. Whereas the earlier book drew especially on criminal records from Sussex and Surrey—counties chosen because they spanned rural and urban regions—this study focusses on the City of London. This shift of focus reflects a conclusion drawn in the first study: that perceptions of urban and especially metropolitan crime provided the main driving force behind changes in criminal justice until the final decades of the eighteenth century.

Perhaps 10% of England’s population lived in the metropolis in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Beattie perhaps insufficiently emphasises, the region loomed still larger as a centre of criminal prosecution. Metropolitan problems moreover attracted especially close attention, both because this was the seat of government, and because, by virtue of their office, all active MPs were resident there for some part of each parliamentary session. Initially, attention focussed especially on the City: because that remained the chief residential district, but also because of the density and vigour of its governmental structures. As Beattie demonstrates, large numbers of householders played a part in both the policing and other aspects of the administration of City wards and parishes. They had opportunities to transmit their concerns upwards to the powerful Court of Aldermen—many of whom, in their capacity as magistrates, had their own experience of dealing with crime. Beattie convincingly argues that much of the new criminal legislation of this period had its origins in metropolitan and especially City concerns: about the perceived growth of such crimes as shoplifting, theft by servants and street robbery, and the inadequacy of existing policing and penal resources for dealing with these developments. From the 1720s and 30s, the picture began to change: the growth of Westminster encouraged more creative activity on the part of Westminster residents, along with moves by government to build special relationships with Westminster magistrates. The scene was set for the emergence of the Fielding brothers’ Bow Street office as a centre of innovation.

As in his previous, so in the present volume Beattie is much concerned with stressing the extent of considered, pragmatic innovation long before ‘reform’ became a watchword. He identifies the years 1690 to 1720 as years of especially vigorous experimentation. In the 1720s and 30s...