Introduction

In the late autumn of 1762, Robert Munro was admitted to St George’s Hospital, ‘very Melancholy & dejected’. He was disappointed in his search for work, owed money to a great many and had recently undergone an unsuccessful salivation to cure his venereal disease at the Lock Hospital. His head throbbed with pain. But in his despair, the event that finally drove him over the edge was the casual cruelty of his fellow patients, who ‘told him Fielding was after him’. Munro asked a hospital porter, Roderick McKinnon, if he had spotted Justice John Fielding on the wards, and in response McKinnon advised him that he ‘had better think of his maker’. In the early hours of the next morning, Robert Munro took a razor and cut his own throat. He died six hours later. The subsequent coroners’ inquest found that he had, ‘Cut his throat being a Lunatick’. However, in the hard decades of the 1760s and 1770s, many Londoners must have felt the rising despair that moved Munro’s hand.

The second half of the eighteenth century saw a dramatic decline in real wages for working Londoners (Figure 5.1). From a high point in 1744, wages for bricklayers and carpenters, for example, fell 38 per cent by the end of the century. Much of this decline was concentrated in the period between 1761 and 1774, during which real wages fell by 24 per cent for these same occupations. In part, this was the result of harvest failure and rising food costs, and it was national in scope. The years 1767 and1768 and the winter of 1775/6 all witnessed extreme weather events that affected the harvest and the cost of living. However, these climatic phenomena were essentially temporary in character, and the fall in real wages was exacerbated in London by a growing labour supply fed by in-migration, particularly following demobilisation at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, and the fact London employers sought to lower their costs in order to respond to new competition from manufacturers operating in the North and overseas. With employers reducing their wages and introducing new working practices, plebeian Londoners found themselves squeezed between lower incomes and periodic sharp increases in the cost of living.

Introduction

On Saturday 18 November 1750, Westminster Bridge was opened to the public for the first time. By linking Westminster to Southwark, it changed the character of the metropolis and laid the foundation for rapid expansion south of the river. Built of Portland stone in a plain neoclassical style, it was ‘allowed by Judges of Architecture to be one of the grandest Bridges in the World’. That night a procession crossed the new bridge with ‘Trumpets, Kettle-Drums, &c. with Guns firing during the Ceremony’. And on Sunday, ‘Westminster was all Day like a Fair, with People going to view the Bridge and walk over it’. With twelve new salaried watchmen and thirty-two street lights, the bridge set the tone and style for a fifty-year period of civic building in the capital that would include many of the city’s prisons and lock-ups, court houses and workhouses. And while ‘The Pickpockets made a fine Market of it, and many People lost their Money and Watches’, the bridge symbolised a new and more orderly London. But it also reinforced the sometimes brutal character of the systems of justice and social care that governed the lives of London’s working people. It became one of the specific and peculiar places where small crimes were made capital under statute law. Westminster Bridge joined the ‘bloody code’: ‘Persons wilfully and maliciously destroying or damaging the said Bridge … shall suffer Death as Felons without Benefit of Clergy.’ New and old architecture, new and old systems of police and punishment, new and old conceptions of community and social obligation jostled cheek by jowl in the 1750s, pitting innovation against social cohesion and resulting in growing conflict.

Thomas Limpus

Thomas Limpus was born into modest circumstances on 23 July 1760, to parents who frequently relied on the parish to make ends meet. He shared his fourteenth Christmas with a rag-tag collection of twenty-five boys and men from eight years old to eighty in a mixed men’s ward at St Martin in the Fields workhouse. For those few weeks he was a member of the ‘workhouse family’ and celebrated the most important ritual of the year with its members. But this was only the first of the many temporary and artificial communities he was obliged to join as a result of his encounters with the institutions of poor relief and justice over the next twenty-five years. In 1777, at seventeen years old, he stole a handkerchief and was sentenced to three years hard labour on the hulks; he was also forced to share his food, labour and life with a newly formed group of long-term prisoners.

Within months of his release, now aged twenty, he was once again caught stealing a handkerchief and was held for three months in Tothill Fields Bridewell with a constantly changing population of disorderly vagrants and prostitutes noted for spending their days gambling and retailing dirty jokes. And following an appearance before the Westminster sessions charged with ‘Petit Larceny’, he spent most of the next year in New Prison. In each institution he was forced to engage with a new group of people and new figures of authority, and to develop along with his fellow prisoners strategies for survival in that temporary home. At the same time, and along with his many contemporaries, his recidivism and later direct challenges to the working of those institutions helped to illustrate the failure of the prisons and hulks to eradicate the problems of crime and disorder.

Lives

Thomas Limpus, with whom this book began, spent the 1790s in Australia. While attempts in the previous decade to transport him and others ‘beyond the seas’ – to Africa, revolutionary America, Canada and Honduras – had been stopgap and incompetent measures that collapsed in the face of plebeian resistance and settler opposition, his transportation to Australia was permanent. Sheer distance, combined with military power, limited indigenous opposition and a colonialist agenda that placed a new positive value on his life and labour, ensured that he would stay put. He died on Norfolk Island sometime before 1801.

Many of the other men and women who had stymied the best efforts of the judicial establishment over the course of the 1770s and 1780s also ended their lives in Australia. Robert Sideaway had been first convicted and sentenced to the hulks soon after Thomas Limpus in 1778. Like Limpus, he was later charged with returning from transportation, in his case following a daring escape from Newgate prison dressed in women’s clothes. Despite his counsel’s attempt to secure his release on a technicality, Sideaway was transported on the First Fleet. He went on to establish a successful bakery, and opened Australia’s first theatre in 1796. He died there in 1809. So did Mary Burgess, whom the clerk at the Home Office described as: ‘5 f[oot] 4 in[ches, with] Grey Eyes, Brown hair [and a] Sallow Complexion’. In the spring and summer of 1789, she had been one of the men and women who had publicly challenged the court at the Old Bailey by refusing the royal pardon. Following an escape from her transport ship, the Lady Juliana, the night before it was due to weigh anchor, she spent the next three years selling old clothes in Petticoat Lane before she was finally recaptured. She arrived in Australia on 4 October 1794.

Introduction

In the spring of 1704 the governors of the London Workhouse were confronted by one of the uncomfortable realities generated by a rapidly growing city. Two brothers, Thomas and John Brinnish, had been taken up from the streets and brought before them, where they informed the governors that the churchwarden of their home parish in Bristol had given the brothers three shillings and directed them to the charity of Londoners. Thirty years earlier they would almost certainly have simply been whipped and sent on their way. However, in an increasingly bureaucratic system, the governors first wrote to the keeper of the workhouse at Bristol for more information. In the process, the Brinnish brothers were inducted into a system of vagrant and pauper removal, itself part of an evolving bureaucracy of poor relief and criminal justice that was changing in response to legislation, civic innovation and the actions of the reformation of manners societies. These in turn had been prompted in part by the 1688 Revolution, which led to more frequent meetings of parliament and the growth of voluntary societies seeking reform.

Whether the Brinnish brothers were aware of and consciously took advantage of the new opportunities these innovations accorded the poor is unknown, but by their actions plebeian Londoners both forced the pace of change and took advantage of the new opportunities that arose. Driven by economic hardship, the poor and the criminal brought substantial pressures to bear on the institutions of relief and justice in the 1690s. Both the amount spent relieving poverty and the number of crimes prosecuted rose in the decade after 1688. In the small City parish of St Dionis Backchurch, expenditure peaked in 1694 at £582, a figure that would not be reached again for over four decades, and in the ten years after 1690 expenses averaged £414 per annum. Rising rates of criminal prosecutions reveal a crisis of gender, prompted by the imbalance in migration which saw a large number of young, unmarried women in the metropolis, whose independent status rendered them quickly suspected of theft and sexual immorality. Driven in part by the recruitment of men into the armed forces, prosecutions of women reached historically unprecedented levels.

This book is one facet of a larger project: ‘Plebeian Lives and the Making of Modern London, 1690–1800’. Originally funded by the ESRC (RES-000-23-1217), this project digitised and made searchable some 240,000 pages of manuscript materials reflecting on criminal justice and poor relief in eighteenth-century London. The website, London Lives 1690–1800: Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis, provides access to these materials in combination with fifteen modern data sets created by previous projects. In total London Lives gives direct access to 3.35 million name instances, and allows users to link together records relating to the same individual. In doing so, it makes it possible to trace individual life histories and to assess the role plebeian Londoners played in shaping the development of modern social policy. This book is constructed as a product of that website and largely reflects the results of our research in it.

Since the vast majority of the sources consulted are freely available on the London Lives website, this book is best read online, allowing you to click through directly from the primary sources cited and quoted in the text to transcriptions and images of the original documents. Where possible, we have also linked to modern secondary literature and to printed primary sources, including Google Books and the English Short Title Catalogue for printed primary literature, and to the British Library’s Ethos system for unpublished doctoral theses. With Google Books we have linked to volumes available through ‘Snippet’ or ‘Preview’ functions, but not to those which provide only bibliographical data. With one exception we have restricted links to freely available materials. Where a pay wall makes the materials inaccessible for many or most readers, we have noted our use of the sites, including URLs and a date, but have not provided direct links. The exception to this rule of thumb is journal articles where a secure link could be identified, even when the relevant source was not freely available to all users.

Introduction

The arrival of peace with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, followed by the death of Queen Anne and the controversial accession of George I the following year, fuelled a crisis of law and order that had been brewing for half a decade. While wartime employment had to some extent mitigated the socio-economic difficulties caused by poor harvests, demobilisation set in train a new wave of crime and prosecution. Moreover, the disorder occasioned by the defence of religion and opposition to the Hanoverian succession, dating back to the Sacheverell Riots of 1710, allowed socio-economic grievances to be expressed through riot.

The new Hanoverian monarchy and whig government were not slow to respond to the pressures, not least with legislation including the Riot Act in 1715 and the Transportation Act in 1718. In part, these developments led to the creation of a more powerful central authority that found expression in the whig rule of Walpole and the Robinocracy. However, for poor Londoners, this was also a moment when divisions within the elite over church and politics gave them a voice. The corruption laid bare in the South Sea Bubble provided a new language that could be used to critique aggressive prosecution of crime and oppression of the poor. This politics threw into uneasy alliance the poor and the middling sort men who ran the parishes and sat on juries, setting them at odds with parliament and an increasingly powerful whig elite. But while central government grew in relative power, most new social policies were implemented at the local level. The most important poor law initiative of the period – the Workhouse Test Act of 1723 – was drafted as permissive legislation, leaving the initiative to the parishes, while responses to crime were dominated by the increasingly entrepreneurial activities of informers and thief-takers. For the next few decades, as parliament became more active, the character of change in London was markedly piecemeal, and open to challenge. For the city’s poorest inhabitants, the 1710s and 1720s represented a moment of real, if still circumscribed, agency, in which the divided politics of the parish and the elite gave them a voice.

Introduction

When she stood trial at the Old Bailey for the theft of six pewter plates and an iron bedscrew (used to fasten bedframes together) in October 1736, Grace Powell must have seemed the embodiment of a disorderly Londoner. Recently discharged from St Martin’s workhouse, penniless, recently widowed, drunk and having apparently abandoned her only child, she sought temporary refuge at Samuel Pate’s ‘stand’, or low lodging house in St Giles in the Fields, where for tuppence a night, he ‘entertains Black-shoe-fellows, and sells Drams … the House … full of People, Men and Women, all lie[ing] together in the same Room’. The worse for wear after drinking three or four drams of Pate’s gin, Powell was caught with the iron bedscrew secreted in her petticoats, and when she attempted to escape down the back stairs to the cellar, Martha King watched as Powell ‘dropp’d two Plates upon the Stairs, I saw her pull two more out of her Bosom, and two more she dropped down the Vault’. Despite the clanging pewter, and artfully hidden bedscrew, Grace Powell was acquitted by a sympathetic jury clearly willing to condone at least some types of disorder. They found her not guilty, following a simple plea that she had no ‘Friends but God and my self’. Grace was just one of the 3,805 defendants found not guilty at the Old Bailey in this eighteen-year period, bookmarked by years in which the acquittal rate was over 40 per cent.

With one exceptional year, the 1730s and 1740s were characterised by relative calm and prosperity. The decade after 1729, in particular, witnessed a sustained series of good harvests driven by a unique series of mild winters and warm summers, resulting in high real wages. Acquittal rates at the Old Bailey rose, while prosecutions and committals to Bridewell both slid gradually downward. Marginally fewer convicts were hanged or transported. Following the outbreak of war with Spain in 1739, the years between 1740 and 1748 also saw relatively good conditions. Many young men were drawn into the military, while prices and wages remained steady.

Introduction

During the 1760s and early 1770s, plebeian Londoners nursed an accumulating sense of grievance. Innovations in policing and prosecution placed those suspected of crimes at a growing disadvantage, while new poor relief policies created an ever widening chasm between parish worthies and the dependent poor. Yet through both legal and illegal means, individually and collectively, plebeian Londoners had developed and refined effective tactics for challenging authority. In this febrile context, war with America broke out in 1775, a war whose far-reaching consequences would include not only an ideological crisis over the state of English liberties but also a fundamental renegotiation of social policy in the metropolis. The interruption of criminal transportation caused unprecedented chaos in the penal system and the creation of Britain’s first mass prison population. The hardships suffered by prisoners held for years in buildings designed for short-term incarceration, or in rotting hulks on a stinking Thames, laid the foundations for keenly felt grievances. Thousands of Londoners experienced, for the first time, the pressured boredom of long days spent in powerless proximity with people just like themselves: marked, like the vast majority of criminals, by their youth, poverty and ill-luck. In the process, and despite relatively favourable climatic and economic conditions (except following demobilisation in 1783), new patterns of resistance developed.

This chapter describes these new communities of resistance, solidified through long-term imprisonment and shared suffering following 1776; communities created at a time of intense political debate. It argues that it was the new-lived, and by 1780 widely shared, experience of mass imprisonment that transformed the Gordon Riots from an anti-Catholic protest into an organised proto-revolutionary series of attacks on the prisons of London. The origins of the reconfigured system of criminal justice and poor relief that followed can be found most fully in the experience of plebeian men and women forced into desperate dialogue with judges and turnkeys, overseers and churchwardens.