A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

crimes to obtain money for drugs in our own society. Theft became so common that, in 1699, a
particularly savage act was passed that made almost any theft punishable by hanging, provided the
goods were worth more than five shillings. At the same time, anyone who helped to secure the
apprehension of a thief could obtain various tax exemptions and rewards. The measures were
desperate; but so was the situation. Quite suddenly, England was virtually in a state of war with
criminals. The diarist Narcissus Luttrell mentions an endless series of highway robberies and
similar crimes. On one Saturday in 1693, a highwayman named Whitney had been arrested after
resisting for an hour, and another highwayman was arrested in St Martin’s Church. A gang of seven
broke into Lady Reresby’s house in Gerard Street, tied her and her family up and then rifled the
house. Three coaches were robbed coming from Epsom, and three rowdies had caused an affray in
Holborn, broken windows and run a watchman through with a sword, leaving it in his body. The
invasion of houses by robber gangs had become as common as it was before the Black Death. A
few years later, the famous robber Dick Turpin - whose exploits were far less romantic than his
legend - led a gang that specialised in breaking into country houses, torturing the householders to
force them to disclose valuables and raping any maids. Turpin’s fame rested on the flamboyant
manner of his death, bowing and waving to the mob from his cart, and finally voluntarily leaping
from the gallows ladder.
All this makes an interesting contrast with crime in the age of Queen Elizabeth. It had been just as
widespread, but far less serious. London was then full of thieves and confidence men (known as
‘cony catchers’, a cony being a rabbit). The thieves used to meet once a week in the house of their
leader, who also happened to be the brother-in-law of the hangman; there, like an alderman’s
meeting, they discussed ‘prospects’ and exchanged information. In contemporary descriptions
(Robert Greene wrote several pamphlets about it), the London criminal scene in the time of
Elizabeth sounds rather like Damon Runyan’s New York, deplorable but fairly good-natured. A
century later, this had changed. Highwaymen infested the country roads, burglars operated in the
towns, and women and children appeared as frequently in the courts as men. Children were trained
as pickpockets, and were also sent out to earn gin money by prostitution - the novelist Henry
Fielding, who became a magistrate in 1740, wrote of the large number of children ‘eaten up with
the foul distemper’. The government’s reaction was to execute almost every offender who appeared
in court. In 1722, a gang of Hampshire poachers had murdered a keeper who had interrupted them;
they had blackened their faces so as to be less visible in the dark. Landowners in the Waltham area
(where it took place) were so alarmed that the government was prevailed upon to pass an act - the
‘Waltham Black Act’ - which enabled almost any poacher to be hanged. (If the act had been in
existence when Shakespeare was arrested for poaching from Sir Thomas Lucy, his works would
have remained unwritten.) The act included a list of more than three hundred other offences -
including catching rabbits - for which a man could be hanged.
Yet these measures had no effect on the rising crime rate. It could hardly be expected to when a
large proportion of the population was permanently drunk. Henry Fielding reckoned that a hundred
thousand people in London alone lived mainly on gin. Another observer stood outside a gin palace
for three hours one evening and counted 1,411 people going in and out. These ‘palaces’ usually
consisted of a shed, full of barrels of gin; the customers merely came to buy a pennyworth of gin,
which explains the enormous number. Whole families, including, father, mother and children then
sat on the pavement and drank themselves unconscious; with gin at a penny at quart, it was not
difficult. The artist William Hogarth engraved two famous pictures, ‘Beer Street’ and ‘Gin Lane’,
to expose the evil. In Beer Street, a lot of jolly-looking men and women are drinking outside a
tavern and obviously engaging in intelligent political discussion (there is a copy of the king’s