Gwenda Morgan

Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1660–1914

Few will fail to be impressed by the scope of Drew D. Gray’s new book but how they will use it is debateable. The author describes it as a textbook and doubtless students will find it useful as a r...

American Revolution, The

This article is a revision of the previous article by W.P. Adams, volume 1, pp. 430–434,

Arson, Treason and Plot: Britain, America and the Law, 1770-1777

The problems of arson, treason and national security became entangled in the politics of Britain and its Atlantic empire between 1770 and 1777. Fears of French military terrorism were compounded by the increasingly violent resistance of the American colonies. Two dockyard fires in Portsmouth, in 1770 and 1777, and the attack on, and burning of, the royal navy ship Gaspee off Rhode Island in 1772, provoked both legal and political difficulties for the British government. New laws on arson and treason were passed yet proved almost impossible to implement in full outside England.

Flight, Escape and Return

When John Poulter and an accomplice held up a post-chaise belonging to Dr William Hancock on Claverton Down near Bath one Wednesday evening in March 1753, he set in motion a chain of events which led not only to his own execution and a nationwide hunt for his former accomplices, but also to the publication of The Discoveries of John Poulter, alias Baxter, one of the best-known and most remarkable of eighteenthcentury criminal biographies1 The Discoveries of John Poulter, alias Baxter purported to reveal, as nothing had before, the existence of a complex network of professional criminals who operated at will across the length and breadth of England. Published by the same West Country printer as An Apology for the Life of Bamfylde Moore Carew, Poulter’s Discoveries catered to the seemingly insatiable public appetite for criminal narratives. In notices placed in the Bristol and London press in January and February 1754, Robert Goadby informed the reading public that Poulter was ‘expected to receive a pardon on account of the great discoveries he has made’ and that, though the press had been kept constantly busy, he was unable to satisfy the demand for orders. He promised a ‘proper supply for the future’.2

Pedlars in the Outports: Transportation, the Locality and the Atlantic

The varying willingness to adopt transportation as a regular part of the armoury of punishment is most apparent at the county level, where local magistrates responded to the 1718 Act with everything from apparent enthusiasm to complete indifference. While transportation had figured in the seventeenth century as both a political means of dealing with rebellion, and a judicial method of disposing of those reprieved from the gallows, it is unclear to what extent it had been adopted by county authorities before 1718. Transportation of criminals was not new in the eighteenth century, for many individual felons reprieved from the gallows had been transported before 1700. Banishment, together with forms of enslavement and hard labour, had been part of the armoury of penalties directed at rogues and vagabonds by sixteenthcentury laws. By the 1590s, after nearly half a century of legislative measures against the uncontrollable poor, ‘masterless men’, gypsies and vagrants, the final Elizabethan vagrancy statute made transportation a key punishment. The death penalty was still a possibility for gypsies and vagabonds, if they were persistent offenders.1 With regard to criminals, the initiative was taken by James I who in 1615 gave judges discretion to reprieve felons on condition that they were employed ‘in foreign discoveries or other services beyond the seas’.

Cities, Regions and their Criminals

The early eighteenth century was not a period devoted to the collection and publication of statistics on matters of social concern such as crime. Most efforts were, and remained, private, and commentators were frequently more concerned with economic or trade data than crime. State information on criminal matters, by contrast was confined to records of individual cases and their progress. No one attempted to bring together the scattered decisions of the different courts of all the counties into a national picture of crime and punishment in the whole country. Even when this was attempted, at the start of the nineteenth century, the record of convict transportation for the previous ninety years was incomplete. This was because only capital charges at the assizes were included in the survey for all the years of the eighteenth century, and, although reprieves from execution were counted, the consequent sentences were not. Only for the early nineteenth century were transportations included.1 Some numbers did emerge at the time of the American Revolution when, with transportation blocked, official attention was directed to calculating the number of convicts who would have to be accommodated in the alternatives of the prison hulks or the proposed national penitentiary.

Panics and Recriminations: Convergence and Divergence and the Criminal Atlantic

It is clear that convict transportation after 1718 involved a massive effort by the authorities in both England and the colonies. The London government maintained expensive subsidies for shipping felons, and local counties and regions entered into similar, often long-term, arrangements. Equally important were the common interest in criminals which this trade generated, and the exchange of news and cultural representations associated with it. The overall impact on both societies, however, is difficult to gauge. As Bailyn writes, ‘how deeply the experience of transportation entered into the consciousness of eighteenthcentury Britons and into the fabric of British society and culture can only be surmised, but the evidence of a profound impact abounds’. As we have seen, the visible evidence of ‘coffles of manacled prisoners marching through the early-morning streets of London to the Thames or across the English countryside to pens in harbour prisons to await shipment’, reports of the transatlantic voyages and accounts of the conditions of work in the ‘plantations’, indeed the imagery of virtual slavery in the colonies, were all deeply embedded in popular consciousness.1

Introduction: the Formation of the Criminal Atlantic

In August 1752, a performance of The Beggar’s Opera was advertised at the New Theatre, Upper Marlborough, by the Company of Comedians from Annapolis, capital of Maryland. Whether there were many convicts eager to be in the audience in what one visitor noted as a ‘tobaccohouse’, is not recorded, but there is a certain irony in the fact that England’s best-known dramatic representation of criminals was going to be performed in the colony with the highest proportion of transported convicts in its population. This was not uncommon, for Gay’s musical play provided one of the most popular entertainments in the colonies, in Virginia as well Maryland.1 If British felons did attend, they would only have become prouder of their criminal professions than before, at least so Daniel Defoe asserted (a remark one writer describes as ‘pretty rich from the author of Moll Flanders’).2 In England, according to apocryphal stories, youthful highwaymen were arrested in London with copies of The Beggar’s Opera in their pockets, and so influential was the live performance that one seventeen-year-old is supposed to have left the play and immediately spent his last guinea on a brace of pistols in order to emulate his stage hero, the gentlemanhighwayman MacHeath.3

Gangs, Gentlemen and Gypsies: Narratives of Transportation

In August 1752 the Maryland Gazette carried a report from Bristol concerning the movement of convicts to Bideford for shipment: Last Monday morning a great number of People resorted before Newgate, to see the 11 transports carried away for Bideford. Ten of the Prisoners were mounted two upon a Horse chain’d. People were chiefly concerned to see [Daniel] Bishop who had murdered his sweetheart. They rode them through the crowd who yelled at him and he back etc. They threw dirt and stones at him. This was part of a much larger story of Daniel Bishop which had run through the west-country papers for more than a year. He had been arrested in March 1751 on suspicion of murdering his fiancee Winifred Jones, who had disappeared. She had last been seen quarrelling with him and pleading with him not to hit her, when, observers reported, he had said ‘You B—h of Destruction, I’ll use you worse, and kill you this Night’. When her body was later found in a ditch near the river, she had clearly been physically attacked before her death, and Bishop was charged, tried and convicted of murder. However, the newspapers were not entirely unsympathetic, and there was a plea for further information, particularly from Winifred’s letters-writer, apparently to provide evidence for appeal.

Emancipation studies: The demise of slavery in Pennsylvania and New York

Freedom By Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. By GARY B. NASH and JEAN R. SODERLUND. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. xvi, 249 pp. £20. Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New YorkCity, 1770–1810. By SHANE WHITE. Athens, Ga. and London: University of Georgia Press, 1991. xviii, 278 pp.