Property Offending in the City of London

Abstract

At half past eight on an April evening in 1784 Samuel West was walking in the east of the City of London, close to the borders of Whitechapel. As he turned to a corner a man armed with a drawn sword confronted him and demanded his money. As West pleaded for his life two other robbers came up and rifled his pockets, removing his gold watch, chain and carnelian seal. West called for help, and a nearby patrolman — James Gabetus — arrived as the gang attempted to escape. After a desperate struggle, which required the help of several policing agents, two members of the gang were arrested. They appeared before the alderman at Guildhall and were committed to take their trial at Old Bailey. On the 21 April Joseph Hawes and James Hawkins were found guilty of highway robbery and were sentenced to death.¹ This case and its outcome conform to a widely held view of the eighteenth-century criminal justice system. The courts were concerned with property crime and the archetypal offender in this period was the highway robber. The fate that awaited those highwaymen that were unfortunate enough to be caught was death, and so determined attempts to resist arrest were common. However this view can obfuscate the reality of most property crime in the Hanoverian period. Many thieves avoided ‘dancing the Tyburn gig’ and most property crime never reached a jury trial at all.² A concentration on the trials conducted at Old Bailey, and the executions of felons at Tyburn and outside the debtor’s door of Newgate, has in some ways created a false impression of property offending and its prosecution in the long eighteenth century.