The Copy Book

In Georgian England, the consensus was that the key to crime prevention was to dangle the hangman’s rope before every would-be criminal’s eyes. Whether he was guilty of shoplifting or murder most foul, the hangman awaited him. Yet to some at the Old Bailey the news that they wouldn’t be up on a hanging charge came as a disappointment, as George Wrong explains.

Since legislators thought that strict enactments would prevent offences, and created new felonies with reckless indifference to human life, the laws against crime were barbarously severe.* It was property-owners who made the laws, and they looked upon offences against property as the most heinous; to steal a horse or a sheep, to pick a pocket of more than a shilling,* to steal goods from a shop,* to destroy maliciously a tree in a garden,* were all punishable with death; while graver moral offences, such as attempted murder, and perjury that might even lead to the execution of an innocent person, were more lightly punished.* A servant who had wounded his master fifteen times with a hatchet in an attempt at murder, was executed, not for this offence, but for burglary in entering the room.*

Since the penalty for trifling theft was death, merciful juries and judges acquitted obviously guilty persons rather than inflict so terrible a punishment; undue severity thus caused crime to be condoned, not punished, and accused persons, relying on this forbearance, sometimes preferred to be tried on a capital charge.

Usually it seems there were not more than fifty executions in London in the course of a single year, and when we compare this with the probably enormous number of thefts in days without police, we see that the law’s rigour was more nominal than real.

Continue to Part 2

* George Wrong (who was Professor of History in the University of Toronto) relied for his examples on the lengthy discussion in William Lecky’s magisterial and multi-volume History of England in the Eighteenth Century, which furnished additional examples and contemporary sources of information; some have been added as footnotes below. Lecky wrote: “Disparities of punishment almost equally great may be found in cases which were not capital. Thus (to give but a single example) two persons were whipped round Covent Garden in 1772, pursuant of sentence, the one for stealing a bunch of radishes, the other for debauching and polluting his own niece. (Annual Register, 1772, p. 116.)”

* “The only difference in punishment by which the law of England distinguished the most atrocious murder from the theft of five shillings,” Lecky tells us, “was that in the first case, under a law of George II, the execution of the criminal was to take place within forty-eight hours of his conviction, and his body was to be anatomised [dissected].”

* If the thief was caught red-handed, that was a felony, but if he got away with his haul unseen and was charged later, that was only a misdemeanour. It was an age, let it be recalled, without security cameras or forensics.

* One criminal who had managed to escape justice despite a career steeped in burglary and larceny was eventually executed for felling trees.

* One provision stated that a leaseholder who set fire to his own property was not liable to the death penalty, even if hundreds of people died from his arson.

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Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 60 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 50 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: because, besides, if, may, must, otherwise, since, whereas.

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