In a land of increasing wealth, where freedom was paramount and police were absent, property crime was a perennial problem. As far back as 1690 John Locke had asserted that ‘government has no other end but the preservation of property’. Blackstone in 1766 opined that ‘nothing so generally strikes the imagination and engages the affection of mankind as the right of property’. It could equally be said that ‘the greatest offence against property was to have none’.

With no police force and no forensic science service, the only means of deterring crime was through exemplary punishment: whipping, transportation and hanging. In the eighteenth century an already sanguinary system was to get even bloodier. The solution to the problem of how to protect movable property – from handkerchiefs to stallions – propounded by such luminaries as Archdeacon Paley was to impose the death penalty for a myriad of offences, including such trivial ones as shoplifting or pickpocketing. In the late eighteenth century, Sir Francis Buller, when consoling a condemned felon at Maidstone assizes, did so with the words, ‘you are to be hanged not for stealing horses but that horses be not stolen’. They encapsulated the theory perfectly.

The Waltham Black Act of 1723, the most draconian statute ever enacted by a British parliament, started the process whereby England was to have more capital statutes than any other country in Europe. Brought in to deal with the threat posed by forest poachers and robbers who blacked up their faces to carry out their depredations, the act created fifty separate capital offences, including wrecking fish ponds and damaging trees.