A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

sympathy of the London poor. In the Victorian age, even the common burglar had become an
alarming, half-mythical creature - due largely to Dickens’s portrait of Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist.
The criminal had become ‘alienated’ from society, and society regarded him as a dangerous
outcast.
Yet the crimes of the eighteenth century were worse than anything the Victorians had to endure. In
the summer of 1751, a farmer named Porter, who lived near Pulford, in Cheshire, engaged some
Irish labourers to help with the harvest. One August evening, there was a crash at the door as
someone tried to force his way in; the farmer evidently kept it locked as a precaution. Five Irishmen
smashed their way into the house, grabbed the farmer and his wife - who were sitting at supper -
and tied them up. Porter was ordered to reveal the whereabouts of his cash box, and tried delaying
tactics; at this the gang threatened to torture them both. A daughter who had been listening outside
the door now rushed into the room, flung herself on her knees, and begged for her father’s life; she
was also tied up and threatened. She gave way, and told the gang where the valuables were kept.
The youngest daughter, a girl of thirteen, had hidden herself; now she escaped out of the rear door,
tiptoed to the stable, led out a horse and rode across the fields to the village. She went to the house
of her brother and told him what was happening. The brother and a friend armed themselves -
probably with knives and hatchets - and hurried to the farm. A man was on watch; they managed to
approach so quietly that he was taken unawares, and promptly killed. Then they rushed into the
parlour, and found the four men holding the farmer - who was naked - and trying to force him to sit
on the fire to reveal where he kept his savings. One robber was promptly knocked senseless; the
other three fled through the window. The rescuers organised a pursuit, and caught up with two of
the robbers on Chester bridge; another man, the ringleader, was caught on a ship at Liverpool. All
four men were tried and sentenced to death, but the sentence of the youngest was commuted to
transportation for life. The ringleader, Stanley, managed to escape on the eve of his execution. On
25 May 1752, the other two - named M’Canelly and Morgan - were hanged, ‘their behaviour
[being] as decent as could be expected from people of their station’.
This kind of house storming was commonplace during the crime wave of the eighteenth century.
The robbers organised themselves like military units. A house that was to be attacked was watched
for days until the gang knew when they could burst in, and when they were likeliest to be safe from
interruption. Stealth and skill were unnecessary in the actual operation; it was conducted like a
siege of a town. The M’Canelly and Morgan case shows that the burglars of the mid-eighteenth
century had already discovered a method of torture that became common in France at the time of
the Revolution - when the robbers were known as chauffeurs - warmers. (Professional drivers were
later called chauffeurs because the earliest cars were steam driven, so that the driver was literally a
stoker, or ‘fireman’.) We have seen that the streets of London were unsafe even by day; footpads
operated openly in all the parks and open spaces, while highwaymen waited in every wood and
thicket along every main road.
In the year after the execution of M’Canelly and Morgan, the novelist Henry Fielding, who had
been a magistrate for thirteen years, declared that he could halt the London crime wave if the
treasury would place £600 at his disposal. The secretary of state took him up on his offer. Fielding
was a magistrate at Bow Street, so the force he created became known as the Bow Street Runners.
Their job was simply to patrol central London, get to know the gangs - who had become
accustomed to operating quite openly - and try to catch them in the act. Good intelligence work was
more important than actual detection, because ever since the Elizabethan age, London’s thieves and
criminals had behaved as if they were one of the medieval guilds. During the reign of Queen Anne,