Armed robbery was particularly common in London, either by
highwaymen (on horseback) or
footpads (on foot). One gang, run by a man called Obadiah Lemon, used fishing hooks to steal hats and wigs through open coach windows, or leapt on top and cut through the roof.
George III himself was robbed of his shoe buckles and spare change while walking in
Kensington Gardens. During the 1750s, several outyling towns in London's suburbs organised their own guard patrols to combat robbers on their roads. For example,
Blackheath residents offered rewards for information on highwaymen in 1753, and
Kentish Town inhabitants paid to hire guards in 1756. , by
William Hogarth, 1735, depicting a brothel full of sex workers Pickpocketing was also particularly common in London, where large crowds often gathered at executions and theatre performances. There was also large amounts of theft on the river, as ships laden with valuable goods waited with skeleton crews for a berth in the
Pool of London. £70,000 worth of sugar alone was stolen per year from boats on the river. Sex work was another common crime, particularly associated with
Covent Garden. In 1758, it was estimated that 3,000 sex workers lived in London. On one routine sweep, constables arrested 22 sex workers in Covent Garden, two of whom were men dressed as women. In 1757, a catalogue of London's sex workers was published called ''
Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies'', which detailed the names, locations, and descriptions of hundreds of workers in the capital. Although the crime of
buggery was punishable by death, London had several establishments known as "
molly houses", where queer men could meet. According to one homophobic pamphlet of the time, men in molly houses took on female personas and performed mock weddings and birth ceremonies. The 18th century saw a huge backlash against molly houses, with the publication of pamphlets such as ''The Sodomites' Shame and Doom'', and groups such as the
Society for the Reformation of Manners attempting to track down queer men and have them prosecuted. One of the most famous molly houses was
Mother Clap's in
Holborn, which was raided in 1726, resulting in 40 arrests and three hangings. Mother Clap herself was sentenced to the pillory and two years in prison.
Law enforcement There was no organised police force in this period. In times of serious emergency, or in the case of organised gangs, the authorities could deploy the military, but this was deeply unpopular, both with citizens and with the military themselves. There were small, specialised forces, such as the King's Messengers (who dealt with sedition, particularly Jacobites), the Press Messengers (who dealt with seditious publishers) and the City Marshals (localised to the City of London). Local magistrates, or Justices of the Peace, could issue warrants for criminals; and their officers, constables, would apprehend them. Constables were also responsible for policing low-level criminals such as sex workers and fortune tellers, detecting crime, and raising the "
hue and cry". Below them,
beadles were responsible for making sure that those who qualified for "
outdoor relief" were receiving it, acting as
town crier, and supervising the
town watch; and the watch patrolled the streets at night armed with a lantern and a cudgel to discourage crime. Corruption was endemic, meaning that if one wanted someone prosecuted, one had to do all the leg-work oneself, bribing officers at every stage. In previous eras, Londoners had been able to claim sanctuary at monasteries and former monasteries in order to avoid the law, but by 1712 this practice had been eradicated.
Bow Street Magistrates' Court opened in 1740 in
Covent Garden. One of the magistrates,
Henry Fielding, established the
Bow Street Runners in 1749 as an early form of a police force. They took the form of six parish constables who acted as bounty hunters, being paid a regular salary plus bonuses for any criminal they apprehended who was successfully prosecuted. The Bow Street Runners were unusual in that they are generally agreed to have not been corrupt. In 1754,
John Fielding took over as chief magistrate, and his writings on the model popularised the concept across the country as he advocated for a national police force. Fielding is even credited with popularising the word "police". By the end of the century, there were eight or nine other such groups belonging to magistrates' courts around London. Inspired by the Bow Street Runners, in 1798
Patrick Colquhoun set up the
River Police, sometimes called the first professional police force in the country, which tackled crime in the docks and
Pool of London.
Punishments in 1724, shortly before Sheppard's execution Throughout the period, the number of crimes, especially
property crimes, subject to the death penalty ballooned under a period of English law known as the
Bloody Code. Of those executions, London played host to the vast majority.
Hanging was a common punishment for several crimes. In the period 1750–1775, 3.85 people per 100,000 were hanged per year on average, and only 12% of these were for murder, as the number of people executed for property crimes grew under the Bloody Code. Hangings were public, and could attract large crowds depending on the fame of the victims. When the thief
Jack Sheppard, who had escaped from prison multiple times, was finally hanged at
Tyburn in 200,000 people reportedly came to see it. In the 1780s, the authorities stopped use of Tyburn as London's main execution site in favour of Newgate Prison. The last person executed at Tyburn was a man called John Austin in 1782. London employed a chief hangman and an assistant for this job, at a salary of £50 per year plus a guinea per execution. The most famous of these was
John Price, who was himself hanged for murder in 1718. As an extra punishment for particularly cold-blooded crimes, a hanged body would be publicly displayed in chains, such as a Mrs Phipoe in 1797, whose body was displayed at the Old Bailey. Pirates were generally hanged at
Execution Dock on the foreshore of the Thames near Brewhouse Lane and Wapping High Street, and the bodies would be left there until they had been covered by three tides of the river. This was done to
Captain William Kidd in 1701.
Burning at the stake was used as a punishment for women who committed treason, as in the case of Katherine Hayes, who was burned in 1726 at Tyburn for murdering her husband. As the period went on, this sentence changed to include being hanged before the body was burned at the stake. Men who committed treason were sentenced to be
hanged, drawn and quartered, as was the case for several soldiers who supported the
1745 Jacobite Rebellion, who were executed on
Kennington Common. Nobles who committed treason were permitted to die by beheading. The last person to be executed by beheading in Britain was
Lord Lovat on
Tower Hill in 1747. Prisoners who refused to plead either guilty or not guilty would be "pressed" to death, otherwise known as
peine forte et dure, by being slowly crushed by large stones, a practice abolished in 1772. being pilloried for seditious libel in 1703. He was so popular that instead of stoning him, the crowd threw flowers, which can be seen on the ground. After the
Transportation Act 1717,
transportation became another common punishment. At the beginning of the period, convicts were transported to the American colonies, where their labour would be sold to a plantation for the duration of their sentence, but after the American Revolutionary War, the authorities looked for a new location. London's first shipment of convicts to Australia set off in 1787, and landed in
Port Jackson, in modern-day Sydney. Some crimes were punished by
whipping, which could take place either in public, tied to the back of a cart and being marched through the streets; or in the private confines of a prison. Another punishment designed to inflict public humiliation was the
pillory. As the century went on, those sentenced to the pillory would increasingly find themselves at the mercy of the mob, who could either protect them while they served their sentence or throw rotten vegetables, manure, dead animals, or rocks. Several people were killed by mobs while in the pillory.
Prisons At the beginning of the period, there were three kinds of prison in London: gaols such as that on
Horsemonger Lane, where arrestees were kept prior to a trial;
debtors' prisons such as
Marshalsea; and houses of correction such as
Bridewell Prison for the "reformation" of those who had no employment- often sex workers and the homeless. In 1779, a new kind of prison was introduced called the pentitentiary, with an emphasis on forcing criminals to do hard labour. In 1794, London gained a new prison at
Coldbath Fields, where prisoners worked at occupations such as
oakum-picking or walking on a treadmill, in silence, for ten hours a day London's prisons were often filthy and its officers corrupt. In 1726, an investigation into conditions in the
Fleet Prison revealed that families had to bribe the warden to hand over the bodies of their family members who had died inside; and that one man called Jacob Solas had been chained up next to a sewer and a rubbish heap for two months. In 1750, an outbreak of "jail fever" at the
Old Bailey next to
Newgate Prison killed at least 50 people. == War and uprisings ==