Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750. Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror.

Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750. Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror. By J.M. Beattie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xx plus 491 pp. $74).

John Beattie's magisterial Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800 (Oxford, 1986) was the first major monograph to arise from the vigorous research culture which developed around the study of crime and criminal justice in early modern England during the 1970s and 80s. This, his second, equally magisterial work on this theme builds upon his earlier study but also offers fresh perspectives. It is compulsory reading for all students of early modern English criminal justice, has much to offer students of urban society, sheds interesting light on the history of women and, finally, provides some unexpected insights into mainstream politics and government.

Crime and the Courts persuasively established two major claims. First, that trial and penal practice underwent significant development throughout the period 1660-1800: change was underway long before the dawning of the 'age of reform'. Secondly, that although the character of and motives for these changes are difficult to recover from printed sources before about 1780, nonetheless it is possible, through arduous work on official records, not merely to reconstruct patterns of change but also to speculate persuasively about their causes. Beattie interpreted many of the developments that he recorded as the outcome of efforts by practical men to cope with problems arising from both social change and the effects of previous administrative decisions, against a background of changing values. In this way, he shed a flood of light not only upon his immediate subject matter but also upon the character of late seventeenth and eighteenth-century English governance.

This second study delves more deeply into the first part of the period covered in the earlier study: that hardest to reconstruct from surviving sources and, consequently, least well charted. Whereas the earlier book drew especially on criminal records from Sussex and Surrey--counties chosen because they spanned rural and urban regions--this study focusses on the City of London. This shift of focus reflects a conclusion drawn in the first study: that perceptions of urban and especially metropolitan crime provided the main driving force behind changes in criminal justice until the final decades of the eighteenth century.

Perhaps 10% of England's population lived in the metropolis in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Beattie perhaps insufficiently emphasises, the region loomed still larger as a centre of criminal prosecution. Metropolitan problems moreover attracted especially close attention, both because this was the seat of government, and because, by virtue of their office, all active MPs were resident there for some part of each parliamentary session. Initially, attention focussed especially on the City: because that remained the chief residential district, but also because of the density and vigour of its governmental structures. As Beattie demonstrates, large numbers of householders played a part in both the policing and other aspects of the administration of City wards and parishes. They had opportunities to transmit their concerns upwards to the powerful Court of Aldermen--many of whom, in their capacity as magistrates, had their own experience of dealing with crime. Beattie convincingly argues that much of the new criminal legislation of this period had its origins in metropolitan and especially City concerns: about the perceived growth of such crimes as shoplifting, theft by servants and street robbery, and the inadequacy of existing policing and penal resources for dealing with these developments. From the 1720s and 30s, the picture began to change: the growth of Westminster encouraged more creative activity on the part of Westminster residents, along with moves by government to build special relationships with Westminster magistrates. The scene was set for the emergence of the Fielding brothers' Bow Street office as a centre of innovation.

As in his previous, so in the present volume Beattie is much concerned with stressing the extent of considered, pragmatic innovation long before 'reform' became a watchword. He identifies the years 1690 to 1720 as years of especially vigorous experimentation. In the 1720s and 30s, many earlier changes were formalised or made routine, setting a mold which would itself later be broken. In contrast to the previous volume, Beattie here devotes much attention to policing: to the wide variety of agencies--watchmen, constables, beadles, marshals, thieftakers--who carried out tasks that would subsequently be concentrated in the hands of salaried police forces. As ever, the scale and quality of the research he has carried out on intractable material is extremely impressive. He charts the decline of the nightwatch as a citizen body, in the context of growing acceptance that its tasks should be discharged by paid watchmen. Paid constables were also on the increase--though the idea that this office might effectively be filled by householders serving their turn would have some purchase for a while yet. Thieftakers had long acted to recover stolen goods; Beattie argues that a series of legislative changes helped to steer them rather towards seeking rewards for prosecuting crime: another aspect of what we might very loosely term the professionalisation of policing. At higher levels, aldermen became increasingly disinclined to act as magistrates--but this development was reversed when their traditional responsibilities were formalised in a new way: from the 1730s they took it in turns to man an office rigged up in the form of a courtroom. In later chapters, Beattie elaborates and deepens the account he has previously given of creative experimentation with new forms of 'secondary punishment' (alternatives to capital punishment), culminating with the establishment of statutory transportation in 1718. He charts the growth of cabinet involvement in determining the fates of metropolitan capital convicts after 1689, and, especially after 1714, the government's growing role in organising and financing the prosecution of crime: a development whose unintended effect was to encourage the emergence of defence attorneys.

Beattie shows that some patterns that were established later in the eighteenth century did not apply in these earlier years. Whereas during eighteenth-century wars, prosecutions for crime dropped away, in the 1690s they increased--perhaps, he suggests, because of extreme economic disruption. In the eighteenth century, innovations in policing and punishment often clustered at the ends of wars, when crime rates rose again. In the war years of the early eighteenth century, by contrast, important innovations were associated with low levels of prosecution--perhaps because this very drop was thought to demonstrate the effectiveness of certain measures it was therefore deemed wise to extend. The turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also saw women looming much larger among those prosecuted and convicted in the City than would be the norm there, or elsewhere, later in the eighteenth century. Beattie suggests that this was the result in part of the nature of urban society at this time, but also of certain innovations in the law designed to target a perceived problem of female criminality.

This study reveals much about the management of local affairs within the City, in a period in which they have not been much studied. It sheds intriguing light on changes in urban life. As Beattie indicates from time to time, much of what he has to say could be read as an account of certain previously unstudied effects of the development of a 'polite', 'consumer' society. Worries about theft from shops and theft by servants reflected changes in urban life-styles; the task of policing the night streets was complicated as more people socialised well into the hours of darkness; changing social aspirations made older forms of civic self-government harder to sustain. Beattie also sheds occasional shafts of light on mainstream politics and government: we gain fresh insights into the impact of the 1688 revolution, and of the Hanoverian accession. Isaac Newton makes an unexpected cameo appearance (in his role as Master of the Mint) as the patron of thieftakers combating coining.

This is not a book for beginners: those unfamiliar with the institutions and processes of the period, with its political, social and cultural trends, will find that too much is expected of them. Those with sufficient background knowledge will however find here a lucid and careful exegesis of a complex web of changes. It is probably a book that can be entered at more than one point: cross-references scattered throughout the footnotes point readers towards other sections of discussion that will help them to contextualise particular sections of the analysis. As all the cross-referencing underlines, however, all parts of the analysis constantly interrelate. Ultimately, it is in the book's patient unravelling of interconnections between different forms of change that much of its fascination lies.

Joanna Innes

Somerville College, Oxford