A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

the city marshal of London, a man named Charles Hitchin, was a notorious transvestite and
sodomite who acted as a receiver of stolen goods and blackmailed thieves for sexual favours. When
a bucklemaker named Jonathan Wild, who had spent four years in prison for debt, regained his
freedom in 1714, he decided to model himself on Hitchin, and was soon the most prosperous
receiver of stolen goods in London. When a thief stole a watch he came straight to Wild. So did the
watch’s owner. For a sum of money, the watch was restored, and Wild and the thief split the fee.
No one complained because the victims were glad to get back their property. Thieves who refused
to co-operate were sent to the gallows. Wild prospered for ten years, but in 1725 - the year
Catherine Hayes was burned - he was arrested on a minor charge of assisting a thief to escape. The
authorities succeeded in convicting him on another minor charge - restoring stolen goods without
prosecuting the thief - and he was hanged on 24 May 1725. Fielding wrote his first novel about
Wild. And he also saw clearly that the London crime network could be smashed by anyone who
took the trouble to get to know the thieves. This is what the Bow Street Runners did, and the
criminals had become so accustomed to immunity that they were captured by the dozen. Fielding
says he had the immense satisfaction of reading the morning papers, and watching the reports about
murders and street robberies diminish day by day until they ceased altogether. He had only used a
half of the £600 voted by the government.
Highway robbery proved just as easy to halt. All that was needed was the equivalent of the modern
patrol car on the lonely roads around London - a heavily armed policeman on horseback. When the
highwaymen and burglars knew they might be interrupted at any moment, they moved to remoter
parts. Since England had never been policed before, the introduction of the patrols caused
widespread alarm in the criminal fraternity and crime fell dramatically.
Naturally, this could not last. The old gangs were replaced by new ones who employed new
methods and tried not to advertise their operations. This was the first major step towards the
‘alienation’ of the criminal. He had to employ more stealth and cunning, to develop the arts of a fox
raiding a chicken farm. When Henry Fielding’s blind brother John took over his job at Bow Street,
he had to do the work all over again - hang dozens of highwaymen and housebreakers, and send
hundreds of pickpockets and petty thieves to prison. Fielding tried some famous cases, yet in few of
these are the crimes themselves of any interest. A clergyman named Dr Dodd forged a bond for
£4,200 and was hanged; another clergyman, the Rev. James Hackman, shot a woman he adored
(the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich) in a fit of hysterical jealousy, and was hanged. And an
unprepossessing and sadistic old woman named Sarah Metyard was charged with killing two girls
who had been sent to her from the workhouse to learn to be seamstresses. It is not clear whether
Sarah Metyard was merely evil-tempered, or whether she derived sexual pleasure from ill-treating
the many girls who became her apprentices, but she beat one girl so badly, after an attempt to run
away, that the child died; the other girls were told she had had a fit. The girl’s sister was suspicious,
so she was murdered. Sarah Metyard cut up the bodies when they began to decay, and dumped
them in a sewer, with the aid of her daughter. A coroner who saw the remains thought they were
bodies from a churchyard that had been dissected by a surgeon. Then the daughter became the
mistress of a man called Rooker, and Mrs Metyard began to cause disturbances at his house in
Baling. The daughter told her lover about the murders, and he told the authorities, assuming that the
daughter would not be indicted, since she was under age at the time. He was mistaken, and both
women were hanged.
But the Fieldings died, and no magistrates of comparable energy took their place. The eighteenthcentury
crime wave continued unabated.