Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (The New Past and Present Book Series)

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The Past & Present Book Series General Editor ALEXANDRA WALSHAM

Inferior Politics

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INFERIOR POLITICS Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain J OA N N A I N N E S

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Joanna Innes 2009

The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Innes, Joanna. Inferior politics : social problems and social policies in eighteenth-century Britain / Joanna Innes. p. cm.—(Past and present book series) Includes index. ISBN 978–0–19–820152–6 (alk. paper) 1. Great Britain—Social policy. 2. Great Britain—Social conditions—18th century. 3. Great Britain—Social policy—Case studies 4. Great Britain—Social conditions—18th century—Case studies. I. Title. HN385.I66 2009 320.60941 09033—dc22 2009023068 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–820152–6 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

In memory of Evan Innes 1921–2001


Contents List of Illustrations and Figures Acknowledgements Note on the text Abbreviations Introduction

ix xi xv xvii 1

I . S T RU C T U R E S 1. Parliament and the shaping of eighteenth-century English social policy 2. The domestic face of the military–fiscal state: government and society in eighteenth-century Britain 3. The local acts of a national Parliament: Parliament’s role in sanctioning local action in eighteenth-century Britain

21 48 78

I I . E M PI R I C A L E N QU I RY 4. Power and happiness: empirical social enquiry in Britain, from ‘political arithmetic’ to ‘moral statistics’

109

III. CASE STUDIES 5. Politics and morals: the reformation of manners movement in later eighteenth-century England 6. The King’s Bench prison in the later eighteenth century: law, authority, and order in a London debtors’ prison 7. The Protestant carpenter—William Payne of Bell Yard (c.1718–82): the life and times of a London informing constable

279

Index of bills and acts General index

343 349

179 227


List of Illustrations and Figures 3.1 Local acts per session, by region, 1689–1800.

82

3.2 Subject matter of local acts 1689–1800. (a) England and Wales; (b) London metropolitan area; (c) Scotland.

84

6.1 The legal process for the collection of debts: an instrument in the hands of the creditor.

230

6.2 The legal process for the collection of debts: opportunities for the debtor.

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6.3 Annual commitments to the King’s Bench prison 1760–1800.

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6.4 A nineteenth-century plan of the King’s Bench prison.

242

6.5 Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin, ‘King’s Bench prison’: handcoloured engraving and acquatint, illustration to Rudolph Ackermann, Microcosm of London (London, 1808).

243

6.6 Robert Cruickshank, ‘Surrey collegians giving a lift to a limb of the law’: handcoloured engraving and acquatint, illustration to ‘Bernard Blackmantle’, The English Spy (London, 1825).

251

7.1 Payne’s London.

284

7.2 ‘Dr Squintum’s Exaltation, or the Reformation’, single-sheet engraving (London, 1763).

296

7.3 Letter from William Payne to members of the House of Lords ‘Dearness of Provisions’ committee, 12 February 1765.

312–13


Acknowledgements Two of the eight chapters in this collection—the chapters on the King’s Bench prison and on William Payne—grow out of discoveries I made during my first year of research, in 1975–6, when I was employed by John Brewer as a research assistant on an SSRC-funded project into the political culture of the Wilkite era. In the course of the more than thirty years that have since elapsed I have of course accrued innumerable debts, so many that were they money debts and were this the eighteenth century, if my creditors chose to pursue me, no act of grace would ever release me. Debts incurred particularly in the writing of individual chapters are mostly acknowledged in those chapters. What follows are my more general acknowledgements. First, as to institutions, I am deeply indebted to the material and moral support provided at various points by Newnham College and Girton College Cambridge, and by Somerville College Oxford, doughty supporters all of women’s academic labours, and to the History Faculty and University of Cambridge (who financed three years of my graduate research) and the History Faculty and University of Oxford (who have supported me generously but who have had their money’s worth). Also to my colleagues and friends at all those institutions. Also to the Research School of Social Sciences, Canberra, and Ludwig Maximilian Universität Munich, on whose payrolls I drafted sections of what follows. I am equally indebted to the staffs of many libraries and record offices, especially Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, and The National Archives, as it now is. I am forever grateful to the scholarly generosity of the late Sheila Lambert, who freely turned over to Julian Hoppit and me her extensive notes on failed legislation, and who courteously shared her own hard won understanding with us. Linda Colley first suggested that I write a book along these lines. The idea was to save me wasting time rewriting material. That was a long time ago. Since then I have tried the patience of a series of long-suffering OUP editors: Robert Faber, Tony Morris, Ruth Parr, Rupert Cousens, and finally Seth Cayley. I have been extremely fortunate to be informed by the learning, enriched by the generosity, stimulated by the enthusiasm, and warmed by the companionship of a remarkably committed, humane, and sociable collection of historians with interests overlapping mine, notably (in roughly the order that I came to know them) John Brewer and John Styles, David Lieberman, Pete King, Julian Hoppit, Nick Rogers, John Beattie, Doug Hay, Norma Landau, Donna Andrew, Henry Horwitz, Paul Slack, Paul Langford, David Eastwood, Mark Philp, Richard Smith, John Robertson, Roey Sweet, Fara Dabhoiwala, Randall McGowen, Michael Roberts, Sarah Lloyd, David Lemmings, and Simon Devereaux. No one

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Acknowledgements

could wish for a more supportive and inspiring community of scholars (it would be easy to extend the list). I am also grateful to the many undergraduate and especially graduate students who have let me try out my ideas on them and who have tried out theirs on me. I would also like to acknowledge debts intellectual and personal to my parents (who were there from the start), Eric Rothschild, Gill Sutherland, Jane Caplan, Janet Coleman, Gareth Stedman Jones, Michael Ignatieff, John Walsh, Barbara Harvey, Ruth Harris, Jeri Johnson, the late Raphael Samuel (with whom I once spent a memorable evening wandering around Soho discussing William Payne), the late Gerald Aylmer, the late Lawrence Stone, and the late Colin Matthew. I would like to acknowledge the formative influence of Susan Pennybacker, the late Raj Chandavarkar, Alastair Reid, and Jonathan Zeitlin—among the spikier presences of my graduate-student years; to thank Tom Ertman, Eckhart Hellmuth, Iain McCalman, Nicholas Canny, Sean Connolly, David Hayton, Tadgh O’Sullivan, Kazuhiko Kondo, Toshio Kusamitsu, Takao Matsumura, and most recently Mariana Saad, Philippe Minard, and Renaud Morieux (among others) for broadening my intellectual horizons, and Ted East, Charles Philpin, and Hubert Stadler for diversifying my life experience. Chris Crocker shared more than ten years of his life with me; I’m grateful for the many distractions he provided. I gratefully acknowledge permission to republish some previously published work as follows: the Royal Historical Society, for permission to republish ‘Parliament and the Shaping of Eighteenth-Century English Social Policy’ from Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., xl (1990), 63–92; Cengage Learning Services, for permission to republish ‘The Domestic Face of the Military–Fiscal State: Government and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ from Lawrence Stone ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1993), 96–127; Edinburgh University Press, for permission to republish ‘The Local Acts of a National Parliament: Parliament’s Role in Sanctioning Local Action in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, from Parliamentary History, xvii (1998), 23–47, also published as David Dean and Clyve Jones eds, Parliament and Locality, 1660–1939 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust, 1998); to Oxford University Press and the German Historical Institute for permission to republish ‘Politics and Morals: the Reformation of Manners Movement in Later Eighteenth-Century England’, from Eckhart Hellmuth ed., The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century (Studies of the German Historical Institute London) (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 57–118; and to Springer Science and Business Media, and to John Brewer and John Styles, for permission to republish ‘The King’s Bench Prison in the Later Eighteenth Century: Law, Authority and Order in a London Debtors’ Prison’, from John Brewer and John Styles eds, An Ungovernable People? The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Hutchinson, 1980, paperback edn 1983), 250–98.

Acknowledgements

xiii

Peter Jones has done a great job of helping me to prepare the text for publication. Thanks also to Ben Heller for helping with the index. This book is dedicated to the memory of the man who first, by his example, convinced me of the sustaining power of intellectual labour.


Note on the text Five of the chapters appearing in this volume have been published previously (as noted under Acknowledgements). In all of these cases, the text remains substantially as previously published (the version of ‘The King’s Bench Prison in the Later Eighteenth Century’ included here is the slightly revised version that appeared in the paperback edition of An Ungovernable People (London, 1983)). Some small corrections have been made to dates and numbers of statutes. Otherwise, previously published texts have been changed in only four significant respects. First, footnotes have been rationalized, so that their form is consistent throughout this volume. Second, in cases where original footnotes referred to work as ‘forthcoming’, and that work has since appeared, it is now properly referenced. Third, in ‘The King’s Bench Prison in the Later Eighteenth Century’, in the light of the National Archives’ resorting and renumbering of items in the archival class KB1, all references to KB1 have been checked and if necessary changed or amplified. Finally, some essays were originally published with numbered subheadings. These have been replaced with brief descriptions.


Abbreviations BL

British Library

CJ

Journals of the House of Commons (to 1800: 55 vols, London, 1803)

Corp. of London archives

Formerly City of London Record Office—since these archives have been moving around during the period in which I have been finalizing this book, I have decided to reference them in this neutral form. It is currently intended that they should end up in the Guildhall Library

English Reports

The English Reports (178 vols, Edinburgh, 1900–32). Citations of reports follow the conventional form, e.g. 1 Dougl. 39 (for volume 1 of Douglas reports, page 39 in original text). These reports can now also be consulted on-line on the subscription database

Essex RO

Essex Record Office, Chelmsford

HMC Ailesbury

Historical Manuscript Commission, 15th Report, App. pt. vii, Manuscripts of the Duke of Somerset, Earl of Ailesbury [etc.] (London, 1897)

HMC Kenyon

Historical Manuscript Commission, 14th Report, App. Pt. iv, Manuscripts of Lord Kenyon (London, 1894)

HMC Townshend

Historical Manuscript Commission, 11th Report, App. Pt. iv, Manuscripts of Marquess Townshend (London, 1887)

HMSO

Her Majesty’s Stationery Office

House of Lords MSS

The Manuscripts of the House of Lords, New Series (12 vols, London, 1900–77)

Lambert, Sessional Papers

Sheila Lambert, Sessional Papers of the House of Commons (147 vols, Wilmington, DE, 1975)

Lambeth Palace

Lambeth Palace Library

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Abbreviations

Lancs RO

Lancashire Record Office, Preston

LJ

Journals of the House of Lords (to 1800: 42 vols, London (various dates))

LMA

London Metropolitan Archive

Norfolk RO

Norfolk Record Office, Norwich

Northumberland RO

now Northumberland Collections Service, Woolhorn. Ashington

N’hants RO

Northamptonshire Record Office, Northampton

Nottinghamshire RO

Nottinghamshire Archives, Nottingham

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004), also available on-line by subscription at

Oxfordshire RO

Oxfordshire Record Office, Oxford

Parliamentary History

[W. Cobbett], The Parliamentary History of England (30 vols, London, 1806–20)

Parliamentary Register

[J. Almon, later W. Debrett], Parliamentary Register (years 1774–80: 17 vols, 1775–80; years 1780–96: 45 vols, London, 1781–96; 1796–1802: 18 vols, London, 1797–1802).

PP

Parliamentary Papers

TNA

National Archives, Kew (subsuming erstwhile Public Record Office)

TRHS

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Somerset RO

Somerset Record Office, Tawnton

Survey RO

now Surrey History Centre, Woking

SBCP

Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor

SPCK

Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge

Westmorland RO

now Kendal Record Office, Kendal

West Yorks RO

West Yorkshire Archive service headquarters, Wakefield

Introduction The essays collected here, though they have been written over a long period of time and published in various places, are nonetheless the fruits of a single project, which took shape early in the course of their production, and which has for three decades informed my research and writing. The central question that they address is, how was social policy shaped in eighteenth-century England? Within what institutional framework, in what intellectual context, by what processes, engaging whose energies? The surveys and case studies which follow outline some answers to these questions. In this introduction, I aim to set this enquiry in context and to draw together some of its threads. ‘Social policy’ was not a common eighteenth-century phrase, though it conveys quickly to the modern reader what this book is about. It is about governmental or official strategies—mainly though not exclusively national in scope—addressing such problems as crime, poverty, vice, and the incarceration of debtors in connection with civil suits. These issues figured within a larger array of issues (including provision of urban amenities, maintenance of a transport infrastructure, preservation of civil peace, and the regulation of production, distribution, and consumption), which I refer to in these pages as ‘issues of domestic government’. But it is above all with the shaping of more specifically ‘social’ policies that these essays are concerned. Many older and some newer accounts of eighteenth-century English governmental arrangements, of the eighteenth-century ‘state’, make it hard to imagine how this polity could have generated anything worthy of the name of social policy. Older accounts stressed the weakness of central governmental institutions at this time, constrained as these were thought to have been by propertied elites weary of the excesses of Stuart absolutism. In Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s multi-volume history of English local government (which still largely held the field when I first entered it in the mid-1970s), what I am calling issues of domestic government were portrayed as falling entirely within the sphere of ‘local government’: depending on the initiative and energies of magistrates, parish officers, corporations, and ‘statutory authorities for special purposes’.¹ ¹ English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act (9 vols, London, 1906–29).

2

Introduction

In the 1980s, John Brewer (who did much to inspire my own interest in the eighteenth century, and guided my first efforts at research) challenged traditional wisdom with his argument that, considered as a ‘fiscal–military’ state, eighteenthcentury Britain was an altogether more powerful and effective state than had commonly been realized. This fiscal–military state, as its features emerge from his and others’ research, impinged directly on the experience of ordinary Britons insofar as they found themselves taxed to support it, or recruited, balloted, or press-ganged into its armed forces. The standing army was deployed to control civil disorders, and fiscal policy interacted with economic policy, as producers and consumers lobbied for the adjustment of tax policies to take account of their economic effects. The fiscal–military state thus conceived clearly had a domestic face.² Yet Brewer himself did not attempt to spell out the implications of his revisionist account for other domestic institutions, or other policy topics. It remains possible for his readers to suppose that, fiscal and military apparatuses aside, responsibility for British domestic government fell entirely on the shoulders of ‘local authorities’, as older accounts had suggested. The dichotomy central/local, it is worth noting, became part of the British repertoire of ideas only in the nineteenth century. Eighteenth-century Britons did not speak of ‘central’ and ‘local’ government. Rather, they spoke of ‘officers of the crown’ or ‘officers of state’, on the one hand, and ‘inferior’ officers on the other.³ It is true that, with the mid-seventeenth-century abolition of Star Chamber (once the penal arm of the Privy Council), and declining importance of the Council itself as an active force during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, officers of state increasingly lost interest in monitoring and regulating the behaviour of ‘inferior’ officers. There is thus an element of truth in the traditional story of local government unyoked (though we should not exaggerate how far central bodies had ever possessed effective power at the local level). Through the eighteenth century, nonetheless, Secretaries of State retained an active interest in the control of major disturbances, and the punishment of serious crime. Most serious crimes were moreover tried not by county or borough magistrates but by a few men closely linked into central councils: the Recorder of London and circuit judges, who were recruited from High Court judges and senior counsel.⁴ From the 1680s until 1760, even county magistrates were ² J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1689–1783 (London, 1989). See also L. Stone ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain 1689–1815 (London, 1993); J. Brewer and E. Hellmuth eds, Rethinking Leviathan: the Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany (Oxford, 1999); T. Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England (London, 1978); J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 1789–1815 (Oxford, 1997); W. J. Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production and Consumption in England, 1640–1845 (Oxford, 2003). ³ I have made a preliminary attempt to determine when the ‘central/local’ dichotomy did emerge in ‘Central Government ‘‘Interference’’: Changing Conceptions, Practices and Concerns’, in J. Harris ed., Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions (Oxford, 2003), 39–60. ⁴ It is not uncommon to read, in accounts by non-specialists, that, during the eighteenth century, responsibility for criminal justice lay primarily in the hands of unpaid local magistrates. That became

Introduction

3

not indiscriminately appointed from among local proprietors (as would later be the case), but instead carefully selected at the centre with an eye to their political reliability.⁵ The reach of ‘central’ government was in all these ways wider and deeper than is always recognized.⁶ For all that, the argument of this book is not that there existed a hitherto unrecognized, permanently active chain of command reaching from the centre down into the localities, nullifying the supposed distinction between central and local government, and overturning conventional assumptions about the prevalence of local initiative. For the most part, outside fiscal and military apparatuses, ‘inferior’ officers were free to operate within their sphere as they saw fit, subject only to such penalties as they risked incurring if they exceeded or abused their authority.⁷ Yet there was one further institution of eighteenth-century British government which I have so far left out of account: a national institution which played a crucial role in domestic government. That is, Parliament. As John Brewer and others have noted, Parliament met more frequently and figured more largely in eighteenth-century Britain than had ever routinely been the case before, not only because this was something that members of the political nation insisted upon (in the light of their seventeenth-century experiences with overweening monarchs) but also, more immediately, because, as a result of political wrangling and constitutional position-taking at the end of the seventeenth century, Parliament had acquired a crucial role in propping up the fiscal–military state. Annual acts of Parliament were needed to authorize the raising of vital revenues. Annual ‘mutiny’ acts were required to keep the standing army legal.⁸ The reason why Parliament was convened annually, and kept in being for four or more months in every year, was thus not primarily so that it could deal with domestic business (in my sense of the term). But this pattern of meetings had increasingly true in the nineteenth century, but in the eighteenth century was by no means the case. For the criminal-justice system, J. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986). ⁵ L. K. J. Glassey, Politics and the Appointment of Justices of the Peace, 1675–1720 (Oxford, 1979); N. Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 1670–1760 (Berkeley, 1984). ⁶ These issues are dealt with more fully in Chapter 2. Note also—an instance of the localities seeking out the centre—recourse by contending factions in the boroughs to High Courts to sort out their differences, as described by P. D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge, 1998). For more on the role of these courts, see p. 13 below. ⁷ I sketch the institutions of ‘local government’ and their relations with central bodies in ‘Governing Diverse Societies’, in P. Langford ed., The Eighteenth Century, 1688–1815 (Short Oxford History of the British Isles) (Oxford, 2002), 103–40. D. Hay, ‘Dread of the Crown Office: the Magistracy and the King’s Bench 1740–1800’, in N. Landau ed., Law, Crime and English Society 1660–1830 (Cambridge, 2002), 19–45, argues that magistrates were too rarely disciplined for these sanctions to have meant much—though it is open to argument how rarely ‘rarely’ has to be to lose all purchase. ⁸ For the new regularity of parliamentary meetings, see the handy table in Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991), 141–2.

4

Introduction

consequences for the way that domestic issues were handled.⁹ The availability of Parliament helped to ensure, first, that statute law retained and developed its role in defining the basic framework within which ‘inferior’ domestic officers operated. Statute law, publicized through commercial handbooks, interpreted in the first instance by local officers, sometimes (under challenge) by the court of King’s Bench, emerged in this period as the chief source of instruction and direction for these officers.¹⁰ Frequent meetings of Parliament also provided interested parties with unprecedented opportunities to attempt to reshape statute law. The accessibility of Parliament to Members of Parliament (MPs), many of them men closely involved with government in the localities, relieved central organs of government and officers of state from pressure to pay more attention to these matters. They could if they wished enter the parliamentary arena and float their own bills, and sometimes did. Judges and law officers also quite often advised on bills initiated by others. But officers of state did not need to take initiatives on any regular basis. They escaped having to forge consensus on issues on which opinion was often divided—and also from the opprobrium which might have followed had their initiatives failed or provoked discontent. Ordinary politically aware Englishmen often moaned about Parliament’s failure to generate enough ‘good laws’, and certainly leaving such matters mostly to backbenchers was not a recipe for vigorous or ambitious law-making. But ministers would probably have risked more by more frequent action than they did by inaction. Though it did not usually generate ambitious policy, this order of things was entirely capable of generating national social policies, embodied in statute, often securing significant (if by no means perfect) compliance from those charged with executing them. This system was also open to initiative from below: it had the potential to sustain an inclusive ‘politics’ of social policy-making. Opportunities to act were quite widely taken up by magistrates and others active in national and local public life, including members of voluntary societies concerned with public welfare and the nation’s morals. As the final two chapters in this volume show, even those far removed from the governing elite—imprisoned debtors, or master artisans with a powerful sense of public mission—sometimes took the chance to petition, to give evidence to parliamentary committees, or to make their case in print, or found other means of bringing their cause to public notice, in the hope of influencing parliamentary proceedings. The eighteenth-century ‘public ⁹ For an overview of the scale and content of Parliament’s activities throughout the period, J. Hoppit and J. Innes, ‘Introduction’, in Hoppit ed., Failed Legislation: Extracted from the Commons and Lords Journals (London, 1997). For some criticisms as to choice and consistency of the categorizations employed in this volume, see H. Horwitz, ‘Changes in the Law and Reform of the Legal Order, 1689–1760’, Parliamentary History, xxi (2002), 301–24—but these do not affect either the basic listing or the broad outlines of the analysis. ¹⁰ C. Holmes, ‘The Legal Instruments of Power and the State in Early Modern England’, in A. Padoa-Schioppa ed., Legislation and Justice (Oxford, 1997), 285–9.

Introduction

5

sphere’ was better articulated, and more capable of supporting extra-governmental initiative in public life than had been the case in earlier centuries.¹¹ Yet we must not exaggerate the extent to which it empowered ordinary people. Initiatives were relatively few; successful initiatives usually originated—or took definitive shape—high up the social scale. Organized societies promoting schemes for the public welfare mainly operated in larger towns or at county level, and drew their support from those who could confidently term themselves ‘gentlemen’ or ‘ladies’, and not from vast numbers even of them. For all its limitations, in terms of both achievement and accessibility, this order of things had consequences for the functioning of government, for the nature of the British state, and for the character of public life. We need to understand these arrangements if we are to understand the development of British governmental institutions in the longer term. Moreover, some proposals which emerged from this system were enacted, implemented, and had a real effect on the lives of substantial numbers of middling, labouring, and poor men, women, and children. These structures and processes, these actions and experiences, therefore deserve our attention. The phrase ‘inferior politics’, which I have used in my title, is a contemporary coinage, characterizing the terrain that I want to explore. It was originally the title of a pamphlet, published in 1786, the work of a clerk to the Navy Office, Hewling Luson.¹² Luson wrote following the defeat in Parliament of the 1785 Metropolitan Magistrates bill, which proposed the creation of a corps of stipendiary magistrates serving the metropolitan area.¹³ When he wrote, Luson expected the bill to be reintroduced, probably in modified form, in the next session, though in fact it was not brought back until 1792. He wrote to set out his own ideas for the benefit of those who might redraft or later assess the revised bill. At the time, Britain was struggling to come to terms with the aftermath of defeat in the War of American Independence. The new prime minister, the younger Pitt, faced a raft of serious problems: coping with a sharp increase in the national ¹¹ The term ‘public sphere’ has gained currency from its use in the English translation of Jürgen Habermas’ work: J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (trans. T. Burger) (Cambridge, 1989; original German ed. 1962). It should be noted that common usage does not closely correspond with Habermas’ own, instead covering ground he and other modern social theorists sought instead to cover with the concept ‘civil society’. Perhaps in part because that last term was differently used in the eighteenth century itself, however, historians of eighteenth-century England tend to employ ‘public sphere’ in its stead. ¹² H. Luson, Inferior Politics, or, Considerations on the Wretchedness and Profligacy of the Poor, especially in London and its Vicinity . . . on the Defects in the Present System of Parochial and Penal Laws . . . (London, 1786). I am grateful to Nick Rogers for first bringing this pamphlet to my attention. For Luson’s later career, see TNA HO 42/30, letter from Luson to Home Office, 11 May 94; and Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, XIX (1811), 1147–9, also apparently printed separately as The Case and Vindication of Mr. Hewling Luson, late Clerk of the Cheque of His Majesty’s Dock-yard at Sheerness (London, 1803). ¹³ For the bill, which was adopted in 1792 (with the proviso that it did not extend to the City), E. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1737–1830 (Basingstoke, 1998).

6

Introduction

debt, mending diplomatic relations, reconstructing Britain’s international trading system, and developing a new working relationship with Ireland’s political elite, who had staked their own claim to ‘legislative independence’—not to speak of dealing with the aftermath of a domestic constitutional crisis caused by inter-party wrangling, and running in a new set of arrangements for governing British India. Many of these issues had aroused lively public interest—but Luson allowed that these were matters which must largely be left for leading statesmen to sort out. The case was altered, he suggested, when it came to other matters troubling the nation: economic and social problems associated with post-war demobilization; poverty, vagrancy, crime, and widespread ‘vice and immorality’ manifest in the conduct of the poor—symptomatic some thought of a pervasive moral rot. These were the kinds of issues ‘inferior’ officers routinely confronted. Luson argued that, this being so, on these matters middling men such as he had something important to contribute: here was proper ground for an ‘inferior politics’. The term suits my purposes; first, because it provides an authentic contemporary name for the kinds of issues that interest me. Also, because the argument Luson made nicely captures some key features of this sector of public life. Finally, it attracts me because it employs the word ‘politics’: it evokes an idea of an open, participatory, contentious process rather than—as our modern term ‘social policy-making’ does—an image of a professionalized bureaucratic machine, grinding out policies. It should be apparent from all that I have said so far that this last image would not fit the realities of eighteenth-century English ‘social policy-making’. Although, when I first began work on this subject, the Webbs’ History of English Local Government still held a commanding position within the historiography, their enduringly impressive tomes have since receded from view behind a host of more recent publications, many of outstanding quality. I count myself fortunate to have worked on the history of eighteenth-century Britain in a period which has seen an extraordinary flowering of interest in its institutions (in the broadest sense), its ideas, values, and practices. This has been the case not only among historians but also across cultural studies and the social sciences, in part because of interest aroused by the writings of Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, both of whom identified this as a critical period (Habermas also identified eighteenthcentury England as a critically important place).¹⁴ Within the historical field, most closely aligned with my concerns and conclusions has been work on criminal justice, especially the work of John Beattie, whose masterly Crime and ¹⁴ For work by M. Foucault bearing especially on the eighteenth century, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (trans. A. Sheridan) (London, 1970; original French ed. 1969); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans. A. Sheridan) (London, 1977; original French ed. 1975); Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France (trans. G. Burchell) (Basingstoke, 2007, original French ed. 2004); Habermas, Structural Transformation.

Introduction

7

the Courts has embedded within it a thoroughly revisionist account of the forms and processes of domestic policy-making.¹⁵ The ideas which inform this book are broadly shared among a large group of historians.¹⁶ Among this group, some have had narrower concerns than mine: they have been concerned with particular policy strands, relating say to crime or poverty.¹⁷ Others have had broader concerns: they have sought to characterize the state or the political culture as a whole.¹⁸ A distinctive feature of my work has been its intermediate focus: on the terrain of social policy, on issues arising from all aspects of the practice of employing ‘inferior officers’ to regulate, conduct, and promote welfare. Closest to my book in scope and intention is the collection by Lee Davison, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Keirn, and Bob Shoemaker: Stilling the Grumbling Hive: the Response to Social and Economic Problems in England 1689–1750, which appeared in 1992, and was in many ways a pioneering work.¹⁹ I mostly share the understanding of the nature and operations of government which informs that collection. I would, however, like to express a reservation about a phrase the editors of that book coined to characterize the arrangements that they explore: the ¹⁵ Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986). ¹⁶ Some of my work in this field has been in collaboration: see J. Innes and J. Styles, ‘The Crime Wave: Recent Writing on Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies, xxv (1986), 380–435, and Hoppit and Innes, ‘Introduction’. The fact that all the essays republished here originally appeared in collections also suggests the collaborative nature of the enterprise. ¹⁷ For work on criminal-justice policy, see especially the older but still valuable study by Sir Leon Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law and its Administration Since 1750, vols 1–4 (London, 1948–68); also Beattie, Crime and the Courts and Policing and Punishment: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror, 1660–1750 (Oxford, 2001). For other excellent work on criminal justice in practice, see numerous essays by D. Hay and P. King, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford, 2000). I have published a number of essays on policy towards the poor, not collected in this book, see especially ‘The ‘‘Mixed Economy of Welfare’’ in Early Modern England: Assessments of the Options from Hale to Malthus (c.1683–1803)’, in M. J. Daunton ed., Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare in the English Past (London, 1996) and ‘The State and the Poor: Eighteenth-Century England in European Perspective’, in Brewer and Hellmuth, Rethinking Leviathan. See also D. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1989). For moral reform, M. J. D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 (Cambridge, 2004). ¹⁸ Brewer’s study apart, see Langford, Public Life, and various studies taking issue especially with Brewer’s account, partly on the ground that it fails to do justice to the character of this state taken as a whole: P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–83 (Oxford, 1989), ch. 14, and Cookson, British Armed Nation, especially the Introduction. S. Conway weighs the evidence in The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford, 2000), especially 347–53, and War, State and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2006), ch. 2. For more schematically conceived studies, P. Harling, The Modern British State: an Historical Introduction (Cambridge, 2001) and P. Jupp, The Governing of Britain, 1688–1848 (London, 2006). ¹⁹ (Stroud, 1992). Note also R. McGowen’s work on forgery legislation: ‘From Pillory to Gallows: the Punishment of Forgery in the Age of the Financial Revolution’, Past and Present, clxv (1999), 107–40, and ‘Making the ‘‘Bloody Code’’? Forgery Legislation in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Landau, Law, Crime, 117–38, and J. Hoppit, ‘Reforming Britain’s Weights and Measures, 1600–1824’, English Historical Review, cviii (1993), 82–104.

8

Introduction

phrase ‘reactive state’.²⁰ The term is worth pausing on because of its attractions. Clearly, they wanted to suggest that this state was not for the most part pro-active in the domestic sphere, and this was indeed true in two senses: first, the state responded to problems as they arose; second, it did not even respond very proactively—instead, it depended on others to suggest responses to it. Problems with the phrase are problems that commonly arise from any attempt to characterize an arrangement by reference to an ideal type. It is highly schematic. It might lead us to imagine that officers of state only reacted and never initiated—when this was not the case. It suggests a clear distinction between what was and what was not ‘the state’, when (not least because of the ambiguities of the word ‘state’) there is in fact no clarity here. When county magistrates who were also Members of Parliament brought bills into Parliament, perhaps after consultation with law officers, was this an example of action designed to produce a reaction by the state, or was this the way that this state operated? Also, implicitly, the eighteenth-century British state is contrasted with other (especially subsequent), pro-active states. Yet, in fact, there is an element of reactivity in the way that most states formulate social policies: they respond to problems as their officers or others perceive them, and they respond in the light of ideas developed and experiments conducted by people at the sharp end: officials implementing policy, voluntary organizations active in the field, and the like. Of course, the balance of initiative is differently distributed from time to time and place to place: it is much easier to discern in modern than in eighteenth-century policy-making the effects of bureaucratic imperatives, academic theories, and party-political strategies. Yet analogies to these can also be found in an eighteenth-century setting. If we aim to place the development of state functions in our period within a longer continuum, a model of changing balance between different agents will serve us better than one that relies on differentiation by type.²¹ Before introducing the individual chapters which follow, so as to avoid misunderstanding or complaint, I should like to emphasize certain things that this collection does not claim or do. The chapters shed incidental light on a variety of topics. In relation to policies, they provide insights into the development of welfare benefits for soldiers and sailors, the regulation of theatres and of meatmarketing (to name only some of the less explored of the many policies on which I touch). In relation to social experience, they illuminate the impact of wars on eighteenth-century society, developments in the uses of apprenticeship, and the disorderly street life of metropolitan London. But the book’s concern is essentially with structures and frameworks, and ways in which people operated ²⁰ Editors’ introduction: ‘The Reactive State: English Governance and Society’ in Davison et al., Stilling the Grumbling Hive, xi–liv, esp. xv–xvi. Pages xxviii–xli provide a good survey of the institutional and sociocultural context. ²¹ For an attempt to set eighteenth-century arrangements in longer perspective, P. Thane, ‘Government and Society in England and Wales 1750–1914’, in F. M. L. Thompson ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 (3 vols, Cambridge, 1990), iii, 1–62.

Introduction

9

within these. Those seeking more comprehensive information about particular forms of policy or problem must look elsewhere.²² I have already stated that it is not my object to argue that central authorities had the ability to determine what went on locally. This applies as much to Parliament as to executive government. Beatrice and Sidney Webb long ago exploded attempts to write the history of British government from the statute book. They delved into then little-explored county and borough muniment rooms and parish chests to show that statutes provided a poor guide to what was happening in the localities. Law making moreover did not drive most change, they argued: local improvisation and experimentation, and slow evolution in the structure and character of ‘local government’ mattered more. Many historians have since developed their insights: since the 1960s, in the context of a richer understanding of social and economic structures and conjunctures; since the 1980s, in the context of an increasingly omnivorous consumption of all kinds of printed and manuscript evidence (including, for example, newspaper evidence), and with imaginative alertness to the cultural context. Peter King’s recent study Crime and Law in England, 1750–1840: Remaking Justice from the Margins, stands squarely in the Webbian tradition; it offers an interesting and spirited account of the scale and significance of innovations in policy not expressed in statutory law-making.²³ This book offers a corrective to that tradition, but only a mild one.²⁴ The claim made here is not that statute law was all that mattered, only that it sometimes mattered. Also that attempts to shape it, whether or not they produced new laws and whether or not these laws had significant effects, are potentially interesting for the light they shed on the workings of government and the character of political culture: for the insight they provide into aspects of politics conventionally passed over by political historians. This book engages on more than one historiographical front. Finally, this book is by design Anglo centric. It is British, insofar as eighteenthcentury England was governed within the framework of a (very Anglo centric) British state, and inasmuch as English-language print culture was British and not merely English. Scots’ experience under British institutions figures in this account when it is most natural to include it, or occasionally when it helpfully points a contrast. But no attempt is made here to explore the Scottish version of ‘inferior politics’. ²² For example, to works cited in n. 17 above. See also for wide-ranging recent studies S. King, Poverty and Welfare in England, 1700–1850: a Regional Perspective (Manchester, 2000) and M. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge, 2003), and for studies stressing the experience of those who figured among the objects of policies: R. S. Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 2004); T. Hitchcock, Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 2004); A. Tomkins, The Experience of Urban Poverty, 1723–82: Parish, Charity and Credit (Manchester, 2007). ²³ (Cambridge, 2007). ²⁴ My differences with the Webbs are set out in Chapter 1.

10

Introduction

Were such an account to be written, it would not have the same form as this.²⁵ I argue that a key feature of England’s experience in this period was that Parliament became more central to domestic government than it had been. That might have held true of Scotland—had Scotland retained its own Parliament. Between 1689 and the union of 1707, a considerable body of domestic legislation did issue from the Scottish Parliament. However, this flow was abruptly curtailed by the Union of 1707. The Scots did not lack access to the British Parliament thereafter, though it was certainly less convenient and no doubt less amenable to their purposes than the Scottish Parliament had been. As Chapter 3 shows, they managed to obtain from it significant quantities of local legislation. However, perhaps because they feared to let English MPs loose on an unfamiliar institutional landscape, legal tradition, and local culture, or because they found Westminster inhospitable for other reasons, they did not choose to bring to it many general measures relating to Scottish domestic government—and English measures were not framed in such a way as to be readily applicable in Scotland (even in some cases when they were supposed to apply to it!). Equally, though Wales was subject to English statutes, and the occasional Welsh MP (for instance, Sir John Phillips) showed a lively interest in social policy, it should not be casually assumed that the practice of government in England and Wales was the same. It appears, for example, that the Elizabethan poor laws were not implemented in large parts of north Wales until the later eighteenth century—and when Welsh great circuit judge Daines Barrington tried to stir up ministerial interest in this lack of respect for the ‘rights’ of the Welsh poor (not characteristic of any large English region at this time), he was politely but firmly deflected.²⁶ Welsh communities, organizations, and representatives were not, for the most part, players in my stories. While I have not excluded Wales from my account, I therefore do not claim to have got to grips with the particularities of Welsh experience. The chapters that follow fall into three main groups. The first three chapters outline governmental structures; the fourth surveys developments in empirical social enquiry during the eighteenth century; the final three offer case studies of efforts to shape policy. The fourth chapter, on empirical social enquiry, and the ²⁵ See the overview in my ‘Legislating for Three Kingdoms: How the Westminster Parliament Legislated for England, Scotland and Ireland 1707–1830’, in J. Hoppit ed., Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660–1850 (Manchester, 2003), 15–47; and also for more summary reflections on substantive policy differences, ‘What Would a ‘‘Four Nations’’ Approach to the Study of Eighteenth-Century British Social Policy Entail?’, in S. J. Connolly ed., Kingdoms United? Great Britain and Ireland Since 1500: Integration and Diversity (Dublin, 1998), 181–99. For deeper explorations of the shaping of Scottish policy, J. S. Shaw, The Management of Scottish Society, 1707–1764: Power, Nobles, Lawyers, Edinburgh Agents and English Influence (Edinburgh, 1983) and B. F. Jewell, ‘The Legislation Relating to Scotland after the Forty-Five’, (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1975). ²⁶ Innes, ‘State and the Poor’, 229–30.

Introduction

11

final case study, on the ‘Protestant carpenter’, William Payne, have not previously been published; the others have all appeared elsewhere. The first chapter, Parliament and the Shaping of Eighteenth-century English Social Policy, makes the case for Parliament and statute having played an important part in shaping national policies which had a real impact on local practice. The basic agenda did not change much. Parliament had extended its reach in the sixteenth century, when it began to shape the punishment of serious crime and developed a system of poor laws, and in the later seventeenth century, when it assumed responsibility for mitigating imprisonment for debt, prescribed forms of summary proceeding against people committing a host of petty crimes, and affirmed the right of secular magistrates to deal with some forms of immoral conduct. Eighteenth-century parliaments largely operated within these bounds (they were more innovative when it came to developing new forms of strictly local legislation). Since statute law already provided the broad framework for proceedings in these fields, however, Parliament provided an obvious forum in which to argue any case for change. This chapter examines the roles played by ministers and other major officeholders, on the one hand, and backbenchers, on the other, in initiating new measures. It also explores the extra-parliamentary sources from which proposals sometimes sprang (mostly local authorities and voluntary societies), the extent to which and ways in which extra-parliamentary opinion was canvassed, and the challenges facing backbenchers who tried to shepherd such measures through Parliament. The second chapter, The Domestic Face of the Military–Fiscal State: Government and Society in Eighteenth-century Britain, takes as its starting point new developments in fiscal and military organization described by John Brewer.²⁷ It outlines the case for supposing that these developments encouraged the disengagement of officers and organs of state from many aspects of government in the localities. However, it also argues that disengagement was not complete. The resources of the military–fiscal state were sometimes brought to bear on problems of domestic government. The chapter develops this case especially in relation to war-related social problems—though it does not suggest that central agencies acted only in that context. The third chapter, The Local Acts of a National Parliament: Parliament’s Role in Sanctioning Local Action in Eighteenth-century Britain, turns to the growing body of legislation generated by eighteenth-century British parliaments that applied only to a particular named locality. The swelling tide of these acts has often been cited as evidence that the propertied classes of the day preferred to govern themselves through bodies locally appointed and locally accountable—at ²⁷ In my title and within the chapter, I reversed Brewer’s epithet ‘fiscal–military’. This was not intended to convey any different assessment of the nature of the state. The rewording sounds better to my ear, and has some logic inasmuch as it was the military needs of the state that prompted fiscal innovation. I have found other historians varying the order of the adjectives, and have decided to leave this phrase in this chapter as originally written.

12

Introduction

least when it came to imposing taxes to fund local amenities and services. There is much to say for this—but this chapter draws attention to another element in the picture, less frequently noticed: that is, that these local acts were acts of Parliament. In order to meet local needs, people turned (increasingly often) to a national body. This chapter explores what it was about British understandings of legality and authority that made this a necessary or attractive course. It also explores some of the effects of routing local projects through a national Parliament. One effect was to enlarge Parliament’s experience of dealing with domestic issues, giving rise to several attempts to promote general statutes rationalizing or extending local experiments. The fourth chapter, Power and Happiness: Empirical Social Enquiry from ‘Political Arithmetic’ to ‘Moral Statistics’, turns from general structures and processes to consider certain ancillaries to policy making. Historians have long been interested in the development, in the late seventeenth century, of the new technique of ‘political arithmetic’: the description of things of political interest in terms of their ‘number, weight and measure’. More recently, historians have placed that development in the broader context of the creation of a ‘culture of fact’, developing in the seventeenth century but proceeding to colour many aspects of eighteenth-century intellectual and social life.²⁸ Or course, this was not a peculiarly British development: it intermeshed with wider movements in thought that we term ‘the Enlightenment’, some of whose key proponents vigorously propounded the claims of empirical over merely speculative enquiry.²⁹ Government and policy considerations shaped such enquiries in a number of ways. They helped determine what was seen as worth studying; how information could be collected, who had access to it, and what they could do with it. In continental Europe, such enquiries were sometimes entirely confined to the official sphere—or to relatively exclusive sectors of professional or academic life. In Britain, government remained an important reference point, and official data a key source of information, but the links were looser, and became looser still as the century progressed. Parliament’s role as watchdog on government, and its large role in domestic government, meant that many official figures were laid before Parliament (some were compiled only because ordered by Parliament); Parliament also, especially in the second half of the century, set on foot data-collection exercises of its own. Over the same period, records of Parliament’s proceedings were increasingly made public: with the result that ever more data entered the broader public sphere. The existence of lively public debate, often printed ²⁸ I borrow the phrase from B. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY, 2000). See also M. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998). For other references to the historiography, see Chapter 4. ²⁹ For example, R. Darnton, ‘Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge: the Epistemological Strategy of the Encyclopédie’, in R. Darnton ed., The Great Cat Massacre (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1985), 185–207.

Introduction

13

debate, on issues of public policy, not least social policy, created a context in which data of this kind could be put to work—and supplemented with other information that had been privately collected, or culled from other publications. The main aim of this chapter is to chart the development of the British ‘culture of fact’, as that manifested itself in studies of society and economy. The chapter describes the increasingly public character of British debate, and the flowering of forms of enquiry linked to social-policy debates. It also details the gradual separation of two lines of enquiry that had initially been inextricably entangled: enquiries into the bases of national power, and into the nature and extent of social ‘happiness’. Nineteenth-century ‘moral statistics’ did not emerge directly out of the old political-arithmetic tradition, but owed much to later eighteenth-century reorientations in both the mode and the focus of enquiry. The final three chapters in the book offer case studies of attempts by particular groups or individuals to shape policy. In every case, Parliament was one of the fora which claimed their attention, though they made varying use of it, and had varying success with it. Many themes run through these chapters. I should here like to highlight two, present but not always strongly emphasized within them. First, it emerges that, Parliament apart, an important forum for all these people was the courts, particularly the court of King’s Bench. Earlier in this introduction, I noted that the decline in conciliar oversight of domestic government made the law in general and statute law in particular key sources of direction to inferior officers. One effect of this was to enhance the importance of generating statutes, but another was to enhance the importance of the role the courts might play in interpreting law. The role that resort to the courts played in this period in the development of public policy, by prompting rulings as to what the law was, is a subject that has received some attention from historians, but that certainly deserves more.³⁰ Second, in all the case studies, I pay careful attention to the social status of key players. Recent historiography has tended to emphasize the many facets of personal identity and also its malleability: they celebrate scope for ³⁰ See also Innes, ‘Origins of the Factory Acts: the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act 1802’ in N. Landau ed., Law, Crime and English Society, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2002), 230–55. For various insights, E. Henderson, Foundations of English Administrative Law: Certiorari and Mandamus in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1963); J. Brewer, ‘The Wilkites and the Law, 1763–74’, in J. Brewer and J. Styles eds, An Ungovernable People (London, 1980), 128–71, drawing on research that I carried out as a research assistant; D. Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989). Much work on this theme appears in legal history journals and is too little noticed by historians: e.g. P. Hamburger, ‘The Development of the Law of Seditious Libel and the Control of the Press’, Stanford Law Review, xxxvii (1985), 661–765; M. Lobban, ‘From Seditious Libel to Unlawful Assembly: Peterloo and the Changing Face of Political Crime, c.1770–1820’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, x (1990), 307–52; G. van Cleve, ‘Somerset’s Case and its Antecedents in Imperial Perspective’, Law and History Review, xxiv (2006), 601–46.

14

Introduction

self-fashioning.³¹ I think myself that we must not lose sight of forms of social difference beyond the powers of individuals to overcome. Not everyone enjoyed the same life chances. There is much more work to be done in identifying the kinds of opportunities different people did and did not enjoy, and the extent and limits of people’s capacity to reinvent themselves—in relation to the material and social resources they could muster, as well as the nature and limits of their own imaginations. I hope that my case studies might help readers to imagine more precisely differences in the opportunities the public sphere afforded to a range of people too easily lumped together as ‘middling men’. The case study Politics and Morals: the Reformation of Manners Movement in Later Eighteenth-Century England focuses on the wave of enthusiasm for reforming morals that swept the country in the aftermath of the American War—it is concerned, that is to say, with the background against which Hewling Luson composed his pamphlet. The chapter explains how diffuse local initiatives were to some extent channelled and given focus by the young MP William Wilberforce, fresh from his evangelical conversion, via a society ostensibly founded to promote ‘His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality’ (though Wilberforce and his friends had in fact been instrumental in getting the proclamation issued in the first place). Always a canny as well as a determined political operator, Wilberforce, and his associates, operated imaginatively and (at least in terms of their impact on government) effectively in advancing their objectives, through a combination of rallying local magistrates, bringing key lawsuits to establish precedents on crucial points, and, not least, lobbying to obtain new statutes. The Proclamation Society was not the first general-purpose social-policy ginger group in eighteenthcentury England; as Chapter 1 notes, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) had followed a similar course for several decades after its foundation in 1698.³² But the Proclamation Society has attracted less attention from historians, and offers an interesting case study in the art of getting things done. Its members were a notably high-status and well-connected group of men (in the Society’s last years, women were also admitted). I suggest in the chapter that Wilberforce had a clear understanding of what the implications were of ³¹ Strong claims for the malleability at least in theory of eighteenth-century identities are made in D. Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 2004). A reflective recent collection is H. French and J. Barry eds, Identity and Agency in England, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2004). ³² M. G. Jones, The Charity School Movement. A Study of Eighteenth-Century Puritanism in Action (Cambridge, 1938); D. W. R. Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven, 1957); D. Hayton, ‘Moral Reform and Country Politics in the Late Seventeenth-Century House of Commons’, Past and Present, cxxviii (1990), 48–91; T. Hitchcock, ‘Paupers and Preachers: the SPCK and the Parochial Workhouse Movement’, in Davison et al., Stilling the Grumbling Hive; C. Rose, ‘The Origins and Ideals of the SPCK, 1699–1716’, in J. Walsh, C. Haydon, and S. Taylor eds, The Church of England, c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993), 172–90.

Introduction

15

constructing the Society’s membership as he did: this was crucial to his whole plan of operations. The Society’s partial successor, the Vice Society (too often conflated with it by historians), was constructed according to a different plan, with a different social profile and distinct mode of proceeding. Chapter 6, The King’s Bench Prison in the Later Eighteenth Century: Law, Authority, and Order in a London Debtors’ Prison (my first published essay), was (as its subtitle indicates) initially conceived as an exploration of attitudes to law, authority, and order among prisoners for debt. Its relevance to this collection lies especially in the light it sheds on efforts by imprisoned debtors to draw public attention to their plight. Ever since Parliament had assumed responsibility for mitigating the situation of debtors (in the late seventeenth century), prisoners for debt had mounted recurrent petitioning campaigns to procure ‘acts of grace’ in their favour—petitions which were sometimes granted, sometimes not, depending rather on parliamentary judgements as to what was best than on the force of debtors’ own representations. In addition, Parliament occasionally mounted enquiries into conditions in debtors’ prisons, and into abuse both of and by prisoners. In the 1720s, an extraordinary enquiry into conditions in the Fleet and King’s Bench prisons (commemorated in a sketch and painting by Hogarth, of a ragged debtor being interrogated by a parliamentary committee) became a vehicle for a sideways attack on Walpole, who was targeted both by implication and as presumed protector of judges, who in turn were thought to be protecting corrupt and abusive prison officers.³³ The scene was set for debtors’ agitations of the 1760s and 1770s (with which my chapter is particularly concerned) by broader agitations in London and the country associated with the provocative figure of John Wilkes. Wilkes had established himself as a ‘friend of liberty’ in the early 1760s, when his imprisonment on a charge of seditious libel led to a court judgment against the Secretary of State, who was found to have acted unconstitutionally (and therefore without legal effect) in ordering arrests under a ‘general warrant’. Charged subsequently with obscenity, Wilkes fled the country. When he returned to fight his corner in 1768, he succeeded in winning election for Middlesex, but was committed to the King’s Bench prison to serve out a sentence previously imposed. Shortly after he was first committed, Scottish troops stationed to control Wilkite crowds who were demonstrating around the prison shot and killed several onlookers. Wilkes’s provocative account of the reasons why the troops had acted in this way, in a letter to the press, led the House of Commons ³³ R. Lee Brown, The History of the Fleet Prison, London: the Anatomy of the Fleet (Lewiston, NY, 1996), 57–94, and for context, A. Hanham, ‘Whig Opposition to Sir Robert Walpole in the House of Commons, 1727–34’, (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Leicester, 1992). For Hogarth’s depictions, R. B. Beckett, ‘Hogarth’s Early Painting: III 1728/9: The Gaols Enquiry’, The Burlington Magazine, xc (1948), 222–6. Hogarth’s oil sketch has been reproduced on the dust jacket of this book.

16

Introduction

to expel him—and to ignore Middlesex electors when they repeatedly re-elected him.³⁴ Against this background, King’s Bench debtors departed from their normal course of petitioning Parliament, and instead, echoing the arguments made against general warrants, argued that imprisonment for debt was illegal and unconstitutional: they tried, like Wilkes, to use the courts to contest public policy. In parallel, they entered upon a campaign of non-compliance, dramatizing what they claimed to be their illegal confinement. That these efforts failed to achieve their intended effect is not entirely surprising—though they were received in better part than the more rhetorically violent and would-be revolutionary protests of debtors in the King’s Bench and Fleet prisons in the 1790s: these earned their perpetrators high-profile trials and swingeing terms of imprisonment. The debtors’ campaign thus provides insights into the mindset and strategies of men, mainly of good education and respectable background (though marginalized by their indebted and imprisoned status), operating in a relatively politically sophisticated culture, with a good sense of the various avenues open to them—in a context in which their confidence in Parliament had declined though their hopes for change had risen. They were not alone at the time or since in searching for alternatives to fruitlessly soliciting Parliament, though it is important that they were operating in a political climate momentarily especially conducive to such attempts. The final chapter, The Protestant Carpenter—William Payne of Bell Yard (c.1718–82): The Life and Times of a London Informing Constable, focuses on a man whose status as small master carpenter did not deter him from making vigorous efforts to influence public policy in a variety of ways, partly by direct engagement in neighbourhood and city policing, but also by giving evidence to a House of Lords committee, by pamphleteering, and by joining a petitioning association. Above all (this was the method he took up and turned into something distinctively his own), he attempted to turn his experience of bringing prosecutions into a tool for both advancing and dramatizing public causes. For Payne, and therefore also necessarily for his adversaries, once again the courts were a crucial forum. Payne was of lower social rank than key figures in the other case studies, yet we should not understate his position. He was a man of (small) substance, householder, employer, and figure of authority within his neighbourhood. He was literate; his small resources gave him a measure of freedom to pursue his personal causes; he had standing in his community, and was in a position to forge personal connections with men in various positions of leadership (including George ³⁴ P. D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Oxford, 1996) now offers the best account of Wilkes’s personal political career, though for context see more helpfully G. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford, 1962) and J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), ch. 9.

Introduction

17

Whitefield, Sir John Fielding, a succession of Lord Mayors, and Lord George Gordon). Through holding office and exercising authority he was able to acquire experience of institutions, officialdom, and official procedures—and all these circumstances played their part in enabling him to act as he did. If, in the wider public sphere, someone such as he appeared marginal, indeed so humble a figure that he could be brushed off with contempt, how much more marginal were the three-quarters or so of the adult male population of less property and standing, and lacking Payne’s experiences—let alone women and children in similar or lower ranks! I suggest in the chapter that Payne’s public career was in several different senses shaped by his middling-trading status. The modes of action open to him were shaped by this; so too (largely to his disadvantage) were the ways in which he was able to present himself and the ways in which he was received. I suggest also that his preoccupations (prostitution and petty street crime; meat prices; the popish menace), though not peculiar to men of his kind, probably loomed larger for them at this time than they did for people higher up the social scale. Even when more elite figures shared his preoccupations, they were often disposed (or could be persuaded by their peers) to address them by other means than the repressive strategies Payne favoured. Whereas prosecution and punishment of perpetrators presented themselves to Payne as excellent ways of dealing with prostitutes, profiteering butchers, and papists, by contrast, increasingly, elite figures favoured reform of prostitutes, freeing of trade, and toleration (however grudging and wary) of Catholics. Marginal figures, such as King’s Bench debtors and William Payne, were not always doomed to fail. If their concerns resonated with the concerns of people better placed, and they could win sponsors or be swept up into constructive alliances, then they stood a chance of succeeding. As I have noted, King’s Bench debtors in the 1720s were able to recruit sponsors from among MPs who had their own grounds for worrying about the abuse of power; from the 1770s, former slaves found common cause with elite reformers.³⁵ Bereft of such allies, lesser men might still find a voice—but had more difficulty in gaining leverage. Change in the course of the eighteenth century is not a major theme of this book; it is most clearly an organizing principle in Chapter 4, on the development of empirical social enquiry. As it happens, my three case studies all focus on the second half of the century. It might be asked, in what ways did this system change over time? In terms of institutional structures, I would mainly want to ³⁵ C. L. Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, 2006), 93–8, 294–8; M. Dresser, Slavery Obscured: the Social History of the Slave Trade in a Provincial English Port (London, 2001), 178–80. Note, however, that although Olaudah Equiano may have written to the newspapers, spoken in debating societies, and rubbed shoulders with elite abolitionists and Whig reformers, as a mere shopkeeper he would not have been as intimate with them as Michael Apted’s 2007 film Amazing Grace suggests; socially, he ranked more easily with London Corresponding Society artisans.

18

Introduction

stress continuities. Nor would I want to overstate change in society and forms of public life. As I have noted, as early as the 1690s, the SPCK was operating in ways that foreshadowed much of what Wilberforce’s Proclamation Society would later attempt. Differences in ways debtors operated in the 1720s and 1730s and the 1760s and 1770s owed much to transient political circumstances. Yet there were certain patterns of change in the period. Parliament by stages accepted an obligation to make its proceedings public.³⁶ The output of print increased more rapidly in the second than in the first half of the century. Meanwhile, important shifts took place in European thought, away from a preoccupation with ontology and epistemology and its implications for theology, towards a preoccupation with charting and explaining natural and ‘moral’ phenomena in all their diversity—with a view to better controlling them. These trends encouraged the development of more ambitious and innovative schemes of social analysis and projects of social betterment, but also began a process of more explicitly ideologizing social thought, which in turn began to change the terms of social policy debate—ultimately changing what was understood to be at stake in such debates.³⁷ During the eighteenth century itself, nonetheless, these changes did not in my view fundamentally transform the structures and processes which framed the making of social policy. In the early nineteenth century, the continuation of these trends would begin to reshape the picture more fundamentally. Those changes will provide the main focus for the next phase of my research.³⁸ ³⁶ I have surveyed this development in ‘Legislation and Public Participation: Aspects of a Changing Relationship 1760–1830’, in D. Lemmings ed., The British and their Laws (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2005), 102–32. ³⁷ For the early enlightenment, see now the massive surveys by J. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001) and Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006), and J. Robertson, The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Oxford, 2006). Robertson stresses engagement with political and social issues throughout, but diagnoses a shift from more philosophical treatments to the more practical concerns of political economy from the 1740s and 1750s (see especially ch. 7). For a sketchy but suggestive overview of the later progress of enlightenment, F. Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (London, 1971). ³⁸ For some first fruits of this research, see two essays already cited ‘Legislating for Three Kingdoms’ and ‘Origins of the Factory Acts’; also ‘Reform in English Public Life: the Fortunes of a Word’, in A. Burns and J. Innes eds, Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 2003), 71–97.

PART I S T RU C T U R E S


1 Parliament and the shaping of eighteenth-century English social policy This chapter provides a preliminary and exploratory account of some of the ways in which eighteenth-century parliaments helped to shape English social policy.¹ At the heart of this study lie a body of measures, several hundred strong, which came before Parliament in the course of the eighteenth century. These were general rather than local measures, applying to the country as a whole. They dealt with such matters as the relief and regulation of the poor, repression of vice (variously conceived), handling of insolvent (and therefore perhaps imprisoned) debtors, and prevention and punishment of crime. It is not, I think, generally recognized quite how many measures of this kind were introduced into and considered by Parliament in the course of the eighteenth century. It is true that a substantial proportion of these measures failed: perhaps something of the order of half the total. But several hundred secured the assent of both Houses, and were ultimately promulgated as statutes. One might have thought that historians would have been moved to enquire into various aspects of the history of this substantial body of laws and projected laws. It is true that some of the questions one might want to ask are most naturally asked of particular measures or groups of measures: questions about why this measure at this time? But other sorts of question also suggest themselves, of a more general nature. Thus, what sorts of considerations led people to suppose that problems they perceived were best addressed by legislation? And when it had been decided that legislation should be sought, how were measures of this kind drawn up? And by whom? Who introduced such bills into Parliament? How did MPs set about assessing their merits? And what sorts of consideration determined their success or failure? Special interest attaches to these questions because, during the eighteenth century, measures of this kind were not, in general, promoted by ministers, or men representing the interests, or acting under the direction of, departments of First published in TRHS, 5th Series, xl (1990), 63–92. Reproduced by permission of the Royal Historical Society. ¹ I have received helpful comments and advice on this chapter from people too numerous to mention. I am, however, especially indebted to John Beattie, David Eastwood, Paul Langford, Paul Slack, and above all to John Styles, for their sustained interest and encouragement.

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state—as they had at least sometimes been in earlier centuries, and as they would increasingly commonly be in subsequent centuries. Measures of the sort that we are concerned with were, during the eighteenth century, usually introduced into Parliament by backbenchers. We have here then a body of general laws or projected laws, shaping public policy in matters of quite general concern, not (in most cases) evidently serving any organized sectional interest—and yet somehow emerging from the floor of the House, and finding their way, or not finding their way, through Parliament by means that are profoundly obscure. The object of this chapter is to shed some light on these obscure processes—and in this way to add to our understanding of the nature of eighteenth-century English government, and of course (because this is the nature of the subject) to our understanding of the ways in which social issues and social interests were constituted in eighteenth-century England.²

T H E I N F LU E N C E O F T H E W E B B S Why has this subject not attracted more attention from other historians? And what sort of work have they undertaken that bears, in some fairly immediate way, upon it? Among historians of an earlier generation, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, in terms of their knowledge and the nature of their interests, were undoubtedly best placed to open up an enquiry of this kind. Ironically, however, the Webbs have almost certainly done more than most to deter historians from embarking on any such study. The Webbs were clearly well aware that eighteenth-century parliaments produced large quantities of legislation bearing on questions of social policy. In the more policy-oriented volumes of their History of English Local Government —that is, in their histories of the poor law, prison management, and so forth—they provide long and detailed surveys of eighteenth-century statute law.³ Indeed, they explicitly comment on the sheer volume of Parliament’s output. In their history of The Old Poor Law, they observe that, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Parliament produced ‘fourscore or so’ acts relating to the relief and regulation of the poor, above and beyond the ‘hundred or more’ local ² I exclude all discussion of local bills from this chapter, not because they are irrelevant to my concerns, but simply because, in a short chapter, there are limits to what one can take on. In fact, local issues were very often considered in terms of general principles, and ideas generated in the context of local discussions were often subsequently imported into national legislation (and vice versa). Furthermore, the same people were often involved in promoting and refining both sorts of measure. These issues are explored in Innes, ‘The local acts of a national Parliament’ (below, pp. 78–105). ³ S. Webb and B. Webb, The History of Liquor Licensing in England (London, 1903), The Story of the King’s Highway (London, 1913), English Prisons under Local Government (London, 1922), English Poor Law History. Part I: The Old Poor Law (London, 1927).

Parliament and the shaping of English social policy

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acts which it sanctioned during the same period, laying down rules for the relief of the poor in particular districts.⁴ However, although they recognized that Parliament was active in this sphere, the Webbs expressed very strong reservations about the quality and significance of its activity. Their most serious—that is, most forcefully asserted—charge was that this great mass of legislation was essentially inconsequential: it had next to no effect on the way in which the country was governed in practice.⁵ The reason for this, in the Webbs’ account, was that the central executive element of English government (that is, the main departments of state) had so tenuous a hold on magistrates, constables, parish officers, and so forth—the sorts of men to whom it should have fallen to execute these laws—that they were effectively unable to determine how these men operated. In fact, according to the Webbs, there was not even any comprehensive system for diffusing knowledge of new laws: ‘Parliament might pass a law, but it was nobody’s business even to communicate the fact to such local authorities as existed’.⁶ If laws had no effect—or an extremely uneven and imperfect effect—it perhaps matters relatively little what their content may have been, except insofar as this provides an index to contemporary aspirations. In fact, however, the Webbs were also unimpressed by the substance of most such legislation. How did they account for its poor quality? It appears that they thought that the root of the problem lay in deficiencies in procedures for initiating and handling such bills. Bills of this kind, they noted, were commonly introduced (and presumably drafted) by backbenchers. Such men, they seem to have felt, lacked the sort of experience of government that might have equipped them to devise effective measures. Nor, in the absence of any well-developed political science, could such ‘amateur legislators’ compensate for their lack of practical experience by private study.⁷ The Webbs made no serious attempt to explain why backbenchers should have promoted general laws, or to determine how they went about formulating measures. Nor did they identify these as possibly interesting questions to pursue. The Webbs’ History —a product of the early part of the twentieth century—dominated thinking about many aspects of eighteenth-century English government for several decades. During the past fifteen to twenty years historians of the eighteenth century have broken free of their influence, and opened up many new lines of enquiry. Breaking free of the Webbs has meant, among other things, developing more respect for the skill and effective power of the men who ruled eighteenth-century England. ⁴ Webb and Webb, Old Poor Law, 149. ⁵ See, for example, Webb and Webb, English Prisons, 25–30; Old Poor Law, 99–100, 149–50. ⁶ Webb and Webb, English Prisons, 29. ⁷ For the phrase ‘amateur legislators’, see Webb and Webb, King’s Highway, 75. The issue is not very systematically explored in the Webbs’ writings, but see also English Prisons, 27–9, 41, 73–5; Old Poor Law, 425–7.

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Especially germane to our purpose are those recent studies which suggest that the whole question of Parliament’s role in shaping social policy is worth opening up. In this connection, we might cite first recent work on Parliament itself. Until quite recently, studies of eighteenth-century parliaments commonly focused on the making and breaking of ministries, nature of party conflict, construction of systems of political influence, and the like. Little attention was paid to what we might term the ‘business side’ of Parliament: to its role in vetting government financial programmes, or to almost any part of its legislative activities, bar a few constitutional and other such controversial measures. By contrast, during the past few years historians have homed in on such topics with a vengeance (as a glance at any issue of the journal Parliamentary History will reveal). Sheila Lambert must be given credit for leading the way, with her study of the drafting and processing of private bills, Bills and Acts, and her monumental compilation, the House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century.⁸ A sense that the parliaments in this period were institutions in which serious and complex business was transacted by serious men emerges clearly from all her work. More recently, a stream of articles have traced the careers, in and out of Parliament, of particular bills, and explored the legislative activities of particular MPs. Most studies of this kind have focused on backbenchers. In this historiographical context, the Webbs’ low estimate of backbenchers’ legislative capacity loses some of its plausibility, though the question posed here—how did backbenchers go about devising and promoting general measures bearing on questions of social policy?—has not, as yet, been more than fragmentarily illuminated.⁹ ⁸ S. Lambert, Bills and Acts (Cambridge, 1971); House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century (145 vols, Wilmington, DE, 1975–6). O. C. Williams, The Clerical Organization of the House of Commons 1661–1850 (Oxford, 1954) is a useful older study; see also P. D. G. Thomas, The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1971), D. Rydz, The Parliamentary Agents (London, 1979), and M. R. Julian, ‘English Economic Legislation 1660–1714’ (unpublished MPhil thesis, London School of Economics, 1979), chs 1–2. D. Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined (Cambridge, 1989), 13–28, provides a useful overview of a shifting historiography. ⁹ Studies particularly relevant to this chapter include E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (London, 1975); J. Styles, ‘Embezzlement, Industry and the Law in England 1500–1800’, in M. Berg, P. Hudson, and M. Sonenscher eds, Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory (Cambridge, 1983); P. B. Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws 1671–1831 (Cambridge, 1981); J. M. Beattie, ‘London Crime and the Making of the English Criminal Law, 1689–1718’, in L. Davison et al. eds, Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England 1689–1750 (Stroud, 1992); P. Clark, ‘The Mother Gin Controversy in the Early Eighteenth Century,’ TRHS, 5th ser. xxxviii (1988), 63–84; J. V. Beckett, ‘A Back-Bench MP in the Eighteenth Century: Sir James Lowther of Whitehaven’, Parliamentary History, i (1983), 79–97; D. Hayton, ‘Sir Richard Cocks: the Political Anatomy of a Country Whig’, Albion, xx (1988), 221–46, and ‘Moral Reform and Country Politics in the Late Seventeenth Century House of Commons’, Past and Present, cxxviii (August 1990), 48–91. Two studies which shed more general light on the behaviour of MPs as legislators are T. K. Moore and H. Horwitz, ‘Who Runs the House? Aspects of Parliamentary Organization in the late Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Modern History, xliii (1971), 205–27, and P. Langford, ‘Property and ‘‘Virtual Representation’’ in Eighteenth-Century England’, Historical Journal, xxxi (1988), 83–115.


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Other recent work has dramatically recast our picture of the character and dynamics of what the Webbs termed ‘local government’ (a term they imported into the eighteenth from the nineteenth century): that is, of the complex network of often part-time and unpaid office-holders who carried out the work of government at all but the very highest level. According to the Webbs, during the eighteenth century a great gulf yawned between the central executive and local government. It was because they believed in this gulf that they found it hard to see how acts of Parliament could have been more than imperfectly implemented. Recent studies suggest that their account was at fault in at least two significant ways. First, they underestimated the extent to which there were institutionalized links between central government and the localities. Here, a key part was played, in the eighteenth as in earlier centuries (if not in precisely the same way), by the High Court judges, who not only heard civil cases from all over the kingdom in their courts, but also, twice a year, changed their hats and went off around the country on Assize circuits. Service as circuit judges not only brought these men into contact with magistrates and other local officers; in this capacity, they also carried out an important part of the work of government in their own persons, inasmuch as they presided over almost all trials for serious crimes (that is, hanging crimes).¹⁰ If on the one hand the Webbs underestimated the strength of institutional links between locality and centre, on the other hand, recent work also suggests, they underestimated the strength and significance of extra-institutional links: that is, of informal, social, and cultural ties. They seem to have assumed that perhaps even county magistrates, and certainly constables, parish officers, and the like, lived for the most part in a narrowly bounded social world, such that issues that might trouble Parliament were very much less likely to trouble them. This does not seem a plausible picture. It is doubtful it would do as an account of what England was like in the seventeenth century; still less will it do as an account of what it was like in the newspaper-reading, book-club-subscribing, party-politically conscious eighteenth century. Why should local office-holders not being harassed by civil servants have taken the trouble to implement new laws? Often they did so, surely, because they shared the concerns that had prompted Parliament to pass the laws in the first place.¹¹ ¹⁰ The High Court/circuit judges figure remarkably little in the Webbs’ study of The Parish and the County (London, 1906). Among modern studies, J. Cockburn, A History of English Assizes 1558–1714 (Cambridge, 1972), is primarily concerned with the pre-Revolutionary period, as is A. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven, 1986). No general study of their role in eighteenth-century government exists, but see C. Brooks, ‘Interpersonal Conflict and Social Tension: Civil Litigation in England 1640–1830’, in A. L. Beier, D. Cannadine, and J. Rosenheim eds, The First Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989); J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986) and N. Landau, The Justices of the Peace 1676–1760 (Berkeley, 1984). ¹¹ See N. Landau for the involvement of Justices of the Peace in national political conflict. The extent of political consciousness lower down the social scale remains the subject of dispute.

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The Webbs recognized that eighteenth-century parliaments were producing large numbers of laws relating to the treatment of the poor, vagrants, criminals, and so forth. But, having little respect for the legislative capacities of backbenchers, and doubting that such laws could have had much impact in practice, they appear not to have thought the processes—formal and informal—by which such laws were produced worthy of study. Recent writing suggests that their scepticism on both counts may have been exaggerated. This being so, we can open our enquiry in good heart. P RO S PE C T U S The discussion which follows has two main parts. The first puts the case for regarding the sorts of measures we will be concerned with here as significant—in two rather different senses. First, it will be noted that they constituted a non-trivial proportion of all measures laid before Parliament and acts passed by Parliament. Second, we will cite some examples of acts that not only were ambitious in scope but also in practice made a substantial impact. Some measures that fall within the scope of our enquiry were trivial in content and insignificant in practice. But, pace the Webbs, this cannot be said of them all. The second part of our discussion takes as its starting point the proposition that general measures dealing with matters of social policy were, in the eighteenth century, most commonly the work of backbenchers. A series of questions arise. Is this true? What can have motivated backbenchers to act in this way? And how might an eighteenth-century backbencher set about trying to frame and promote a measure intended to affect the conduct of government throughout the land? T H E PAT T E R N O F P RO P O S A L S We must be wary of exaggerating the significance of numbers. Some bills occupied many MPs for many hours; some passed quickly through small committees and thin Houses. Some acts affected thousands of lives; some none. Any attempt to categorize legislation entails making a multitude of more or less arbitrary judgements. Counting bills and acts nonetheless offers us one way of putting our concerns in perspective. All the figures that follow are approximate, but are probably of the right order of magnitude.¹² Between 1690 and 1790, some 15,000 bills were laid N. Rogers, Whigs and Cities (Oxford, 1989), affirms its wide reach, though with qualifications. The Diary of Thomas Turner 1754–65, ed. D. Vaisey (Oxford, 1984), presents us with a one-time local officer the breadth of whose reading suggests wide horizons. ¹² For the figures here I am grateful to Sheila Lambert, from which these estimates have been in part compiled. All totals are, however, my own. A handlist of failed bills has since been published


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before Parliament. Of these, about four-fifths ultimately issued as statutes; about one in five failed. The class of bills we want to count can be defined partly by elimination, partly by positive definition. Categories of bill we are not concerned with include all private and local measures; all fiscal, military, and naval measures; all constitutional and religious measures; all forms of economic regulatory legislation. The widest definition of the category of measures that do concern us would include all measures relating to civil or criminal law, or civil administration, not included in one of the categories above.¹³ Between 1690 and 1790, about 1,000 bills of this kind were laid before Parliament. Bills of this kind had a higher than average propensity to fail: only about 500 of these 1,000 reached the statute book. Both our 1,000 bills and our 500 acts were fairly evenly distributed over time. Parliament considered about ten measures of this kind every year, and passed about five.¹⁴ By contrast, numbers of bills and acts in many other categories increased over time. The growth in the number of bills processed owed much to the increasing size of the government’s annual fiscal programme; even more to Parliament’s increasing willingness to deal with a large flow of local and private measures. Simple arithmetic tells us that our category of bills and acts must have represented a declining proportion of the total: in fact, making up about one in ten of all acts at the beginning of the century, one in fifty at the end. (The fractions would be larger if the same calculation were made in terms of bills, but the trend would be the same.) Given fairly constant absolute numbers, there seems no reason to read these trends as evidence of declining parliamentary interest in questions of domestic government. Furthermore, though the number of measures we are talking about was not large, nor were they so few as to warrant dismissal as exceptional items on the parliamentary agenda. The case from numbers alone cannot—and need not—be made more strongly than that.

S C O PE A N D I M PAC T How ambitious might such measures be in substance? And how significant were they in effect? Probably the most ambitious measures falling within the scope of our enquiry were proposals for the comprehensive reform of the poor laws. Attempts to replace the Elizabethan poor laws with a whole new scheme of as J. Hoppit, ed., Failed Legislation, 1660–1800 (London, 1997). The estimates I offer here are, however, based on a system of categorization other than those employed there. ¹³ Many other bills had a social policy dimension, which would entitle them to consideration in a more broadly conceived study. For the purposes of this chapter, I have adopted a relatively narrow definition of my subject matter. ¹⁴ Somewhat more acts were passed in years of peace than in years of war, however; no doubt because war-related business always tended to squeeze other matters off the agenda.

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legislation were made in the 1690s and first decade of the eighteenth century; in the 1730s, 1750s, and over several decades in the later eighteenth century, culminating in the 1780s.¹⁵ Bills drafted on these occasions were ambitious in the sense that they were intended more or less comprehensively to supersede a complex mass of existing legislation, and in the sense that they proposed to summon into being a whole new tier of administration. Characteristically, these bills anticipated important elements of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, inasmuch as they proposed to create new administrative districts and establish Boards of Guardians. None of these bills passed both Houses, although some major reform bills did pass the Commons.¹⁶ A complex mix of factors appears to have operated against these bills, but an important stumbling block was almost certainly the proposal to establish new kinds of local authority, a project fraught with troubling political implications, quite apart from its other disadvantages.¹⁷ Although many local bills calling into being new forms of local authority secured the approval of Parliament during the eighteenth century, very few successful general measures even went so far as to create new forms of local officer. Most of the measures we are considering bestowed new powers upon or modified the existing powers of extant public officers and bodies: Commissioners of Gaol Delivery, Justices of the Peace, constables, overseers of the poor, and the like. To pass from the comprehensive reform of the poor laws to even the most ambitious of successful acts is to come down a notch or two on the scale of ambition. Nonetheless, it is not hard to find examples of acts that not merely set out to bring about significant changes in the way government operated, but which actually had this effect. Drawing on the work of John Beattie, we might cite first certain acts relating to the punishment of crime.¹⁸ At the end of the seventeenth and in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, Parliament passed a number of acts providing for new ways of dealing with men and women convicted of clergyable (that is, non-capital) felonies: a sizeable proportion of all convicts. In 1699, an act laid down that men and women claiming benefit of clergy should no longer be branded in the hand, as theretofore, but instead in the ¹⁵ Webb and Webb, Old Poor Law, 112–14, 126, 265–70, 170–1, 273. S. Macfarlane, ‘Studies in Poverty and Poor Relief in London at the end of the Seventeenth Century’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1982), 263–76, and T. Hitchcock, ‘The English Workhouse. A Study in Institutional Poor Relief in Selected Counties 1696–1750’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1985), ch. 2, supply fuller accounts of late seventeenth- to eighteenth-century efforts. ¹⁶ Thus Sir Humphrey Mackworth’s 1704 and 1706 bills, and Thomas Gilbert’s 1765 bill all passed the Commons, but failed in the Lords. ¹⁷ For example, T. Andrews, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Encrease and Miseries of the Poor of England (London, 1738), 8; [T. Gray], Considerations on Several Proposals lately made for the Better Maintenance of the Poor (London, 1751), 11, 22–5; An Impartial Examination of a Pamphlet Intitled, Considerations . . . (London, 1752), 19. ¹⁸ Beattie, Crime and the Courts, chs 9–10. Examples cited here are all drawn from ch. 9.


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face. In 1707, on the grounds that this measure had made the rehabilitation of convicts impossible, Parliament revoked its former order and suggested instead that convicts might be imprisoned in houses of correction. Finally, in 1718, Parliament decided to authorize the transportation of clergied felons.¹⁹ Quarter Sessions and Assize records suggest that all these acts were speedily acted upon. Thus, at the end of the seventeenth century, there is evidence in many Quarter Sessions records that counties were investing in new branding equipment (commonly described by county clerks as ‘engines’ for ‘burning’ criminals)²⁰—and, in the aftermath of the 1707 act, we find keepers of houses of correction complaining of the trouble and expense involved in housing convicts.²¹ True, it seems to have taken a few years for counties to gear themselves up to organize convict transportation. But within five years, transportation had been established as the dominant form of punishment for clergyable felonies, a position it was to retain for more than half a century.²² Other examples of relatively ambitious and consequential legislation might be cited in connection with the practice of imprisonment for debt. In the 1720s, Parliament passed a number of acts, designed to alleviate the most troubling consequences of this practice. Orders were given for the break-up of the remaining, already illicit, debtors’ sanctuaries. At much the same time, pre-trial arrests for sums of less than 40s. were prohibited, and procedures were devised for the release of people imprisoned following court judgments. Tables specifying prison fees were ordered to be drawn up and displayed in every prison; and Parliament also provided a sum of money to buy out the mortgagees of the Fleet prison, and return the prison to public ownership. (The long-term consequences of early Stuart privatization had come to be judged intolerable.²³) It is not easy to gauge the impact of these measures on creditors’ appetite for imprisoning debtors, since this period witnessed a secular decline in the ¹⁹ 10 Will. III c.12; 6 Ann. c.9; 6 Geo. I c.23. All references to acts follow Statutes of the Realm numeration. Dates cited in the text are those of the year (NS) in which the act passed. ²⁰ N’hants RO, Quarter Sessions, Treasurer’s Accounts 1 (1669–1746), 1700; Northumberland RO, QSO 3, Easter 1700. Such ‘engines’ cost £3–4. ²¹ J. M. Innes, ‘Prisons for the Poor: English Bridewells 1555–1800’, in F. Snyder and D. Hay eds, Labour, Law and Crime (London, 1987), 90. ²² First references to arrangements made for convict transportation commonly appear in Quarter Sessions Order Books in the early 1720s. For the practice in its heyday, see Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 506–13, 518–19, 538–48; 560–5; R. Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies 1718–75 (Oxford, 1987). ²³ Relatively little has been published on the practice of imprisonment for debt, but see generally Innes, ‘King’s Bench Prison’ (below, pp. 227–78), and P. Haagen, ‘Eighteenth-Century Society and the Debt Law’, in S. Cohen and A. Scull eds, Social Control and the State (Oxford, 1983), 222–47. The reform measures of the 1720s have nowhere been comprehensively explored, but see R. L. Brown, ‘The Minters of Wapping: The History of a Debtors’ Sanctuary in Eighteenth-Century East London’, East London Papers, xiv (1972), 77–86; L. F. Church, Oglethorpe: A Study of Philanthropy in England and Georgia (London, 1932), ch. 3. The acts in question are 9 Geo. I c.28; 11 Geo. I c.22; 12 Geo. I c.29; 2 Geo. II c.22.

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frequency with which most forms of civil action were employed.²⁴ The 1696 Vexatious Arrests Act²⁵—prohibiting arrests for the smallest debts—may, however, have contributed to this decline, and this series of acts did more demonstrably have other effects. Commitments for debt in the metropolis, previously out of all proportion to commitments elsewhere, fell precipitately, and were never to return to their previous disproportionate size; several small metropolitan debtors’ prisons went out of business; tables of fees were drawn up and displayed in prisons up and down the country—large numbers of them were still to be seen when John Howard made his tour of the prisons fifty years later; and the buying out of the Fleet mortgagees decisively altered structures of power in the major London debtors’ prisons.²⁶ Or consider the case of vagrancy. In this connection, the most consequential piece of legislation was probably the 1700 Vagrant Removal Costs Act, which shifted responsibility for financing the removal of vagrants from the parish to the county.²⁷ This act took speedy effect throughout the country. In the course of the next few decades, its more profound implications gradually became apparent, as Justices of the Peace, made more sensitive to the vagrancy problem by the fact that they were now paying the bills, developed new systems for their removal, often involving the transfer of much of the work to a small number of vagrant contractors.²⁸ Finally, the Workhouse Act of 1723 provides an interesting instance of a permissive act which appears nonetheless to have had a significant effect: perhaps partly simply because it served to publicize certain ideas about the potential of workhouses.²⁹ The decade preceding the passage of the act had seen a number of influential new workhouse foundations, but after the passage of the act, a trickle turned into a powerful current. Within fifteen years, there were probably relatively few market towns or populous industrial parishes which had not at least experimented with the establishment of a workhouse. The Webbs, as we have noted, believed that the character of eighteenth-century government should have made it difficult to implement legislation. Drawing on recent historiography, we have already argued that their assessment of the situation may have been too pessimistic. The examples of relatively ambitious and consequential legislation cited lend support to this case. But this question merits pursuing a little further. What mechanisms were at work, when relatively ambitious legislation was reasonably effectively translated into practice in the eighteenth century? Certainly not the same mechanisms in every case. In some instances, the High Court judges, whether acting in their ²⁴ Brooks, ‘Interpersonal and Social Tension’, esp. 365–6. ²⁵ 8 Will. III c.9. ²⁶ E. Burford, In the Clink (London, 1977), 63–5; J. Howard, State of the Prisons in England and Wales (Warrington, 1777); Innes, ‘King’s Bench Prison’ (below, pp. 227–78). ²⁷ 11 Will. III c.18. ²⁸ Webb and Webb, Old Poor Law, 378–87. ²⁹ 9 Geo. I c.7. Hitchcock, ‘The English Workhouse’, now provides the fullest survey of responses to the act.


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ordinary judicial capacity, or as circuit judges, played a crucial role. We have already argued that it was a deficiency of the Webbs’ analysis that they did not make more allowance for the part played by these men. The judges, for example, certainly played a crucial part in securing the implementation of new penal legislation. This they were well placed to do, presiding, as they did, over the conduct of the most serious criminal trials. As we shall see, it may have been standard practice for judges to be consulted in advance before new penal laws were introduced. Against this background, it is scarcely surprising to find them rapidly availing themselves of new laws in the courtroom. Local authorities then had to find the wherewithal to execute these sentences. It is clear that, in the seventeenth century, circuit judges sometimes brought pressure to bear on local magistrates to make them implement legislation. It was also not unknown for them to act in this way in the eighteenth century—though the fact that all the examples I can cite relate to the upkeep of prisons may indicate that, by this date, they operated in this way only in a limited and particular range of contexts. In Essex, in the 1780s, a storm of protest broke out when a circuit judge imposed a fine on the county for failure to comply with a recent statute requiring the county to provide a sick room in the county gaol. (Most other counties had promptly complied with the act.) The local bench contested the judge’s right to act in this way, and a fierce legal battle ensued, which terminated inconclusively.³⁰ This, however, was not the only instance of a county being fined for failure to maintain its gaol adequately, and not every such fine was contested.³¹ It may well be too that, in a much greater number of cases, circuit judges succeeded in persuading local authorities to act, without resorting to coercion (indeed, part of the Essex Justices’ complaint was that they had not initially been approached in a more informal way).³² Some eighteenth-century statutes were implemented because of the actions of men who might be described as agents of the central executive. In these cases, the Webbs were mistaken because they underestimated this executive’s power and reach. But the Webbs’ excessive pessimism about the effectiveness of eighteenth-century government and significance of eighteenth-century statute law stemmed also from their tendency to overrate the importance of institutional machinery of this kind. Local authorities very often appear to have complied with new laws simply because they took it for granted that it was their responsibility to do so, or perhaps because (as presumably in the case of the 1723 Workhouse Act) they felt that national legislation effectively addressed their needs. Local officials may sometimes have been influenced by the knowledge that, if they did not punctiliously conform to law, they laid themselves open to legal ³⁰ R. E. Negus, ‘The Jurisdiction of Judges of Assize to Fine a County’, Essex Review, xxxxvii (1938), 57–67. ³¹ For example, Westmorland RO WQ/O8, 1765 passim. ³² Negus, ‘Jurisdiction of Judges’, 59.

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actions at the hands of ordinary citizens. In Middlesex in the 1720s and 1730s, rural ratepayers, angered by the size of the contributions they were asked to make towards the cost of removing vagrants (essentially, they argued, an inner-city problem), succeeded in overturning a series of rates the county had not managed to impose in sufficiently unimpeachably legal a fashion. In this case the problem was not so much that the county had failed to pay due heed to legislation, as that existing laws were insufficiently clearly drafted. Middlesex Justices could nonetheless find no way out of the corner they had been backed into but via an application for a new law (the result of their efforts being the procedurally important County Rates Act of 1739).³³ Though it has certain idiosyncratic features, this example does suggest some reasons why local authorities may have thought it necessary to pay meticulous regard to certain sorts of statute law. It would certainly be wrong to suggest that simple conformist instincts, or sympathy with the aims of the legislature, or pressure exerted from either above or below between them ensured that all eighteenth-century statutes were promptly and punctiliously observed. Dozens of examples could be cited of eighteenthcentury statutes which were either unevenly enforced or indeed altogether ignored.³⁴ However, it would equally be wrong to suppose that the nature of eighteenth-century government determined that acts were highly unlikely to be implemented. A more discriminating account of the weaknesses of eighteenthcentury English government should be capable of explaining why different acts were observed in very different degrees. This part of this discussion has concentrated chiefly on demonstrating that some measures of the sort that concern us were very ambitious, and that some were both relatively ambitious and consequential. In the context of the historiography, this seems to be the case that needs to be made. It is not suggested, however, that all our measures were of this kind. To correct the balance, let us close this section by considering a narrowly conceived bill. In 1723, William Lowndes, who happened to be Secretary to the Treasury, but was also (and in this context more significantly) a resident of Buckinghamshire and Justice of the Peace for the county, brought into the Commons a bill proposing to alter the established manner of raising money for the building and repair of gaols. According to Sir Edward Knatchbull, who moved successfully for the bill’s rejection, this bill should never have been put forward as a general measure at all, since it related only to a ‘contest . . . in Buckinghamshire . . . who should pay the tax, landlord or tenant’. It had been brought in as a public bill only to ‘save the charges of a private one . . . and so it was rejected nem. con.’.³⁵ ³³ 12 Geo. II c.29. Lambert, Sessional Papers, xv. 171–322; CJ, xxiii. 217–18, 289–90. ³⁴ For example, I agree with the Webbs (English Prisons, 29) that an act of 1744 ordering Quarter Sessions to appoint two Justices to visit and report on county houses of correction was not generally observed (although many counties did operate more informal supervisory systems). ³⁵ The Parliamentary Diary of Sir Edward Knatchbull, ed. A. N. Newman (London, 1963), 18.


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P RO M OT E R S Trivial or ambitious, effective or not—who introduced such bills into Parliament, and how did they go about framing and promoting measures of this kind? The Webbs observed that their promoters were commonly backbenchers—an arrangement which they clearly felt left much to be desired. Their basic observation was well founded. However, by no means every bill emerged from this source, nor in many other cases does ‘backbencher’ without qualification constitute an adequate characterization of the man involved. Both at the beginning and at the end of our period, officers of the central government played some part in drafting and promoting measures relating to the poor, though in neither case was this involvement long sustained. In the late 1690s and first decade of the eighteenth century, the Board of Trade—a body established by royal commission in 1696—was charged by both Crown and Parliament with responsibility for reviewing current arrangements for relieving and regulating the poor, devising new policies, and embodying them in draft laws.³⁶ However, the Board’s interest in such matters did not persist beyond the earliest years of the new century. When the Board’s abolition was proposed (and carried) in 1782, one of its members, refusing to defend its record of service, observed in the Commons that, in relation to ‘the state of the poor and the method of employing them . . . he naturally looked . . . (as the public at large did)’ to the back-bench reformer Thomas Gilbert, ‘who on that subject he considered as the only board of trade he knew of’.³⁷ In the 1790s, against a background of war and harvest crisis, the supposedly deficient state of the poor laws attracted the attention of the Prime Minister, who introduced an (unsuccessful) amending bill in 1796.³⁸ During these troubled years, leading magistrates represented to the Home Office their desire that ministers should sponsor legislation to coordinate local action, and the newly founded Board of Agriculture explored the practicability of some particular ³⁶ I. K. Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy (Oxford, 1968), describes the establishment of the board, and provides a (selective) account of its development. For the Board and poor law policy, see Macfarlane, ‘Studies in Poverty and Poor Relief in London’, 263–76; Hitchcock, ‘The English Workhouse’, ch. 2. The Webbs’ brief account of these matters focuses chiefly on John Locke’s proposals to the Board: Old Poor Law, 109–12. The Board’s proposals did not win parliamentary assent, and indeed, according to one member, led to their being lampooned as a ‘Commission of Chimerical Affairs’ (G. Jacobsen, William Blathwayt (New Haven, 1932), 335). ³⁷ Parliamentary History, xxi. 250. ³⁸ J. Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Reluctant Transition (London, 1983), 471–6. T. Ruggles, History of the Poor (2 vols, London, 1793), i, vi–vii, implies that, as early as the late 1780s, public rumour had it that the minister intended to take the matter on, and that meanwhile he ‘discountenanced the indigested schemes of private individuals’.

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schemes mooted.³⁹ Central agencies, however, once more did not maintain their interest when the immediate crisis was thought to have passed. Officers of the central government intermittently played a part in promoting measures relating to criminal justice. The Law Officers of the Crown, for example, were sometimes active in this way. In 1717/18, it was the Solicitor General of the day who piloted the Transportation Act through the Commons. Sixty years later, his successor brought in one of the measures designed to cope with the collapse of the transportation system in consequence of the American War.⁴⁰ The Secretaries of State played little part in promoting general domestic legislation before the 1780s. When their offices were reorganized in 1782, however, and the distinct roles of Foreign and Home Secretary established, the Home Secretary quickly came to the fore in promoting certain measures against crime. In 1783, for instance, ‘Mr Secretary Townshend’ laid two bills before Parliament intended, he said, to improve the police of the metropolis (although the bills were formally national in scope). One proposed to extend the vagrancy laws to cover new categories of suspicious persons; the other proposed that receiving goods obtained by burglary or highway robbery should be made a capital offence.⁴¹ Central government officers might play a part in formulating legislation even when they did not themselves introduce it. Private members promoting legislation sometimes sought prior advice from Law Officers, from judges, or indeed from ministers. Members not competent to draft bills for themselves might seek the advice of experienced parliamentary draftsmen, but it seems to have been fairly common for members to consult Law Officers or judges. The correspondence of Lloyd Kenyon, successively Attorney General, Master of the Rolls, and Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, provides several examples of applications of this kind.⁴² There is some evidence that it was expected that law officers and judges should be consulted about certain kinds of bill. When, in 1786, William Wilberforce brought a bill into Parliament to authorize the handing-over of the bodies not of ³⁹ D. Eastwood, ‘Governing Rural England: Authority and Social Order in Oxfordshire 1780–1840’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Oxford, 1985), 85. For the Board of Agriculture, Webb and Webb, Old Poor Law, 174; R. Mitchison, Agricultural Sir John: The Life of Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster 1754–1835 (London, 1962), ch. 11. On governmental responses to poverty in the 1790s, see also R. Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England 1793–1801 (Gloucester, 1988), Part 3. ⁴⁰ Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 503; CJ, xxxix. 963. ⁴¹ Parliamentary History, xxiii. 364–5. R. R. Nelson, The Home Office 1782–1800 (Durham, NC, 1969), charts the early history of the office from an administrative point of view, but is not helpful on the Home Secretary’s parliamentary role. ⁴² HMC Kenyon, 511, 541; see also Corp. of London Archives, Rep 95, 189v (Dec. 1690); Monthly Review, lxii (1780), 315. Bishop Porteus in his notebook for 1781 (Lambeth Palace MS. 2099, 20–2) provides a very full account of the series of consultations with magistrates, lawyers, judges, and legal officeholders he undertook before introducing a new sabbatarian bill in that year.


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murderers alone (as was already the practice) but of a wide range of executed felons to the surgeons for dissection, he was denounced in the House of Lords by Lord Loughborough (then Lord Chief Justice of Common Pleas) for not having followed the usual course and consulted the judges first. According to Loughborough, it was an established custom that all bills relating to criminal justice and its execution should be submitted to the opinion of the judges in the first instance. (In fact, according to Wilberforce’s sons, the bill had been drawn up by the Solicitor General, corrected by the Attorney General, and communicated to one of the judges, who had promised to lay it before the rest of the Bench. In their account, Loughborough’s criticisms were essentially the product of political pique.⁴³) Bills dealing with the administration of civil or criminal laws which failed in the Commons on their first introduction were sometimes later reintroduced in an amended form in the Lords, whence they passed successfully through all the usual stages, to emerge ultimately as acts.⁴⁴ The object of their removal to the Lords seems to have been to allow at least some of the judges to play a formal part in shaping their progress at an early stage. Judges were sometimes formally asked to draft bills on subjects on which it was proving difficult to formulate satisfactory laws. In the early eighteenth century, after several sessions of effort to devise a new poor law that would prove generally acceptable had failed to bear fruit, the House of Lords requested the judges to draft some appropriate measure. Their draft, produced in the following session, in fact proved no more able to command assent than earlier bills had been.⁴⁵ Law Officers and judges were consulted because of their legal expertise—and no doubt also because a bill was unlikely to flourish in the face of their determined opposition.⁴⁶ Ministers were probably consulted in some cases because their opposition likewise might sink a bill. There were certainly cases in which ministerial opposition spelt the end of proposed domestic measures. In 1754, the Prime Minister, Henry Pelham, asked the Earl of Hillsborough not to persist with a bill for the radical reform of the poor laws Hillsborough was then promoting, on the ground that it might produce ‘similar clamours to that raised ⁴³ Parliamentary History, xxvi. 195–202; R. I. Wilberforce and S. Wilberforce, Life of William Wilberforce (5 vols, London, 1838), i. 114–15. See also Lord Hardwicke’s strong objections to the introduction of the 1758 Habeas Corpus bill without adequate consultation with the judges (again an objection with a political edge to it): Life and Correspondence of Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke, P. C. Yorke ed. (3 vols, Cambridge, 1913), iii. 12. ⁴⁴ Thus the act which ultimately passed as 6 Ann. c.9. ⁴⁵ LJ, xvii. 506a. ⁴⁶ I have as yet found little evidence that the bishops were much involved, or were often especially consulted, in connection with legislation of this kind, though this is a topic that would bear more investigation. For some traces of their activity, see (for Archbishop Tenison) Lambeth Palace MS 640, 221 (a reference I owe to Steve Macfarlane), and W. O. B. Allen and E. McClure, Two Hundred Years: the History of the SPCK (London, 1898), 25; (for Bishop Porteus), R. Hodgson, Life of the Right Reverend Beilby Porteus (London, 1813), and Porteus’ notebooks, Lambeth Palace MS. 2099–2100.

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against the Jew bill, then recently repealed’.⁴⁷ Hillsborough, a loyal supporter of the government, compliantly abandoned his scheme. In 1782, a bill for the preservation of game was lost when the fall of the North government brought the Marquis of Rockingham and his friends to power. When the bill came up for its second reading, Rockingham’s Attorney General ‘rose and pointed out the several restraints the bill imposed as intolerable in a free government’. Its promoter promptly offered to withdraw the measure.⁴⁸ Measures of the kind we are considering were sometimes heralded in the King’s Speech.⁴⁹ Such august expressions of support for at least an attempt to attack a particular problem might seem to betoken ministerial involvement, and probably this was often the case. However, it may not always have been so: the monarch may sometimes have been approached through non-ministerial channels. In 1712, for example, members of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge considered asking Mr Auditor Harley (admittedly the brother of the Prime Minister) to ask the Queen to recommend a bill against duelling from the throne ‘least’ (as it was observed) ‘for want of this Precaution, the Bill should undergoe the same fate wth the last’.⁵⁰ It becomes clear that not all measures that concern us were promoted by backbenchers, and even those that were might come before Parliament with some sort of official blessing. It is nonetheless true that the majority were introduced by private members.⁵¹ Yet we must be careful not to overstate the ‘amateur’ status of these men. Many were notably experienced parliamentarians. In a very useful and suggestive article, published in the Journal of Modern History in 1971, T. K. Moore and H. Horwitz examined the characteristics of the men most active in the Commons in two sessions in the mid-1690s.⁵² On the basis of this work, they suggested that we should distinguish between two sorts of active MP. Some, the more familiar sort, spoke frequently in debate, struck partisan attitudes, and aspired to and were often successful in securing political office. But they also identified a second, less familiar, sort of activist: often a rather older man, sitting for a county or open borough, distinguished above all by the frequency with which he brought in legislation, or by his service on drafting and second-reading committees. The two sorts of activism were not mutually exclusive.⁵³ But the basic point—that, even among backbenchers, a ⁴⁷ Parliamentary History, xviii. 629. For Hillsborough’s bill, see Webb and Webb, Old Poor Law, 269; for the Jew bill, T. W. Perry, Public Opinion, Propaganda and Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, MA, 1962). ⁴⁸ Parliamentary Register, vii. 210. ⁴⁹ For example, CJ, xiii. I; xxvi. 298; xxxix. 5. ⁵⁰ Correspondence and Minutes of the SPCK relating to Wales 1699–1740, ed. M. Clement (Cardiff, 1932), 53–4. The Queen did in fact commend the measure, which however did not pass. For her speech, see CJ, xvii. 278. ⁵¹ An impressionistic judgement, still to be tested and endowed with precision. ⁵² Moore and Horwitz, ‘Who Runs the House?’ ⁵³ Sir George Yonge, for example, who was for a time the Younger Pitt’s Secretary at War, also frequently displayed an interest in issues of domestic government, in ways that seem to arise from


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group of leaders may be distinguished from a group of followers—clearly holds true throughout the eighteenth century. It must be stressed, furthermore, that while even active backbenchers could not speak and act with the authority of ministers, they often could speak with another sort of authority, which, in certain circumstances and for certain purposes, might give them more weight than a mere minister could hope to command. Their authority might derive from their acknowledged expertise in a field they had made the object of special study: certainly in the later eighteenth century there were men who made themselves experts on such topics as the criminal law or weights and measures.⁵⁴ Or, alternatively, they might speak with authority derived from extensive practical experience of local government, a form of experience few ministers could claim. It seems to have been widely assumed in eighteenth-century parliaments (and not unreasonably) that there were a range of questions to which active magistrates were best qualified to speak. Very striking evidence to this effect is provided by a letter written in 1799 to the President of the Board of Agriculture, by a lawyer whose advice the President had sought in connection with a bill for the better upkeep of highways he wished to bring before Parliament. As well as offering detailed comments on the bill, the lawyer urged the President not to bring in the bill himself, on the grounds that ‘it would be presumptuous in a man . . . who has never acted as a Justice of the Peace to undertake [such] a measure in its commencement . . .’.⁵⁵

M OT I VAT I O N S What considerations moved men not officers of the central government to bring in general measures bearing on domestic government? In some instances such men seem to have been acting essentially as good constituency MPs: the bills they brought in were intended to combat problems arising in their own neighbourhoods. We have already mentioned two bills with origins of this his West Country experience. L. Namier and J. Brooke eds, History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–90 (3 vols, London, 1964), iii. 673–3, fails to mention these interests. ⁵⁴ For penal reformers, L. Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law (5 vols, London, 1948–86), Part 2. For Sir John Riggs Miller’s campaign to reform weights and measures, West Yorkshire RO, QD 1/218 (copy of circular letter); Parliamentary Register, xxvii. 395–403. ⁵⁵ Somerset RO, Hancock MSS DD/HC, box 6E, W. Dickinson to Lord Somerville, 1 Feb. 1799. I owe this reference to John Styles. What is probably being suggested in this case is that a private member might be asked to bring in a bill with official origins. This may have been common practice, complicating still further the task of distinguishing official and unofficial effort. [E. Jones], Observations on the Scheme before Parliament for the Maintenance of the Poor (Chester, 1776), 22n, suggests that the judges ‘caused’ a bill to ‘be brought in’ abolishing the Elizabethan statutory requirement that every cottage built should have at least four acres of land to it (for most purposes already a dead letter, the old statute had provided the basis for a recent malicious prosecution). In fact this bill was introduced into the Commons by a private member, a Mr Cator.

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kind: to wit, the Buckinghamshire gaol rate bill, and the county rates bill of 1739, which had its origins in difficulties experienced by Middlesex Justices. The two criminal bills introduced by the Home Secretary in 1783 similarly arose out of metropolitan experience. Some local problems could not be tackled by purely local legislation: criminal laws, for example, had always to be national in scope.⁵⁶ Not every general measure arose out of particular local problems, however. To explain what other than experience in their neighbourhoods might motivate men to act, it may be helpful to pay some regard to the rhetoric many of them used, and (in a certain sense at least) accept the claim so many of them made—that they were motivated by a desire to promote the public good. The point is not that such claims sufficiently explain the content of measures proposed. ‘The public good’ is an essentially contested concept, and every measure we are concerned with embodied some highly particular, eminently contestable vision of what this good might consist in. However, this rhetoric may help illuminate the forces impelling particular individuals to act. Some men who distinguished themselves by promoting general measures were men who (the general tenor of their lives suggests) were governed by a strong sense of public duty—sometimes founded in powerful religious convictions (as has been interestingly suggested by David Hayton).⁵⁷ More cynically, we might observe that one sort of parliamentary career strategy entailed persistent dedication to promoting ‘improvements’ in law and local government. Men who acted in this way might hope for public acclaim. ‘His name should be written in letters of gold,’ pronounced Sir Gregory Page Turner of the poor law reformer Thomas Gilbert in 1788.⁵⁸ But it was also possible to hope for more material recompense. Gilbert himself had been more materially rewarded for his parliamentary labours a little earlier in the same decade, when he had secured appointment as Chairman of Ways and Means: a post carrying a handsome salary.⁵⁹ Neither support for nor opposition to particular measures of social policy necessarily reflected other political commitments in this period. But neither was activity of this kind always politically innocent. Opposition MPs might promote such measures partly in order to gain credit for themselves among backbenchers: by presenting themselves as devotees of the public good, they might hope to dramatize their own merits as against those of tax-squandering ministers. In the Parliament of 1727–34, opponents of Walpole made great play of the need ⁵⁶ See also Norfolk RO C/S2/7, Fakenham sessions, January 1716/7, suggesting a bill to facilitate the prosecution of horsetheft. H. Zouch, Hints Respecting the Public Police (London, 1786), 4, notes West Riding Justices’ desire for legislation against nightpoaching (an issue also of concern to Norfolk Justices: see Munsche, Gentleman and Poachers, 25–6). For a case study and discussion, Beattie, ‘London Crime’. ⁵⁷ Hayton, ‘Moral Reform’. ⁵⁸ Parliamentary Register, xxii. 277. ⁵⁹ Namier and Brooke, House of Commons, ii. 499–501. For other legislative initiatives of Gilbert’s, see Webb and Webb, King’s Highway, 73, 121: G. Best, Temporal Pillars (Cambridge, 1964), 217. Sometimes it was not MPs themselves, but their constituents who were full of zeal for the public good. See Parliamentary History, xxxvi. 1060; Parliamentary Register, xxiii. 105–6.


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for reform in the nation’s legal institutions. Their efforts bore various fruits, including not only some of the acts relating to imprisonment for debt mentioned earlier, but also the act which finally established English, rather than Latin, as the sole language of the law.⁶⁰ In the 1770s and 1780s, the interest some Rockinghamite and Chathamite MPs displayed in the reform of the criminal law may similarly have had a political edge to it.⁶¹ Some MPs who set out to promote general measures seem almost to have drawn their causes out of a hat. But others’ concern arose out of their previous involvement with voluntary societies formed to promote particular forms of social or moral improvement. Societies of this kind commonly devoted most of their efforts to an immediate assault on social problems. But when their leaders became convinced that new legislation might help them to attain their ends, they might also turn their attention towards Parliament. If there were MPs among their number, these men were of course likely to be asked to bring in appropriate bills. Otherwise, some prominent figure judged likely to be sympathetic would be approached. The earliest society I have identified as being active in promoting legislation in this way was the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), founded in 1698. Bills promoted by the SPCK, some of which were successful, some of which were not, included bills for the repression of blasphemy, debauchery, and duelling (as previously mentioned), and for the provision of religious services in prisons.⁶² It was noted in 1708 that the Society hoped that, ‘as soon as the Legislature can find leisure to attend to so difficult a work’, some steps might be taken to further the general provision of education for the poor, but apparently Parliament never enjoyed sufficient leisure to turn its mind to this task.⁶³ At the end of the century, the Society for the Enforcement of His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality, or Proclamation Society, defined its brief as widely as the SPCK. It promoted bills relating to prisons, vagrants, liquor ⁶⁰ A. Hanham, ‘Whig opposition to Sir Robert Walpole in the House of Commons, 1727–34’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 1992), has done much to illuminate these machinations. Some aspects of the law reform movement of this period are briefly discussed in G. Aylmer, ‘From Office-Holding to Civil Service: the Genesis of Modern Bureaucracy,’ TRHS 5th ser., xxx (1980), 99–102. ⁶¹ Debates on the criminal law in the early 1770s are best traced in the Cavendish diaries. Sir Henry Cavendish’s Debates of the House of Commons, ed. J. Wright (2 vols, London, 1841–3), and BL, Egerton MSS 215–63; thereafter in the Parliamentary History and Parliamentary Register, though these may be supplemented by reports from a variety of newspapers and diaries. J. Brewer, ‘The Wilkites and the Law 1763–74’, in J. Brewer and J. Styles eds, An Ungovernable People. The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1980) is of related interest. See especially 160–1, 163. ⁶² For blasphemy and debauchery, G. V. Portus, Caritas Anglicana, or an enquiry into . . . religious etc. societies . . . 1678–1790 (London, 1912), 61, 66. SPCK and Wales, 83 ff, 93, notes activity in relation to duelling and prisons. See also Hitchcock, ‘The English Workhouse’, 115–27; Clark, ‘Mother Gin’, 74–7. ⁶³ J. Chamberlayne, Magnae Britanniae Notitia (London, 22nd edn, 1708), 276.

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licensing, apprenticeship, and the observance of the Sabbath.⁶⁴ Other societies had narrower aims. The Thatched House Society for the Relief of Small Debtors, for example, founded in 1772, operated initially as a charity, supplying funds to buy insolvent but worthy debtors out of prison. But experience acquired by investigating the cases of such debtors persuaded its leaders that existing law was seriously defective. Accordingly, Lord Beauchamp, one of the Society’s Vice Presidents, brought several bills into Parliament to amend the law.⁶⁵

S T R AT E G Y A N D P RO C E D U R E Certain difficulties might have been expected to confront backbenchers who set about trying to formulate general laws to guide the operations of government. How could such men inform themselves adequately about the current state of practice? And how could they feel confident that the regulations they proposed would be acceptable, practicable, and effective? In fact, under eighteenth-century conditions, difficulties such as these did not confront backbenchers alone. Such ministers as took an interest in questions of social policy also characteristically had little in the way of staff to research problems and explore the relative merits of various forms of remedy for them—although, in the case of measures relating to the administration of criminal or civil law, judges and experienced lawyers were presumably quite well placed to diagnose problems and suggest solutions. Private members proposing ambitious pieces of legislation—bills designed comprehensively to overhaul the poor laws, for example—often publicly professed their sense of their unfitness for the task confronting them.⁶⁶ Their modest disclaimers were no doubt in part conventional gestures, and in part devices to help them cope gracefully with criticism. But to some extent such protestations must be taken at face value. Private members probably did often feel ill-equipped to devise and bring to fruition major legislative projects. One possible strategy for a man in these circumstances was to trust that his own deficiencies might be compensated for by the expert advice he might procure in the course of the parliamentary process. He might seek to have even the substance of his measure largely supplied for him by others. Thus, an MP might ⁶⁴ Innes, ‘Politics and Morals’ (below, pp. 179–226). ⁶⁵ The best account of the Thatched House Society and Beauchamp’s legislative efforts is P. Lineham, ‘The Campaign to Abolish Imprisonment for Debt in England 1750–1840’ (unpublished MA thesis, Canterbury NZ, 1974), 89–101, 110–11, 135–41. See also D. Owen, English Philanthropy 1660–1960 (Cambridge, MA, 1964), 63–5; the several Reports of the Society, and Parliamentary History, xx. 1395–1406. For an initiative undertaken somewhat further down the social scale, see an interesting series of efforts by friendly societies to combine to obtain legislation securing their position, Manchester Journal, 23 Jan. 1779; York Courant, 21 Nov. 1786; St James Chronicle, 31 July, 9 Oct., 18 Nov. 1790 (I owe these latter references to Peter Clark). ⁶⁶ For example, HMC Townshend, 376; Parliamentary Register, xxii. 211.


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approach an experienced lawyer—a public office-holder or otherwise—with only the vaguest notion of what he wanted to accomplish, trusting to the lawyer’s practical experience and expert knowledge to flesh out the scheme for him.⁶⁷ Alternatively, the would-be progenitor of a measure might feel it within his reach to produce the outline of a scheme, but bring it into Parliament with very little commitment to the details of his own plan, in the hope that it might be hacked into more promising shape in committee, or indeed on the floor of the House.⁶⁸ Contemporary comment suggests what one might anyway suppose—that debates on bills of the kind we are concerned with were not on the whole very well attended. But that is not to say such bills might not be subjected to well-informed, wide-ranging, and probing criticism. Discussion seems often to have been dominated by lawyers and experienced magistrates; sometimes, other MPs who took a special interest in or had made a special study of some matter might take an active part. A mere handful of such men might provide a very effective vetting team. At the committee stage especially, they might take a bill in hand and very substantially recast it.⁶⁹ These eighteenth-century parliamentary processes are difficult to penetrate. Committee minutes were by and large destroyed in the fire of 1834, and newspapers very rarely carried reports of debates on such matters before the 1770s. It is possible to gain some insights into the character of discussion, however, from parliamentary diaries, correspondence, and newspaper reporting from the 1770s. Pamphlets sometimes make at least passing reference to discussions in Parliament, and something can be inferred from the study of successive versions of bills, when these survive. What the scanty surviving evidence does suggest is that it would be a mistake to suppose from the sparseness of the sources alone that well-informed and critical debate was not taking place. One example will illustrate the form a critical intervention might take. The parliamentary diary of William Hay, MP for Seaford (Sussex) under Walpole, includes among its entries some accounts of speeches made by Hay.⁷⁰ One of these sets out his views on a bill laid before Parliament in 1734, which proposed to make the offence of ‘assault with intent to rob’ (not previously defined as a distinct form of assault) punishable by transportation. By Hay’s own account, his criticisms of the bill were wide-ranging and vigorous. He argued that it would be difficult to prove the intent; that the bill would consequently open the way to ⁶⁷ For example, HMC Kenyon, 511, Peter Davies to Lloyd Kenyon. ⁶⁸ Thomas Gilbert, for instance, showed himself very willing to modify his original notions substantially in the light of discussion. ⁶⁹ For the role Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls, played in recasting William Hay’s poor law reform bills, see [Hay], Remarks on the Laws Relating to the Poor with Proposals for their Better Employment (London, 1751), p. v. ⁷⁰ N’hants RO, Hay MSS L (C) 1732–3. For the speech cited here, see L (C) 1732, entry for 13 March 1733/4.

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malicious prosecutions; that it was improper to make assault with intent to rob a transportable offence, when assault with intent to maim, ravish, or murder were not so; and that, in any case, fine or imprisonment—the punishments currently available in cases of assault—were more appropriate than transportation, in part because they could be more precisely calibrated to the severity of the offence. This is a striking fragment because almost no other accounts of parliamentary debates on bills relating to criminal justice survive from before the 1770s, and it has sometimes been supposed that such bills were not critically scrutinized before that date.⁷¹ However, it seems unlikely that Hay’s intervention was unique in kind. Hay was Chairman of East Sussex Quarter Sessions, a senior and experienced magistrate. His views may well have been heard with respect. The bill did not pass. Bills might be scrutinized in the light of the knowledge and experience MPs could bring to bear. But certain formal steps could also be taken to enhance the stock of knowledge at Parliament’s disposal. Select committees might go on investigatory trips (to London debtors’ prisons, for example) or people might be summoned to testify.⁷² It has been said of those examined by nineteenthcentury select committees that they were usually pre-selected to prove a case. My impression is that in the eighteenth century this might have been defended as appropriate practice. The object of summoning people was as often as not to demonstrate the need for legislation: so witnesses might have been summoned by a court of law, in the expectation that their evidence would support one side of a case. Thus, when ‘Mr Secretary Townshend’ was trying to persuade the Commons of the need to strengthen police powers in dealing with suspicious persons, in 1783, ‘two patroles and a thieftaker’ were summoned to the Bar of the House, to testify that they had recently taken up people in the night with offensive weapons on them.⁷³ As well as or instead of calling people to testify, Parliament might call for information in writing. In the first half of the eighteenth century, it was standard practice for Parliament to call for accounts and papers in connection with not only political and diplomatic but also fiscal and economic questions. During the second half of the century, it became increasingly common for Parliament to call for the systematic compilation of data to inform its discussions of social policy.⁷⁴ Thus, in 1751, Parliament launched an enquiry through Quarter Sessions into expenditure on the relief of the poor and removal of vagrants; in 1765, sheriffs were asked to return lists of prisoners for debt in every county, with details of the claims made against them; and in 1776, Parliament first attempted the collection of certain criminal statistics. Collecting data in such cases was commonly a matter ⁷¹ For fuller discussion, J. M. Innes and J. Styles, ‘The Crime Wave: Recent Writing on Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies, xxv (1986), 420–30. ⁷² For example, Knatchbull Diary, 88, 89. (See p. 15 n. 33). ⁷³ Parliamentary Register, x. 65. ⁷⁴ Lambert, Sessional Papers, i. 54–71, provides the best general account of Commons’ practice in calling for accounts and papers. Her volumes i–ii list all accounts and papers requested.


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of asking the relevant official to compile retrospective statistics from his records, and the returns secured were usually fairly comprehensive. Though Parliament might take steps to inform itself, it might also find information, and opinions, thrust upon it. Those who felt that proposed legislation impinged upon their interests might petition Parliament, have printed ‘cases’ distributed to members, or even retain counsel to put their case at the Bar of the House. Among the sorts of measure we are concerned with, those which bore upon the practice of imprisonment for debt were by far the most likely to provoke such representations. Court and prison officials, creditor interests, and imprisoned debtors themselves all repeatedly employed one or more of these techniques to press their views upon legislators.⁷⁵ The law relating to imprisonment for debt was also the subject of lively pamphlet debate from as early as the mid-seventeenth century.⁷⁶ Pamphlet debate on the pros and cons of the poor laws, and ways in which Parliament might amend them, took its rise from the late 1670s.⁷⁷ A pamphlet debate on criminal law and punishment was rather slower in taking shape. Although miscellaneous pamphlets appeared earlier, a real debate can scarcely be said to have developed before the 1770s.⁷⁸ By that time, pamphlets were no longer the only or chief medium through which such debates were pursued. Essays on these topics were also carried in magazines, and sometimes in newspapers.⁷⁹ By no means all essays and pamphlets which dealt with these topics placed parliamentary action at the centre of their concerns. But a strikingly large number did. Many addressed themselves to specific measures currently or recently under consideration by Parliament. Many pamphlets were dedicated, either to Parliament or the House of Commons as a whole, or to specific MPs. The growth of a wider public debate around questions of social policy reflects the development of a historically specific kind of ‘public opinion’, associated with a particular sort of media infrastructure. But the part Parliament played in shaping ⁷⁵ For example, HMC House of Lords MSS 1695–7, 396–409; The Case of the Mortgagees of the Office and Fees of Office, of Marshal of the Marshalsea of the Court of King’s Bench (nd [1753]) (BL: 357 d 10/45); Parliamentary History, xx, 1395–9. For examples relating to the poor laws, Proposals for the Better Management of the Affairs of the Poor (nd, [169?])—a four-page pamphlet, apparently written for distribution to MPs of which a copy survives in the Clark Library, Los Angeles; E. E. Butcher ed., Bristol Corporation of the Poor (Bristol, 1932), 117. ⁷⁶ D. Veall, The Popular Movement for Law Reform 1640–60 (Oxford, 1970), 142–51. ⁷⁷ Pamphlets by Sir Matthew Hale, Sir Josiah Child, Thomas Firmin, and others, adumbrating many of the issues which would inform discussion over succeeding decades, were all published within a few years during the late 1670s and early 1680s. ⁷⁸ Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law i. Part 3; Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 548–59, 569–73, 585–6. ⁷⁹ Daniel Defoe repeatedly attacked early eighteenth-century poor law reform proposals in his Review (Hitchcock, ‘The English Workhouse’, 39), as well as writing an important pamphlet on the subject. The Manchester magistrate T. B. Bayley, who published a series of letters commenting on Gilbert’s poor law reform proposals in the London Chronicle Jan.–Apr. 1787, commented in the first of these ( Jan. 25–7) that he thought he could better gain the attention of the public by writing for a newspaper than by publishing a pamphlet.

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this development, by providing both issues for discussion and an audience that seemed worth addressing, ought not to be ignored. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, and indeed from a much earlier date, MPs had no doubt been in the habit of seeking opinions from friends, acquaintances, neighbours, constituents, and other interested parties as to the merits and limitations of measures they were currently considering.⁸⁰ Bills were sometimes printed to facilitate their circulation to a wider audience. When William Hay was promoting poor law reform in the 1730s, he claimed that his object in encouraging the Commons to discuss the report of a committee he had chaired was ‘that Gentlemen might know the Sense of the House, and afterwards consult their neighbours in the country in order for a Bill another Sessions’.⁸¹ In the last few decades of the century, some MPs attempted to extend and to systematize such forms of consultation. Thomas Gilbert was especially remarkable for his efforts in this vein in connection with his campaign for the reform of the poor laws, pursued from the mid-1760s through to the late 1780s. Gilbert ultimately failed to obtain the comprehensive reform he sought. But this was certainly not for want of effort to ascertain what sorts of reform men experienced in and knowledgeable about local government might judge practicable and desirable. Gilbert developed his consultative techniques as he went along. By the late 1780s, he had brought them to a high pitch of elaboration. His procedure by this point was to begin by circulating an outline of his current reforming scheme as widely as possible, especially among active magistrates, with a request for comments. He then introduced a bill towards the end of the parliamentary session, and had it printed, so that it might circulate in the country during the summer. Magistrates were invited to consider the bill at Quarter Sessions or some special meeting, and to make their opinion known.⁸² It is clear that such meetings were held in several counties on several occasions during the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s.⁸³ Gilbert then brought a version of the bill amended in the light of comments received before Parliament in the next session. It should be stressed that Gilbert did amend his original scheme of the 1760s very considerably in the light of critical comments elicited in these various ways. ⁸⁰ See, for example, for various forms of consultation undertaken by Edmund Burke, in connection with a bill he had drafted to punish the plunderers of wrecks: Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T. W. Copeland (9 vols, Cambridge, 1958–70), iii. 140–1, 145, 222, 258. ⁸¹ N’hants RO, L (C) 1733, entry for 2 May 1735. In 1736, the Commons ordered that Hay’s bill be printed in sufficient numbers to supply all members: CJ, xxii. 717. Hitchcock, ‘The English Workhouse’, 244, notes that the SPCK distributed copies of Hay’s bill to their corresponding members. ⁸² T. Gilbert, Heads of a Bill for the Better Relief and Employment of the Poor (Manchester, 1786); A Plan of Police, and Objections . . . Stated and Answered (1786); Considerations on the Bills for the Better Relief and Employment of the Poor & c & c Intended to be Offered to Parliament this Session (London, 1787). ⁸³ For example, York Courant, 12 Dec. 1786, 23 Jan. 1787.


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At the end of the 1780s, the Proclamation Society adopted a rather different approach to systematizing consultation with experienced magistrates. They invited every county bench to nominate two from among their number as delegates to attend a convention to be held in London in the spring of 1790, where certain legislative schemes were to be considered. Most counties did nominate delegates, and the convention was duly held. The Society’s executive committee laid two proposals for bills—one dealing with prisons and one with vagrants—before the assembled magistrates, and amended their proposals in the light of the magistrates’ comments. Both bills were laid before Parliament, and both ultimately passed, though only in a further amended (and in one case, very much further amended) form. A second conference was planned for 1791, and several counties also nominated delegates to attend this, but, for some reason as yet unclear, the second convention never met.⁸⁴ Reviewing the question of whether or not eighteenth-century legislation bearing on general questions of social policy was implemented, in an earlier part of this discussion, we observed that the Webbs may have overstated the need for a strong executive. Consideration of the ways in which such legislation was generated prompts a similar reflection. Although officers of the central executive played some part in shaping such legislation, very often the initiative was taken by backbenchers. A considerable number of general measures were initiated in this way, critically assessed, and amended in the light of criticisms received. The ways in which the need for legislation was ascertained, and its appropriateness evaluated, were no doubt rather rough and ready: these procedures were not indeed without their contemporary critics.⁸⁵ However, the procedures adopted were more sophisticated than might have been imagined. It is unclear that, had officers of the central executive more consistently taken a directing role, the outcome would have been vastly different—or indeed that any imaginable eighteenth-century central executive department would have been much better placed to undertake these tasks.

C O N C LU S I O N S To conclude, let us reflect on the implications of this account in two sorts of general context. First, we might ask how this account might be fitted into a more chronologically extended survey of the changing ways in which English social policy has been shaped. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth ⁸⁴ Innes, ‘Politics and Morals’ (below, pp. 208–9). ⁸⁵ For example, B. White, An Inquiry into the Management of the Poor (1767), 64, suggested that instead of laws relating to ‘public manners’ being introduced ‘casually . . . by any public spirited member, a standing committee should be appointed for that great and important service’. (I owe this reference to Donna Andrew.)

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centuries—and indeed even into the later seventeenth century—the Privy Council clearly played some part (and at periods perhaps a predominant part) in shaping social policies. Acts of Parliament bearing on questions of social policy passed throughout this period may have been little more than the instruments the Council used to achieve its ends—although at least some seem to have been spontaneously generated within Parliament, and in every case the laying of a bill before Parliament gave men with experience of local government or with ideas on the subject a chance to speak their piece and to influence the character of measures.⁸⁶ It has sometimes been supposed that, when the Privy Council withdrew from the field, Parliament lost its sense of direction in these matters, or used its power only for very narrowly conceived and sectional ends: that is, chiefly to protect the property claims of the landed gentry.⁸⁷ The Webbs’ account can be fitted quite well into this sort of story. This situation began to change (this sort of account may go on) only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Change at that date was partly a result of pressures exerted on existing arrangements by social and economic change, but also had to do with the rise, from the later eighteenth century, of a new species of public figure: the humanitarian reformer—Gilbert and Wilberforce being specimens of the type; and also, a little later in the day, with the appearance of reform-minded administrators, as represented pre-eminently by Edwin Chadwick.⁸⁸ In contrast to the account just sketched, the account provided in this paper suggests that the early and mid-eighteenth century cannot be dismissed as a mere caesura. As the executive relaxed its grasp on social policy, Parliament, to a limited but not insignificant extent, assumed a directing role. Nor can this role adequately be characterized as consisting of no more than a set of reflex actions by landed gentlemen concerned to defend the social status quo. There is a story still to be told about when and how Parliament came to take on the part it was playing even at the beginning of our period (perhaps this story might be called ‘The Winning of the Initiative by the House of Commons’?). Looking to the other end of the story: developments during the eighteenth century should be seen as having provided the matrix out of which developments at the end of the century were to emerge. The humanitarian reformers of the late eighteenth century were not a new species of men, even though they had some distinctive attributes. Rather, they were the latest representatives of a line of backbench activists. When, in the late eighteenth century, the executive, chiefly in the form of the Home Office, began to take more responsibilities upon itself, ⁸⁶ G. Elton, The Parliament of England 1559–1581 (Cambridge, 1986); P. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), ch. 6, esp. 117; C. Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979), 35–48, esp. 45ff. ⁸⁷ For example, U. Q. R. Henriques, Before the Welfare State (London, 1979), 4ff. See also the passages cited by D. Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined, 6, 28. ⁸⁸ O. Macdonagh, Early Victorian Government 1830–1870 (London, 1977), ch. 1.


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it took over certain practices pioneered by MPs: for example, the compilation of criminal statistics as an aid to policy making.⁸⁹ If the lines along which effective responsibility for shaping social policy developed have been misrepresented, this is surely because many historians have followed the Webbs in assuming that significant social policy must be devised and implemented by a powerful executive. Once we modify this assumption, we can tell the story differently. A second general issue to be considered concerns the relation between the aspects of government treated here and other forms of state power. In his recent book, Sinews of Power, John Brewer has explored those late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century governmental developments which made possible England’s rise to great power status.⁹⁰ The eighteenth-century English state is misrepresented, Brewer observes, when it is portrayed as a weak state, for in fact in terms of its ability to mobilize money and military force, it was notably effective: quite as effective as any of the absolutist states. It might be thought that the argument presented here represents the other side of the coin from Brewer’s, and in a sense this is so: in both cases it is urged that we should be wary of underestimating the capacities of eighteenth-century English government. However, the arguments are also significantly distinct. John Brewer is concerned above all to trace the growing power of the executive element in English government, as manifested above all in its ability to mobilize money and military force. This paper has explored ways in which government was able to function fairly effectively even without the executive playing a large part. If both the executive and, in certain respects, the legislative components of eighteenth-century English government were somewhat more effective than has always been allowed, those two circumstances may be no more than contingently related. In this connection it would no doubt be illuminating to develop some comparisons between England and other eighteenth-century European states. But that is an exercise for another occasion. ⁸⁹ Nelson, The Home Office, 61–2. ⁹⁰ J. Brewer, Sinews of Power. War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (London, 1989).

2 The domestic face of the military–fiscal state: government and society in eighteenth-century Britain How did the eighteenth-century British state’s increasing orientation towards interstate rivalry, war, and empire affect the ways in which the central institutions of government addressed themselves to the task of ordering and governing British society, when something other than the mobilization of armed force and associated revenues was in question? And was Britain’s recurrent involvement in major wars itself a source of social problems? This chapter supplies some tentative answers to both these questions. The chapter falls into four parts. It can be argued that the reconfiguration of central government institutions associated with what John Brewer has termed the development of a ‘military–fiscal’ state played a part in disengaging central bodies from the traditional machinery of local government and from a range of domestic governmental activities, which had previously preoccupied men at the centre as well as those in the localities. The first section of the chapter develops this case. However—as the second section of the chapter shows—the case must not be overstated. New forms of central–local interaction developed in the new institutional context. What we might loosely term ‘social issues’, which always bulked large among local authorities’ concerns, did not disappear from the central government’s agenda. The repeated mobilization and demobilization of large armed forces during the eighteenth century did have some effect on the ways in which traditionally acknowledged social problems presented themselves—as the third section of the chapter suggests. The mobilization of armed forces created new categories of relief claimant. Crime, traditionally conceived of as an endemic problem, in this period also acquired an epidemic aspect: massive crime-waves followed the end of every war, as contemporaries both observed and came to expect. The ends of wars were also associated with upsurges in vagrancy. Finally, there First published in L. Stone ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1993), 96–127. Reproduced by permission of Cengage Learning Services Ltd. I am grateful to Geoff Hudson for his help with the third section, on War and social problems, and David Eastwood for suggestions about the fourth section, on European comparisons.

The domestic face of the military–f iscal state

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was concern to ease the reintegration of disbanded soldiers and sailors into the productive labour force both so that society might benefit from their labours and so that it should not suffer from their ‘idleness’. Government responses to these various challenges illustrate some of the forms of state action developed in this period. The final section of the chapter sets British experience in a European context. By comparison with what took place in numerous other European states, British developments appear modest and undramatic. The chapter concludes with some suggestions as to why they were so.

D I S E N G AG E M E N T ? Any account of the disengagement of central governmental bodies from aspects of the work of domestic government during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries must emphasize changes in the role and activities of the Privy Council. Once the organ of central government, intimately involved in all manner of domestic issues, the Privy Council was increasingly marginalized during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—and no other central body or bodies took on all the responsibilities once vested in it. During the early seventeenth century, and to some extent between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, the Privy Council served as a central administrative clearing-house. All aspects of the work of government came under its purview, including many miscellaneous domestic and local matters. At times of crisis—harvest failure, plague, commercial crisis—the Privy Council might bombard local authorities with instruction and exhortation, and demand from them full accounts of their proceedings. Communications between the centre and the localities were sometimes channelled through the circuit judges. Judges spent most of the year attached to the High Courts in London, but twice a year travelled around the country on circuit. Though they were most extensively exploited in times of crisis, the circuit judges might at any time be asked to bring pressure to bear on local authorities in furtherance of some central programme. In exceptional cases, errant local officers might be summoned before the Council to explain their conduct. Until its abolition during the civil wars, the Star Chamber provided a forum in which Privy Councillors might explore and deliver rulings on troublesome local matters.¹ The objectives central authorities had in view when they put pressure on local authorities were various. Many of their efforts were designed to promote public order, both in the sense that they were intended to avert serious disorder and in ¹ E. R. Turner, The Privy Council of England 1603–1784 (2 vols, Baltimore, 1928); P. A. Slack, ‘Books of Orders: The Making of English Social Policy 1577–1631’, TRHS, 5th ser. xxx. (1980) 1–22; J. A. Cockburn, A History of English Assizes 1558–1714 (Cambridge, 1972), ch. 8.

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the sense that they aimed to foster the proper ordering of society. Some efforts to control local government were associated with the central government’s military and associated fiscal needs, however. During the first half of the seventeenth century—and to some extent during the second half as well—the central state depended upon traditional local authorities to supply it with the men and money it needed to wage war. The militia, the core military force, was levied and trained in counties and towns under the direction of local gentlemen serving as Lords-Lieutenant and Deputy Lieutenants. Extraordinary taxes raised to finance wars chiefly took the form of subsidies levied by parish constables under the direction of local gentry serving as subsidy commissioners. Although it was by no means only in these connections that central authorities strove to exert their power in the localities, central dependence on local authorities in these respects provided one reason for keeping them firmly in subjection.² The effective power central authorities enjoyed by virtue of these arrangements certainly should not be overestimated. Seventeenth-century historians have amply illustrated the limits on the central government’s power in practice. Men at the centre acted on the basis of patchy and imperfect information. They might lack a sound grasp of realities and practicalities on the ground. Their orders were not always readily complied with. Local authorities were, moreover, entirely capable of taking initiatives of their own; men at the centre might do little more than take up and diffuse what they judged to be good local practice. These are important points to bear in mind. That men at the centre strove to direct and control local authorities is not, however, in question. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the configuration of institutions at the centre of English—subsequently British—government changed significantly. In formal institutional terms, central government became increasingly polyarchic—multi-centred. Power was distributed among a number of institutions, which were co-ordinated by more or less informal co-operation between leading statesmen. Although the Privy Council remained formally the body from which certain sorts of orders and directions had to issue, decisionmaking and practical administrative responsibility were increasingly located elsewhere. Certain aspects of imperial administration were the most important matters remaining substantively with the Privy Council. In most other respects, power shifted towards specialized departments: notably, the Treasury, the Admiralty, and the offices of the two (sometimes three) Secretaries of State. ² L. Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia 1558–1638 (London, 1967); A. Hassell Smith, ‘Militia Rates and Militia Statutes 1558–1663’, in P. Clark, A. G. R. Smith and N. Tyacke eds, The English Commonwealth 1547–1640 (Leicester, 1979); J. Kent, The English Village Constable 1580–1642 (Oxford, 1986), ch. 5; T. G. Barnes, Somerset 1625–1640 (London, 1961). There has been less work on such topics in the eras of the Interregnum or Restoration, but see now A. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven, 1986), esp. ch. 9; A. Coleby, Central Government and the Localities: Hampshire 1649–89 (Cambridge, 1987), and P. J. Norrey, ‘The Restoration Regime in Action: The Relation between Central and Local Government in Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire 1660–1688’, Historical Journal, xxxi (1988), 789–812.


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Parliament became, in practice, a more important part of the machinery of government than it had been theretofore, and absorbed much of the time and energy of leading statesmen. After 1688, Parliament met every year, and for substantial parts of each year (commonly between four and seven months). Every session, a heavy programme of fiscal measures had to gain parliamentary assent: in this connection, much information about the state of the armed forces had to be provided; Parliament might also need to be persuaded of the merits of the government’s foreign policy. Leading ministers met regularly as a ‘cabinet’ to co-ordinate both general governmental and parliamentary activity. Only a small—if crucial—part of the business of government came up at these meetings, chiefly diplomatic and military matters. There was no longer any one central clearing-house in which any matter might be raised and through which most kinds of business might be expected to pass.³ Had all the miscellaneous domestic business Privy Councils had previously dealt with been parcelled out among the new specialized departments, it is not obvious where much of it would have found a home. The Secretaries of State inherited a substantial part of it, but not the whole. They took on chiefly those matters which in some way related to other of their concerns. Their prime concerns were diplomatic and military: they co-ordinated the activity of the expanding diplomatic service; they transmitted orders to the army and navy, and were consequently well placed to have a say in military strategy and tactics; they also ran what there was in the way of an intelligence service. Perhaps because of their responsibilities in relation to the movement of troops, it was to the Secretaries of State that magistrates customarily addressed reports of serious disorders. Reports and rumours of sedition were also commonly directed to them. Among their miscellaneous paper-handling tasks, the Secretaries of State—that is to say, the clerks in their office—kept records of and correspondence relating to the pardoning process, a responsibility no doubt originating in their secretarial relationship to the Crown, the fount of mercy. In consequence, the Secretaries were drawn into some aspects of penal practice, assuming some administrative ³ For an overview of late seventeenth-century developments, see H. Tomlinson, ‘Financial and Administrative Developments in England 1660–1688’, in J. R. Jones ed., The Restored Monarchy 1660–1688 (London, 1979). For the Privy Council, see Turner, Privy Council, ii; J. J. Carter, ‘The Administrative Work of the English Privy Council 1679–1714’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, London University, 1954); O. Dickerson, American Colonial Government 1696–1765 (Cleveland, OH, 1912), esp. ch. 2. For specialized departments, see H. Roseveare, The Treasury (London, 1969); D. Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, 1965); M. A. Thomson, The Secretaries of State 1681–1782 (London, 1968). For Parliament and the operations of executive government see P. D. G. Thomas, The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1971), ch. 4; A. Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline: Officership and Administration in the British Army 1714–63 (Manchester, 1985), 3–9; Baugh, Naval Administration, ch. 9; G. C. Gibbs, ‘Parliament and Foreign Policy in the Age of Stanhope and Walpole’, English Historical Review, lxxvii (1962), 18–37. For the cabinet see E. R. Turner, The Cabinet Council of England 1622–1784 (2 vols, Baltimore, 1930).

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role in relation to transportation and, from the 1770s, forms of imprisonment developed in lieu of transportation.⁴ Until 1782 the Secretaries of State shared responsibility for home affairs. In that year the business of the office was reallocated, one Secretary taking over all the ‘home’ business. The Secretaries’ traditional home concerns—disorder, sedition, and punishment—formed a reasonably coherent package of issues. During the 1780s and 1790s, Home Secretaries (as they were subsequently to be known) further developed their responsibilities in this general area, accepting responsibility, for example, for piloting relevant legislation through Parliament. However, home affairs represented only a part of the relevant Secretary’s brief: he was also charged with all colonial business.⁵ According to its original brief, the Board of Trade, an investigative and advisory body first established in 1696 in succession to several Privy Council committees on ‘trade and plantations’, should have numbered the condition of the poor among its concerns. It did consider the state of the poor in its earliest years, inter alia launching an enquiry into parochial poor-relief expenditure through the Church of England’s visitation machinery (returns were obtained from perhaps one-half of the English and Welsh counties). Parliament amended the poor laws in several respects in the 1690s, and then and in the following decade considered amending them more drastically. The Board contributed to these discussions. Thereafter, however, it left such matters for others to pursue. Like its precursors, it focused its energies on ‘trade and plantations’.⁶ Reconfiguration at the centre was associated with other changes affecting the character of central–local relations. An expansion in the numbers of men directly and fairly effectively controlled from the centre—most notably, in the revenue services and the army—made central government less dependent than previously on the co-operation of local authorities in certain crucial respects. In the 1670s and 1680s, the Treasury assumed direct control over customs and excise collection, previously farmed out to contractors. The collection of land taxes remained in the hands of parish constables, and land-tax commissioners appointed from among local gentlemen. However, between the late seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries the trend (sometimes temporarily reversed in wartime) was for customs and excise to contribute an ever-greater, and land tax an ever-smaller, proportion of national revenue. The Restoration monarchs had begun to build up a ‘standing army’ independent of local control. On this ⁴ Thomson, Secretaries of State; T. Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England (London, 1978). ⁵ R. R. Nelson, The Home Office 1782–1800 (Durham NC, 1969). ⁶ I. K. Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration 1696–1720 (Oxford, 1968); S. Macfarlane, ‘Studies in Poverty and Poor Relief in London at the End of the Seventeenth Century’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1982), 263–76, and T. Hitchcock, ‘The English Workhouse: A Study in Institutional Relief in Selected Counties 1696–1750’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1985), ch. 2, discuss the board’s activities in relation to the poor.


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basis, they felt able to dispense with the services of the militia. Not until the mid-eighteenth century was the militia revived—and then only to complement professional military forces. In this context, although the political reliability of local authorities continued to be a matter of concern, at least until the waning of party strife in the mid-eighteenth century, their efficiency in discharging routine business was not at most times a matter of pressing concern for central government.⁷ Other factors were undoubtedly also in play, and had been in play for a long period, shaping the tone and content of central–local relations, modifying and reworking early seventeenth-century patterns. Historians have suggested that the Privy Council became somewhat less dirigiste in style even before the Civil War. The limited success of, and degree of hostility aroused by, the policy of ‘Thorough’ may have prompted caution. The abolition of Star Chamber somewhat curtailed the post-Restoration Privy Council’s coercive powers. Restoration monarchs experimented with new ways of bullying local authorities—chiefly to further their religious policies—but the most lasting effect of their efforts was to discredit such expedients. Throughout the eighteenth century the circuit judges continued occasionally to be asked to communicate the central government’s concerns; but their services in this line seem to have been less frequently called upon than before, perhaps in part because, after the Glorious Revolution, increasing rhetorical stress was laid upon the independence of the judiciary. At the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Privy Council still sometimes summoned local officials before it, but increasingly it relied on correspondence for all communications. In the following decades, as business increasingly gravitated outwards from the Privy Council towards departments, this continued to be their normal mode of operation. Written communications were predominantly informal in character; progressively less use was made of formal instruments of government.⁸ The pattern of Scottish developments, though different in substance from the English, was arguably similar in at least some of its implications. The union of 1707 entailed the abolition of both the Scottish Privy Council and the Scottish ⁷ J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1763 (London, 1989), ch. 4; J. R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1965), chs 1–3; N. Landau, The Justices of the Peace 1679–1760 (Berkeley, 1984). See also works listed in the latter part of note 2 for the practical operation of this system during the transitional Restoration period. ⁸ R. B. Outhwaite, ‘Dearth and Government Intervention in English Grain Markets 1590–1700’, Economic History Review, iii (1981), 389–406, for declining dirigisme even before the Civil War. For Restoration initiatives, see J. Miller, ‘The Crown and Borough Charters in the Reign of Charles II’, English Historical Review, (1985), 53–84; J. R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in England (London, 1972), ch. 6. For eighteenth-century examples of instructions to judges see J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), 553n (1754), Innes, ‘Politics and Morals’ (below, p. 185, n.16 (1781)), for general trends see Cockburn, English Assizes, 259–61; Landau, Justices of the Peace, 39, 60; see also 355–9; Carter, ‘English Privy Council’, 94, 361.

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Parliament. Scotland, or ‘North Britain’ as it was thenceforth commonly termed, became subject to the British Privy Council and British Parliament. New bodies were established to safeguard domestic prosperity and good order: initially, in 1711, a ‘Commission of Trade and Chamberlainrie’, subsequently (1714) a ‘Commission of Police’. However, the Lords Commissioners treated their posts as sinecures, and did not emerge as an important force in Scottish life. The Convention of Royal Burghs, the Court of Session, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and a succession of voluntary societies established to promote economic development survived as focuses for regional concerns, but of course none of these bodies exercised comprehensive governmental powers. During parts of the early eighteenth century, the metropolitan government assigned Scottish affairs to the care of a special third Secretary of State; but Scottish affairs only exceptionally figured more than marginally among the preoccupations of the British Privy Council, cabinet, or Parliament.⁹ Extensive Scottish participation in the rebellion of 1745 served briefly to fix the attention of leading British statesmen upon the northern part of the island. Attention focused upon, among other things, the important part played by hereditary office holders in Scottish local government—in marked contrast to the contemporary English pattern. Post-rebellion legislation abolished the ‘heretable jurisdictions’, in which important judicial and regulatory powers had been vested in substantial parts of the Highlands and scattered tracts in the lowlands. Hereditary sheriffs also lost their powers, being replaced by ‘sheriffs depute’ appointed from London—initially, local gentry; subsequently, commonly professional legal men.¹⁰ If it is possible to attribute greater vitality to Scottish local government in the later than in the earlier eighteenth century, however, the roots of this vitality appear to have been local rather than metropolitan, being associated with a growing fashion for county meetings to consider practical issues of domestic government, and with vigorous efforts by various voluntary societies to foster and direct the course of social and economic change.¹¹ R E C O N F I G U R AT I O N A persuasive case can be made for British central government having in some respects disengaged from various parts of the work of domestic government ⁹ P. W. J. Riley, The English Ministers and Scotland 1707–27 (London, 1964), ch. 12; J. S. Shaw, The Management of Scottish Society 1707–1764 (Edinburgh, 1983). ¹⁰ A. Whetstone, Scottish County Government in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Edinburgh, 1981), ch. 1. For heritable jurisdictions in operation, see S. J. Davies, ‘The Courts and the Scottish Legal System 1600–1747: The Case of Stirlingshire’, in V. A. C. Gatrell, B. Lenman, and G. Parker eds, Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe (London, 1980). ¹¹ Whetstone, Scottish County Government, 69–70; R. Mitchison, Agricultural Sir John: The Life of Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster (London, 1962), chs 8, 9 and 14.


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during the eighteenth century, as interstate rivalry, war and empire, and the mobilization of resources necessary to maintain Britain’s international position increasingly absorbed the imagination and energies of leading statesmen. Both initiative and practical administrative responsibility may be said to have devolved on to local authorities, who—with much experience behind them and with a well-developed and increasingly ambitious and reflective culture of public service to sustain them—were at least reasonably well equipped to respond to this challenge. However, the case is easily overstated. The reconfiguration of government, and particularly the disappearance of any central administrative clearing-house, makes eighteenth-century patterns of governmental activity at times all but impossible to reconstruct. Putting bits and pieces of information from different institutional contexts together, we can sometimes establish that some sort of agreed strategy must have existed in relation to certain domestic issues. However, rarely can we establish how, by whom, or in what institutional or extra-institutional context such strategies were developed. Clues to the existence of some sort of governmental strategy may be provided by speeches made by the monarch at the opening of the parliamentary session, bills subsequently brought before Parliament, and Privy Council proclamations—most especially when these cluster in some obviously patterned way. The King’s Speech was drafted by members of the cabinet and approved in cabinet. In some years, a section—usually the closing section—of this speech addressed domestic issues. These might immediately be referred to a parliamentary committee or some related bill be brought in, sometimes by an office-holder, sometimes by an ordinary MP with strong ministerial connections. Parliament sometimes specifically requested the King to issue an associated proclamation: sometimes the timing simply irresistibly suggests a co-ordinated plan. Matters for which there is this sort of evidence of a central government strategy include the relief and discipline of the poor, at the very end of the seventeenth century; the threat of plague, in the early 1720s; crime and general immorality, seen as a root cause of crime, in the early 1750s; and the threat of dearth, at various periods.¹² ¹² The King’s Speech was printed in the CJ for each session; proclamations are most easily traced through Bibliotheca Lindesiana, viii, Handlist of Proclamations Issued by Royal and Other Constitutional Authorities (Wigan, 1913). For the poor, see e.g. CJ, xii, 1, 4, 8; for general accounts of policy in this period, see above note 5. Plague: CJ, xix, 646; P. Slack, The Impact of the Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985), ch. 12. Crime: CJ, xx, 3, 298, 345, 519, 841; Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 219–22, 520–31, 553n. Dearth: proclamations against forestalling and engrossing were issued in 1709, 1740, 1756, and 1766. The King’s Speech did not mention the problem in all these years—in some years other matters were more immediately pressing—but did in 1740 and in 1756. Problems associated with high prices provided the chief reason for convening Parliament in 1767. Until the 1760s, after which acts recurrently empowered the Privy Council to regulate grain export, changes in ordinary practice to deal with crisis conditions were usually authorized by act of Parliament. For a survey of changing policy, see D. G. Barnes, A History of the English Corn Laws 1660–1846 (London, 1930), chs 3–5. There has been much work on grain rioting in recent years; policy tends to be incidental to these accounts. For a collection of brief pieces

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The list that can be compiled in this way certainly does not exhaust even the roster of issues attracting the more ambitious, multi-partite forms of central governmental effort. Other matters were more particularly the concern of single departments or other central bodies. Most of the major bodies in the reconfigured governmental system can, in fact, be shown to have engaged—sometimes in rather unexpected ways—with aspects of domestic government.¹³ The Privy Council, as we have noted, does not appear to have been much involved with substantive domestic policy in the eighteenth century—though it sometimes became involved as a matter of form, as the proper body to issue certain sorts of order. However, it did at this time acquire responsibility for co-ordinating quarantine policy, primarily involving the regulation of shipping. When disease was considered to pose a serious problem within the country, the Privy Council characteristically dealt with this too. When, in 1721, it was feared that plague might be imported from abroad, new legislation empowered the Privy Council to isolate affected areas. In the event, there was no need for it to act. It did, however, act vigorously against ‘cattle plague’ during several serious outbreaks: directing the destruction of infected animals, restricting the movement of others, and receiving reports from local officials in the counties affected.¹⁴ The cabinet—in origin, a committee of the Privy Council—developed its form and identity in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. At an early stage it assumed—somewhat incongruously amidst its diplomatic and military concerns—a special role in relation to the administration of criminal justice. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many crimes carried the death penalty, but a significant proportion of those sentenced to death were pardoned. Until the Revolution, decisions as to whom to pardon seem to have been made by the King, usually on the advice of the circuit judges, who presided over trials for most serious crime. In the eighteenth century, this continued to be the way in which decisions about provincial pardons were made. However, the cases of those sentenced to death in the metropolis—always a disproportionately large fraction of the total—were handled differently. From the 1690s the Recorder by some of those working in this field, see A. Charlesworth ed., An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain 1548–1900 (London, 1983). R. Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England 1793–1800 (Gloucester, 1988), Parts 3 and 4, provides the most thorough study available of public responses in one period of crisis. ¹³ I focus here only on a few major institutions, but the list could be extended. See, for example, for the Mint’s activities in relation to ‘clippers and coiners’, and a case study of its involvement in a particular campaign, which also excited other governmental interest, J. Styles, ‘Our Traitorous Money Makers’, in J. Brewer and J. Styles eds, An Ungovernable People (London, 1980), esp. 183–6, 220–7. ¹⁴ C. F. Mullett, ‘A Century of English Quarantine (1709–1825)’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, xxiii (1949), 527–45; 7 Geo. I, s.1 c.3; Slack, Impact of the Plague, for general discussion, J. Broad, ‘Cattle Plague in Eighteenth-Century England’, Agricultural History Review, xxxi (1983), 104–15.


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of London began to attend upon the cabinet to discuss these cases. Commonly about one-half of those sentenced to death were pardoned, in the metropolis as elsewhere, usually on condition that they submitted to some lesser punishment, such as transportation. In this context, the cabinet’s role in the pardoning process provided ministers with a real opportunity to shape the character of criminal justice, by altering the balance between different forms of punishment, according to their sense of the needs of the times. Playing this role kept them aware of trends in metropolitan crime; it also encouraged them to reflect on the relative merits of different forms of punishment. The cabinet’s involvement with such matters must have helped secure for criminal justice the important place it was occasionally accorded on the governmental agenda.¹⁵ The Treasury was the most sprawling of eighteenth-century departments, with a large number of boards and offices associated with different branches of the revenue grouped under it. The Treasury, assisted by the Board of Trade (and its successor, the Privy Council’s Committee on Trade and Plantations), clearly played a crucial part in shaping what there was in the way of an economic policy. It was upon such varied stimuli as the Treasury could supply to the national economy—by manipulating customs and excise duties, providing bounties to stimulate particular forms of production or trade, redistributing or (when possible) absolutely reducing tax burdens—that eighteenth-century governments chiefly relied to achieve and distribute the benefits of prosperity, and in general promote domestic contentment.¹⁶ In the generally well-developed English economy, such measures were expected to suffice. In Scotland (as in Ireland) it could be argued the case was different: more in the way of social engineering, and managed economic development, was called for. Extensive Scots participation in the rebellions of 1715 and 1745 disposed ministers to look kindly on schemes to civilize the Scottish people. Special bodies set up to address this task could conveniently be linked, by more or less loose ties, to the Treasury. The year 1727 saw the establishment of a Board of Trustees for Fisheries and Manufactures, charged with promoting Scottish fishing and the linen industry. Its members were appointed by royal patent; its powers determined by two acts of Parliament; its funds supplied from a variety of central sources. The Trustees, who concentrated their efforts on education and training, quality control, and the provision of financial incentives, enjoyed very substantial independence, but were required to seek Treasury approval for their plans at three-year intervals. More closely constrained by the ¹⁵ J. M. Beattie, ‘The Cabinet and the Management of Death at Tyburn after the Revolution of 1688’, in L. Schwoerer ed., The Revolution of 1688–9: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge, 1992). ¹⁶ Although the nature of the sources makes the subject a relatively difficult one to grapple with, it is nonetheless remarkable how little work has been done on the role of the Treasury in shaping and executing economic policy in eighteenth-century England. Roseveare’s study The Treasury focuses narrowly on the Treasury, not including its subordinate boards, and on the issue of financial control.

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need to gain Treasury support for its ventures was a somewhat later body, the Commissioners of the Annexed Estates, established in 1755 to administer certain estates confiscated from Jacobite rebels after the ’45, with a view to the social and economic development of the Highlands. The commissioners attempted to reshape tenurial relations after the English model, to improve farming methods, and to supply technical and religious education.¹⁷ The Treasury’s capacious umbrella likewise provided shelter for a modest agency, the Inspectorate of Corn Prices, established by act of Parliament in 1770, in the context of public and parliamentary concern about the economic and social effects of adverse trends in grain prices. A team of clerks collated and publicized information collected by inspectors appointed by local magistrates in market-towns throughout Britain, in order to provide a better informational basis for regulating grain imports and exports.¹⁸ Some of the domestic business that had come the way of seventeenth-century central bodies did so as a result of initiatives from without. In the eighteenth century, representations undoubtedly continued to be made on the basis of local experience. They were directed in various ways, and thence might travel by various routes. No doubt ministers and their staff often dealt with such business informally. Applications of this kind, when they survive, can often be found in private, rather than official, papers.¹⁹ In the eighteenth century, Parliament probably attracted some business that in the seventeenth century might have found its way to the Privy Council. Convened frequently, and always for several months at a time, primarily so that they could work their way through the annual programme of fiscal measures, eighteenth-century Parliaments were, by unintended consequence, more consistently accessible, and consequently more useful, than their seventeenthcentury predecessors had been to men confronting problems of government in the localities. Sometimes, especially in the later part of the eighteenth century, MPs representing local interests sought to address local problems by sponsoring bills that were purely local in scope; but every session also saw a handful of measures addressing the sorts of issues that concerned local authorities by means of generally applicable regulations. It was relatively uncommon, though by no means unknown, for ministers or other leading public office-holders to introduce such bills; but they were consulted about them and might sit on parliamentary committees considering them. Parliament cannot properly be left out of any account of the workings of ‘central government’ in eighteenth-century Britain. ¹⁷ A. Durie, The Scottish Linen Industry in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1979); Shaw, Management of Scottish Society, 124–32; A. M. Johnson, Jacobite Estates of the Forty-Five (Edinburgh, 1982). ¹⁸ 10 Geo. III c.39, Barnes, Corn Laws, 41, 50. ¹⁹ J. Innes, ‘Parliament and Social Policy’ (above, p. 34). See also Innes, ‘Politics and Morals’ (below, pp. 179–226), for an account of a royal proclamation against vice and immorality being elicited by extra-official campaigners to serve their own ends.


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It had become the main forum in which issues of domestic government were addressed. Ministers and other office-holders’ attendance on Parliament meant that they could not but be kept aware of these concerns.²⁰ Eighteenth-century Parliaments were more than just machines for producing legislation. They might also function as investigative bodies. Both Privy Council and Parliament at various times during this period enquired into such matters as the workings of the grain trade (in response to the threat of dearth) or issues in contention in industrial disputes.²¹ Parliamentary resources could also be harnessed to the task of conducting general surveys and, in the second half of the eighteenth century, were repeatedly exploited to this end. In the early 1750s, and at intervals thereafter, the House of Commons launched inquiries into parochial poor-relief expenditure and related aspects of local practice (securing rather more comprehensive returns than those obtained in the 1690s by the Board of Trade). They also sponsored inquiries into imprisonment for debt, vagrancy, and charitable endowments. When the Home Office began to collect criminal statistics in the closing decade of the century, it developed a form of inquiry first inaugurated under parliamentary auspices.²² Some of these latter inquiries embodied an approach to the tasks facing government that had been developing only since the late seventeenth century. Early seventeenth-century requests for information from local authorities were usually, in effect, attempts to establish whether local authorities were effectively exerting themselves—or, indeed, were designed to goad them into action. No attempt was made to build up any kind of systematic picture from the returns obtained. In the later eighteenth century the conscientiousness or otherwise of the authorities was not the main concern; the object was rather to take the measure of a problem. Post-revolutionary fiscal policies mobilized very substantial sums of money. During the eighteenth century, grants from central funds were made to support a variety of domestic projects. Some monies were pumped into operations under the control of existing governmental agencies, others to voluntary bodies constituted by royal charter. Some examples must suffice to illustrate the variety of ends to which such monies were devoted. On the recommendation of Royal Commissioners appointed to survey the state of education in the Highlands after the ’15, £20,000 was set aside to erect and maintain schools. From 1717 the Treasury began to subsidize certain forms of punishment. Public spending in ²⁰ Innes, ‘Parliament and Social Policy’ (above, pp. 21–47). Scottish interests were certainly less well represented: see Shaw, Management of Scottish Society, 126, though the picture appears to have changed a little later in the century. ²¹ M. Beloff, Public Order and Popular Disturbances 1660–1714 (London, 1963), 69; Barnes, Corn Laws, 35, 37, 38, 54–5, 73, 77, 84; Turner, Privy Council, ii, 491; G. Henson, History of the Framework Knitters (orig. 1831; Trowbridge, 1970), 132–5, 194–232, 383–416. ²² Innes, ‘Parliament and Social Policy’ (above, p. 42).

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this sector escalated steeply towards the end of the century: some £86,000 went to subsidize transportation to America from 1717 until the subsidy was ended in 1772; from 1776 government grants paid for the maintenance of prison hulks on the Thames; during the following quarter-century, over £700,000 was spent in this way; transportation to Australia from 1787 to 1797 cost something over a million pounds. In the 1730s and 1750s £7,700 was devoted to buying out financial interests which were complicating the management of the great debtors’ prisons attached to the High Courts; further—larger—sums were subsequently devoted to rebuilding these prisons. From 1756 until 1771 grants of the order of £30,000 a year were paid to the Foundling Hospital, on condition that it maintain an open admissions policy. The closing decades of the century saw a number of miscellaneous relief grants paid: £15,000-odd for the distribution of military stores in the Highlands to relieve distress following the poor harvest of 1783; in 1786–7 some £20,000 for the relief of ‘distressed black persons’, and for transporting some of them to establish a new settlement in Sierra Leone; in 1800 £20,000 (repayable) to parishes in the East End of London and the industrial north overwhelmed by the burden of relief payments in another bad harvest year.²³ The significance of these items lies on the whole not in their absolute size: local authorities at this time were raising hundreds of thousands, ultimately millions, of pounds a year for the relief of the poor; central funding for domestic projects of all kinds was trivial by comparison. Such significance as they had derived rather from their strategic character. Injections of cash from central funds made possible certain initiatives that otherwise might not have been attempted. By no means all such monies were put to effective use. It is unclear what became of the money set aside for Highland schools. Though the Foundling Hospital did run an open admissions policy, this was associated with such high death rates that Parliament ultimately withdrew its backing for the scheme. By contrast, in two of the cases cited—the granting of subsidies for transportation and the buying-out of vested interests in debtors’ prisons—the release of relatively small sums from public funds helped to solve problems that had plagued responsible authorities for decades. Similarly, relief to the Highlands and to ²³ M. G. Jones, The Charity School Movement (Cambridge, 1938), 179; R. Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies 1718–1775 (Oxford, 1987), 70–1; H. Colvin ed., The History of the King’s Works (6 vols, London, 1963–73), v, 350–7; vi, 627–8; R. McClure, Coram’s Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1981), chs 7–9; T. C. Smout, ‘Famine and Famine Relief in Scotland’, in L. M. Cullen and C. Smout eds, Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Economic History 1600–1900 (Edinburgh, 1977); F. Shyllon, Black People in Britain 1555–1833 (London, 1977), Part 2; Wells, Wretched Faces, 313–14. Increasing confidence about spending public money for such purposes seems to be reflected in the patterns of compensation payments to farmers ordered to kill diseased cattle (Broad, ‘Cattle Plague’, 106, 113). Some, but not all, such payments can be traced in PP (1868–9), xxxv, Part 1, I and Appendices 2 and 3, where they are classed as expenses of ‘civil government’. An even more selective overview is provided in Sir J. Sinclair, A History of the Public Revenue of the British Empire (3rd edn, London, 1803).


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overburdened parishes provided a safety net when the ordinary relief system could not cope.²⁴ Clearly the notion that, in the eighteenth century, British central governmental institutions disengaged from many aspects of the work of domestic government, substantially abandoning that field to local authorities, needs qualification. Yet undeniably, governmental structures and patterns of activity had changed. Pulling together some of the themes that have emerged from our account, we might particularly emphasize four aspects of change. First, eighteenth-century central governmental institutions, having been adapted so as to enable them to sustain more substantial military and naval forces than had their seventeenth-century counterparts, had certain novel resources at their disposal which, to the extent they were not required for other ends, could be tapped for domestic purposes. Local authorities could see many advantages in exploiting these resources. At this as at other periods, when central government presented itself as a store of resources, rather than as a source of unwelcome obligations, or as an inquisitor, we should not be surprised to find local authorities positively welcoming its activity. As we shall see further in the next section, the opportunity to off-load on to central funds burdens previously borne on local rates was commonly welcomed when offered; landed gentlemen especially could see attractions in transferring to a largely indirect tax-base burdens that, when locally funded, fell upon land. The standing army, likewise, might well be regarded as a valuable resource by local authorities. Eighteenth-century Secretaries of State not infrequently resisted applications from magistrates for troops to help suppress disorders and for the retention of troops to keep the peace for extended periods in the aftermath of riots. It was important, the Secretaries were wont to argue, that magistrates should not depend too much on the army: the ‘civil power’ should be as self-reliant as possible.²⁵ Second, more frequent and longer sessions of Parliament empowered men not holding central office: they gave them a forum in which they could strive to work out their concerns without the need for anything more than acquiescence on the part of ministers or other high public officers. Parliament cannot be classified in terms of any simple central–local dichotomy. It was an arena in which representatives of different levels of government met and collaborated. Third, the contexts in which central government can be found playing a leading role do not differ greatly between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries: as we have noted, dearth, disease, poverty, and crime all, on occasion at least, elicited high-level responses during the eighteenth century. However, the forms of central government action did change. We find legislation, proclamations, ²⁴ Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 470–83, 500–6; CJ, xxi, 274 ff., 376 ff., 513 ff.; R. Mitchison, ‘North and South: The Development of the Gulf in Poor Relief Practice’, in R. A. Houston and I. D. Whyte eds, Scottish Society 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1989). ²⁵ See, for example, Hayter, Army and the Crowd, 95–6.

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perhaps circular letters urging authorities to act, responsiveness to suggestions from elsewhere, perhaps willingness to expend central funds—but rather little in the way of close monitoring of local activity (though the case of cattle plague suggests that this was by no means beyond the system’s capacity). Furthermore, although central government sometimes took the lead, it by no means always did: there is more evidence of widespread innovative activity by local authorities, in counties as well as in towns, in this period than in the seventeenth century.²⁶ Finally, although we have mainly been concerned with structures of government, we should also note that ideas about how government should properly or might profitably act were changing, and affecting attitudes and expectations at all levels. The notion that, on the whole, government should interfere as little as possible in the workings of the domestic economy, for example, encouraged eighteenth-century central government to be highly selective in the forms of economic intervention it sponsored, but equally had a dampening effect on the activities of local authorities.²⁷ WA R A N D S O C I A L P RO B L E M S War and the fiscal pressures associated with war had many complex effects on British society; but the most immediately evident social effects of war were those associated with the repeated mobilization and demobilization of large armed forces. A necessarily sketchy survey of responses to these problems will illustrate aspects of the domestic operation of eighteenth-century government. Fewer men mobilized to fight the War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740s than to fight the War of the Spanish Succession at the beginning of the century. With this exception, each successive major conflict saw greater numbers of men in arms. In the 1690s over 100,000 men served in the army and navy; at the end of the century, over 400,000, in the army, navy, and militia. Forces were characteristically reduced by one-half or more at the conclusion of wars.²⁸ Sailors might expect to find immediate employment elsewhere, in the merchant ships of Britain or other nations; the tens, ultimately hundreds, of thousands of soldiers discharged faced a somewhat more problematic transition into the very different patterns of civilian life. Both the mobilization and the demobilization of forces had broader social repercussions. ²⁶ See Innes, ‘Politics and Morals’ (below, pp. 185– 90), for the extraordinary range of initiatives launched by local authorities in the 1780s. ²⁷ R. K. Kelsall, ‘Wage Regulation under the Statute of Artificers’, in W. E. Minchinton ed., Wage Regulation in Pre-Industrial England (Newton Abbot, 1972), ch. 7, asks whether the gradual abandonment of regulation should be traced to ‘the removal of the strong hand of the Council’, and concludes not. ²⁸ Brewer, Sinews of Power, 30–3; C. Emsley, British Society and the French Wars 1793–1815 (London, 1979), 94.


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The sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries saw the development of the notion that all but the ‘undeserving’ among the poor had some claim to public support. In this context, one consequence of the growth of these fluctuating—and dangerous—forms of employment was the posing of a set of challenges to existing relief systems. Acceptable means had to be found to support those disabled, or simply grown aged, in military or naval service. What of the families of soldiers and sailors? Could they be left to the care of the parish? Or, if only to ease the recruitment of the armed forces, should their dependants be offered superior provision? Demobilization at the end of wars apparently provoked an upsurge in crime: the end of every eighteenth-century war saw a sharp upturn in numbers of property offences prosecuted. In the early seventeenth century, the pattern had been different. Crime had apparently increased during wartime—an intelligible effect in a period when military campaigns were seasonal, and soldiers at home apparently not subject to effective military discipline. To cope with the disorderly soldier problem, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century local authorities had established provost marshals, charged with arresting and seeing to the punishment of vagrants and soldiers. During the eighteenth century, perhaps from the time of King William’s War of 1689–97, war brought a reduction in prosecuted crime rates; peace and demobilization, a sharp hike. Contemporaries became very familiar with this pattern. The first attempt to register it quantitatively was made in 1772, when Stephen Theodore Janssen tabulated numbers executed each year from the Old Bailey, grouping the figures into blocks of war years and peace years.²⁹ These patterns very probably do in part reflect the socially dislocating effects of demobilization—the effects of turning tens of thousands of men loose to find their way home and find work. They also reflect the simple fact that the endings of wars released large numbers of young men—the group most commonly the objects of criminal prosecutions—most of whom had been absent from the country for the duration of the war. During wartime, moreover, some young men who committed crimes were offered immunity from prosecution if they would enlist; in peacetime, the task of coping with disorderly young men fell more squarely upon the criminal justice system. Secretary of State Townshend acknowledged this in 1783, when he brought two bills into Parliament designed to combat crime in the metropolis. Had the war continued, he observed, he might have addressed the problem by sending the press-gangs out. Contemporary expectation that the ends of wars would be associated with ²⁹ P. Lawson, ‘Property, Crime and Hard Times in England 1559–1624’, Law and History Review, iv (1986), 114–17; L. O. J. Boynton, ‘The Tudor Provost Marshal’, English Historical Review, lxxvii (1962), 437–55; D. Hay, ‘War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: The Record of the English Courts’, Past and Present, xlv (1982), 117–60; S. T. Janssen, Tables of Death Sentences (London, 1772; broadsheet, of which a copy is held by the Guildhall Library, London).

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an increase in crime may also have introduced an element of self-fulfilling ‘moral panic’.³⁰ That soldiers travelling through the countryside effectively swelled the numbers of ‘vagrants’ had officially been recognized from at least the sixteenth century—when, on the one hand, soldiers making their way home were officially exempted from the penalties to which rogues and vagabonds were subject; on the other hand, those counterfeiting soldiers’ passes were made liable to execution, and provost marshals were appointed to discipline disorderly soldiers and vagrants.³¹ The cost of returning vagrants to their home parishes was laid upon counties in 1700. County expenditure totals suggest that expenditure commonly rose in the aftermath of wars. In the period following the end of the American War especially, a supposed increase in vagrancy became a focus for public and official concern.³² Finally, concern was expressed about how disbanded soldiers—and even sailors—were to be reintegrated into productive social roles.³³ A matter of concern in part because unemployed servicemen might be expected to swell the ranks of the poor, vagrant, or criminal, this issue also attracted attention inasmuch as it was supposed that these men constituted a valuable social resource—perhaps one especially well fitted for particular purposes. It could also be argued that it was dishonourable for the nation not to make proper provision for those who had served it—and perhaps impolitic, when the next war would infallibly see the recruiting sergeants out on the streets again. It is not suggested that these problems typified the wider range of social problems facing eighteenth-century British government. The more categorically they concerned soldiers, sailors, and their dependants, the more easily they could be seen as constituting a special case, demanding—in the context of general eighteenth-century arrangements—the immediate involvement of central government. In practice, however, as we shall see, a variety of forms of central–local ³⁰ Hay, ‘War, Dearth and Theft’; J. M. Innes and J. Styles, ‘The Crime Wave: Recent Writing on Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies, xxv (1986), 393; Parliamentary History xxiii, 364–5. See also R. Paley, ‘Thieftakers in London in the Age of the Macdaniel Gang’, in D. Hay and F. Snyder eds, Policing and Prosecution in Britain 1750–1850 (Oxford, 1989), 324–6, 339, on the effect of special rewards offered by royal proclamation in stimulating prosecutions. ³¹ 39 Eliz. I c.4, 39 Eliz. I c.21; Boynton, ‘Tudor Provost Marshal’. The county of Devon, which continued to appoint marshals down to the early eighteenth century, may have been the last to persist with the practice. ³² For war and vagrancy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London, 1985), 93–5. For the eighteenth century, see Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 232, n. 60; S. Pole, ‘Crime, Society and Law Enforcement in Hanoverian Somerset’ (unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Cambridge, 1983), tab. V.7; ‘28th Report from the Select Committee on Finance. Police and Convict Establishments’, in Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, xiii, 398–9; Victoria County History: Shropshire, v (Oxford, 1979), 122; Innes, ‘Politics and Morals’ (below, pp. 184–5 and refs). ³³ See, for example, An Enquiry into the Rights of Free Subjects, in which the Cases of British Sailors and Common Soldiers are Distinctly Consider’d and Compar’d (London, 1749), 42–3.


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interaction were involved, nor even were policies narrowly targeted on the armed forces without implications for the treatment of other social groups. Let us consider first the question of relief—pensions or other support—for soldiers and sailors and their dependants. Certain forms of special provision had been developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.³⁴ From the late sixteenth century, disabled sailors, or their widows, had been able to apply—by no means necessarily successfully—for payments from the ‘Chatham Chest’, itself financed by deductions from sailors’ wages. The Chatham Chest continued to operate throughout our period.³⁵ Early seventeenth-century legislation, furthermore, provided for the payment of pensions to maimed soldiers or sailors out of county rates. Such payments continued to be made in some counties down to the early years of the eighteenth century, but appear then to have been phased out. The general establishment and increasing generosity of ordinary poor relief may well have helped to make special provision seem less necessary. Certainly, it seems to have been considered that the poor and vagrancy laws between them provided a basic safety net for soldiers’ and sailors’ dependants: in the 1790s Sir Jeremiah Fitzpatrick considered what might be done for Irish soldiers’ dependants, given the lack of an Irish relief system comparable to the English.³⁶ At the same time that county-funded gave way to parish-funded relief, however, new forms of central provision also came into play. Military hospitals and arrangements for the care of sick and wounded sailors established during the Commonwealth had been abandoned at the Restoration. Yet within a few decades, interest in such schemes revived. Charles II inaugurated plans for the ³⁴ I have greatly profited from discussing these matters with Geoff Hudson, whose Oxford DPhil thesis is concerned with the treatment of ‘maimed soldiers’ in the seventeenth century. ³⁵ I. G. Powell, ‘The Chatham Chest under the Early Stuarts’, Mariner’s Mirror, 8 (1922), 174–82; J. Ehrman, The Navy in the War of William III (Cambridge, 1963), 130–1. Trinity House, established to support merchant seamen and their families, may also have provided relief: when sailors switched back and forth between the merchant marine and the Royal Navy, it is not clear on what basis their eligibility for one or another form of relief was determined. Trinity House Hull noted in 1699 that its poor had much increased since the war (CJ, xiii, 167). ³⁶ O. Macdonagh, The Inspector General: Sir Jeremiah Fitzpatrick and Social Reform 1783–1802 (London, 1981), 257–67. For pressure for pensions for soldiers’ dependants in the 1690s, see J. Childs, The British Army of William III (Manchester, 1987), 157. For three years in the early eighteenth century, monies were paid out from land-tax receipts to parishes supplying soldiers, to defray the cost of supporting those soldiers’ dependants, at the rate of £3 per soldier. That system was then abandoned, however, in favour of bounties, from the same source, paid directly to volunteers (7 Ann. c.2; 8 Ann. c.13; 9 Ann. c.4; 10 Ann. c.12). I am informed by Alannah Tomkins that the records of Exeter Corporation of the Poor show that it received £46 9s for the support of soldiers’ families from this source in 1709, so the provision was no dead letter. The Corporation’s committee for the poor was ordered ‘to examine into the Case of such ffamilyes whose Relations have been lately impressed and order them Such parts of the Said money given by Act of parliam’ as they shall think fit’. During the American War public subscriptions were set on foot for the support of poor soldiers and their families—in part a reflection, no doubt, of the peculiarly ideologically fraught character of this war, but in part perhaps too of changing fashions in charity (J. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution (Macon, GA, 1986), 152–6).

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construction of a ‘hospital’ for former soldiers; Chelsea Hospital was some years in the building, opening its doors only in 1690. Greenwich Hospital, originally conceived in 1691 as a hospital for sick and wounded sailors only, was in 1695 reconceptualized as a ‘hospital’ in the broader early modern sense—an asylum both for the sick and for disabled and aged seamen. As such, William III believed that it would serve as a memorial to the charitable impulses of his recently deceased Queen. Finances for both came from a number of sources—Greenwich in particular was endowed with substantial lands, augmented after 1715 by the gift of the forfeited Derwentwater estate; but both depended in part on compulsory stoppages from wages (an arrangement probably in part to be viewed as a device for tying public subsidies to the size of the forces).³⁷ The number of men maintained on the funds of the two hospitals was considerable, and grew in the face of rising demand in the course of the century. Chelsea Hospital had from its foundation house-room for some 472 pensioners. The expansion of the army in the 1690s ensured that demand for these places would almost immediately exceed supply. Further provision was made in the form of ‘out-pensions’. The number of out-pensioners escalated with every subsequent war: in the 1690s out-pensioners numbered in the hundreds; in 1713, some 4,000; in 1750, over 8,000; in the 1760s, 14,000; and by the end of the American War, over 20,000—all supported at the rate of 5d. a day. By this time, the number of out-pensioners was greater than the mainland peacetime establishment! The much larger Greenwich Hospital—which was extended during the first half of the eighteenth century—housed some 1,000 men by the 1740s, over 2,000 by 1780. The attachment of out-pensioners to Greenwich was first authorized by act of Parliament after the Seven Years War; by the first decade of the nineteenth century they numbered over 3,000. In the second half of the century it was provided that both forms of out-pension should be payable on presentation of the appropriate warrant at any local excise office.³⁸ The militia, revived on a new basis in the 1750s with the backing, on the one hand, of William Pitt and a small core of militia enthusiasts and, on the other ³⁷ [G. Hutt], Papers Illustrative of the Origin and Early History of the Royal Hospital at Chelsea (London, 1872); Ehrman, Navy, 441–4; C. C. Lloyd, Greenwich: Palace, Hospital, College (London, 1969); ‘34th Report of the Select Committee on Finance. Chatham Chest, Greenwich Hospital, Chelsea Hospital’, Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, ii (London, 1803). An act of 1729 provided that seamen must contribute for the support of Greenwich wherever in the empire their wages might be paid (2 Geo. II c.7). ³⁸ [Hutt], Chelsea Hospital, 83–5, lists numbers of out-pensioners; they were also given to Parliament each year with the army estimates, and may be found in CJ. See also Parliamentary History, xx, 475 ff., esp. 495; A Description of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich. Published by the Chaplains (London, 1806), 42. Chelsea Pensioners initially collected their money from agents, but Pitt, responding to accusations of abuse, changed the system in 1754: Parliamentary History, xv, 374–5; 28 Geo. II c.1. Some soldiers’ and sailors’ widows were given jobs in the hospitals. In the 1760s, special provision was made for the orphans of soldiers and sailors who had died abroad and whose settlement could not be ascertained: the Secretary at War asked the Foundling Hospital, then in receipt of a parliamentary grant, to give them priority (McClure, Coram’s Children, 137).


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hand, of certain country gentlemen, depended to a very much greater degree than the regular army on collaboration between central and local authorities. Militiamen were selected by parochially administered ballots. Although those chosen were allowed to find substitutes to serve in their place, the element of coercion aroused popular hostility, especially in the militia’s early days. It appears to have been largely because of the need to allay popular hostility that special provision was made for allowances to militiamen’s families. These were to be paid by ordinary poor-law officers, but were claimable as of right, and their amount determined by fixed rules, relating on the one hand to locally prevailing wage rates, on the other hand to the size of the militiaman’s family. Payments were reclaimable from county funds. This arrangement was unwelcome to many landed gentlemen, who would have preferred the cost to fall on central funds—an arrangement Pitt would have been prepared to make, but which failed to win general support within the ministry or in the Commons.³⁹ New responsibilities, imposed on local authorities by government-sponsored legislation, may ultimately have helped to shape practice in relation to the poor more generally. As is well known, in the mid-1790s magistrates in many counties began to fix scales for relief payments, often taking family size into account—although they had no legal warrant to act in this way. Given that at the same time they were involved in organizing support for militiamen’s families, on fixed scales, is it not probable that this should have influenced their thinking?⁴⁰ Crime-waves which erupted at the end of eighteenth-century wars evoked responses from all levels of government. Crime had not, in the seventeenth century, been a focus for very much innovative effort on the part of central authorities. Though the 1660s and 1670s saw a rash of innovative bills brought into Parliament, it is not evident that these enjoyed ministerial backing, and all failed. In the eighteenth century, by contrast, central government was more conspicuously active. This was in part perhaps because more markedly fluctuating crime-waves provided a recurrent spur to action, in part because the cabinet’s involvement in the pardoning process increased its sensitivity to the problem. There were also pressures from without, increasing in the later part of the century, when how crime might best be policed and punished became a favourite talking point among the literati and governing classes. The subject is too large—and has been too thoroughly dealt with by other historians—for any comprehensive treatment to be thinkable. We might, however, ³⁹ Western, English Militia, see index under ‘Families’ and esp. 142, 168–73, 269, 287–90. The revived militia was a purely English force; a Scottish militia was authorized only in 1797. ⁴⁰ Magistrates’ part in setting the scale is of more interest than the precise form of the scale, which in any case varied from place to place. Precedents for such magisterial action have been cited (e.g. by M. Neumann, ‘Suggestion regarding the Origins of the Speenhamland Plan’, English Historical Review, lxxxiv (1969), 317–22), but all date from the latter part of the century. Although there are other contexts in which magistrates’ assumption of new powers can be set, experience in paying militiamen’s family allowances is one worth taking into account.

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briefly note some aspects of central government involvement, first in the policing of the metropolis, and second in the punishment of crime. In each case, the century saw increasing central government involvement, change apparently being driven by the impact of post-war crime-waves. Responsibility for overseeing the policing of the metropolis was divided between three groups of magistrates: those of the City, Westminster, and the county of Middlesex. Already in the seventeenth century, it is said that ministers were in the habit of maintaining especially close links with, and perhaps paying some sort of salary to, one member of the Westminster bench, Westminster being the home of both court and Parliament, as well as the district in which the aristocracy and gentry were most likely to live. At the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, Henry Fielding, who was then ‘Court Justice’, was given a Treasury grant to combat crime, which he used to maintain a set of ‘runners’ attached to his Bow Street ‘office’; a few years later, his half-brother and successor Sir John Fielding succeeded in converting this one-off payment into a regular grant of £400 a year. At the end of the Seven Years War further money was granted for one year for the establishment of a highway patrol; after the American War, for the same purpose, but on a regular basis.⁴¹ Also after the Seven Years War, other Westminster and metropolitan magistrates followed the Fieldings’ example, and established ‘offices’, staffed, during office hours, by magistrates sitting in rotation. Following the American War, it was proposed that this system should be formalized and extended by the establishment of a set of salaried or ‘stipendiary’ magistrates to do duty throughout the metropolitan area. The Metropolitan Police bill of 1785, brought into Parliament by the Solicitor-General, was defeated, in part, it seems, because of opposition from the City of London. A modified version of the bill, excluding the City, was introduced and passed in 1792. The act set up seven police offices, staffed by stipendiary magistrates appointed by the Home Secretary, each with a team of runners attached to it. The customary fall in prosecuted crime following the outbreak of war in 1793 ensured that the new system had a relatively easy ride in its early years.⁴² ⁴¹ Sir L. Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750 (5 vols, London, 1948–86), iii ch. 2, 135–6. For the Fieldings’ expenses, see TNA T38/671, T1/387, 449, 454. An early ‘patrole’ had been established on the London–Chelsea road, on the petition of the inhabitants of Chelsea, after the War of the Spanish Succession, the patrol-men being a troop of specially selected Chelsea Pensioners. This patrol was still in operation in the early nineteenth century (An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Royal Hospital and Royal Military Asylum at Chelsea (London, 1805), 67–8). One proposal made in 1764 amounted to a generalization of this scheme: it was suggested that 300 able-bodied Chelsea Pensioners might be formed into a ‘patrolling watch’ (Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, iii, 136, n. 13, and pp. 486–7). ⁴² Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, iii, 36–7, ch. 5; D. Philips, ‘A New Engine of Power and Authority’, in Gatrell, Lenman, and Parker eds, Crime and the Law; R. Paley, ‘The Middlesex Justices Act of 1792: Its Origins and Effects’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Reading, 1983).


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Sheriffs were traditionally entitled to claim from the Exchequer in their annual ‘cravings’ an allowance for the maintenance of convicts in gaol, and for the costs of executions. When, in the seventeenth century, transportation was introduced as an alternative to execution for those given the appropriate form of conditional pardon, the new system seems to have been expected to pay for itself, since the merchants who transported the prisoners had the right to sell them as indentured servants. In practice, transportation functioned in only a limited and erratic way on this foundation. When, following the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession, Whig ministers decided significantly to enhance the role of transportation within the penal system, they ensured that the practice was given better public support. New legislation, authorizing the courts to sentence convicts to transportation, also provided that counties must levy rates to cover the costs of conveying prisoners to ships; in addition a Treasury subsidy was supplied at the rate of £5 per head for all convicts transported from the metropolis and Home Counties. (Warwickshire magistrates petitioned in 1730 for the subsidy to be extended to the country as a whole, but were refused.⁴³) By mid-century it was argued by some that transportation to the American colonies was too mild a punishment: following the War of the Austrian Succession, again apparently at government instigation, a bill was brought in authorizing punishment by hard labour in the dockyards, but this failed to win parliamentary approval. In the 1770s colonial rebellion itself put an end to transportation. The end of the war made the development of an alternative a matter of urgency. In practice, a greater proportion of convicts than before were thenceforth sentenced to imprisonment in local ‘houses of correction’, but a further substantial proportion were transported, at vast expense, to a new penal colony at Botany Bay.⁴⁴ Turning from crime to vagrancy, we find very different patterns of interaction between central and local authorities. That soldiers and sailors formed an important constituent part of the stream of potentially problematic poor travellers was acknowledged in legislation from the sixteenth century—and military authorities did take care, in disbanding soldiers, to try to minimize the trouble they might cause as they dispersed. Vagrancy was in general a problem left for local authorities to grapple with, however. This they did in part through community and county-level initiatives, but also through applications to Parliament for successive modifications to the law. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, special provision had been made, in various pieces of legislation, to facilitate—although at the same time to regulate—the movement of poor soldiers and sailors about the country. ⁴³ For a collection of mid-eighteenth-century cravings, see TNA T90/146; Beattie, Crime and the Courts, ch. 9; Ekirch, Bound for America, chs 1–2, 8; Calendar of Treasury Papers 1729–30 (London, 1897), 472. Scottish transportation was systematized, and brought under the scope of national legislation, only in 1766 (Ekirch, Bound for America, 86). ⁴⁴ Beattie, Crime and the Courts, ch. 10; Ekirch, Bound for America, ch. 8.

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Soldiers and sailors equipped with a pass from their commanding officer or captain (later acts were to say ‘from a magistrate’), specifying a route and a time within which they were to travel, were granted immunity from arrest as rogues and vagabonds. They were also empowered to ask relief from constables along the route, constables being entitled to reclaim such outlay from the county maimed-soldiers’ fund. It may be that these laws simply authorized, in respect of soldiers and sailors, practices already common in relation to poor travellers in general; alternatively, it may be that they provided a model that was later to be generalized. Whichever was the case, by the eighteenth century we find many poor travellers equipped with passes issued by magistrates, although magistrates had no legal authority to grant such passes to ordinary travellers. Furthermore, we find many poor travellers, and not soldiers and sailors alone, presenting themselves to constables asking for relief, although such payments could no longer in any case be referred to non-existent maimed-soldiers’ funds, but were apparently instead borne on parochial constables’ rates.⁴⁵ Military authorities tried to minimize the difficulties that might be expected to arise when tens of thousands of men were disbanded within a short period. Disbanded soldiers were given subsistence money to support them for a short period—for example, two weeks—and were ordered not to travel in large groups. Regiments recruited in particular regions of the country might be disbanded within those regions.⁴⁶ The endings of wars were by no means the only periods associated with marked upswings in vagrancy in the eighteenth century: bad harvests, which seem to have sent people off towards towns looking for work, had a similar effect. Neither vagrancy legislation nor circular letters from the Privy Council urging the more vigorous enforcement of vagrancy laws (what prompted these? one might wonder) clustered at the ends of wars.⁴⁷ However, the ends of wars were associated with upturns in spending on the removal of vagrants, and sometimes with flurries of concern at the local level, perhaps most especially towards the latter end of our period. Concern about high levels of vagrancy associated with the end of the American War (and perhaps also with the wet summer and bad harvest of 1783) persisted for a decade—in fact, until the next war once more siphoned off a large portion of the male population. ⁴⁵ For the regulation of vagrancy in general, see S. Webb and B. Webb, English Poor Law History. Part I: The Old Poor Law (London, 1927), ch. 6, esp. 387–91. Beier, Masterless Men, 142, notes that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries counterfeit passports usually stated that the holder was a soldier or sailor. For payments to travellers in the eighteenth century, see, for example, W. E. Tate, The Parish Chest (Cambridge, 1969), 183–5. ⁴⁶ Childs, The British Army of William III, 199–200, 203; R. E. Scouller, The Armies of Queen Anne (Oxford, 1966), 321–5. ⁴⁷ The 1713 Vagrancy Act (13 Ann. c.26)—a consolidating statute—did follow the end of a war, but its timing was at least in part determined by the expiry of previous legislation. The Webbs (Old Poor Law, 367–9) suggest that the central executive took an interest in vagrancy only when they wanted to mobilize vagrants into the armed forces. This would not explain why counties were circulated on the subject in 1786, for example.


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Peace in 1802 prompted the re-enactment of the sixteenth-century provision that counterfeiting soldiers’ and sailors’ travelling passes should count as felony. The end of the Napoleonic Wars saw much agitation about vagrancy as well as crime.⁴⁸ The texts of eighteenth-century vagrancy laws furthermore reveal that travelling soldiers and sailors—or people representing themselves to be such—were a continuing focus of concern. The Vagrancy Act of 1740 provided that, though soldiers and sailors with passes were not to be treated as rogues and vagabonds, those pretending to be soldiers or sailors should be regarded as prime targets for discipline (such people might, under Elizabethan law, have been charged with felony, but providing for their punishment as rogues and vagabonds represented a more realistic assessment of the kind of penal response local authorities might be prepared to apply).⁴⁹ In 1790 a national convention of magistrates, summoned by the self-appointed ‘Society for Enforcing His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality’ (of 1787), recommended inter alia that soldiers and sailors who begged should be liable to punishment as rogues and vagabonds; this provision would need to be coupled, they thought, with another entitling them to claim relief from constables. The Vagrancy Act of 1792 incorporated the penal but not the entitlement provision. (Members of the Society made several attempts to amend this feature of the act, but were rebuffed by the Commons.⁵⁰) No clear consensus existed in the eighteenth century as to whether former soldiers and sailors could be expected to find new employment for themselves. Some thought soldiers in particular could be expected to face difficulties; others believed that, if they were willing to work, the market would operate to provide jobs for them.⁵¹ Ministers did sponsor some moves to facilitate the reintegration of discharged servicemen into productive economic roles—perhaps moved by a sense of responsibility, perhaps fearing opposition criticism (ministerial lack of concern for those who risked their lives for their country was an issue the ⁴⁸ Innes, ‘Politics and Morals’ (below, pp. 184–5); 43 Geo. III c.61; L. Rose, Rogues and Vagabonds: Vagrant Underworld in Britain 1815–1985 (London, 1988), 18, and see also 72, 120. ⁴⁹ 13 Geo. II c.24. ⁵⁰ Innes, ‘Politics and Morals’ (below, pp. 208–9); Statement and Propositions from the Society for Giving Effect to His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality (London, 1790), 8–9; Resolutions of the Magistrates Deputed from the Several Counties of England and Wales (London, 1790), 13–14; LJ, xxxix, 463, 466, 469, 484, 655, 686, 689, 693; CJ, xlviii, 806, 823–4, 847, 924; Lambert, Sessional Papers, 43–54, 483–4. An act of 1803 (43 Geo. III c.61)—mentioned above for its criminalizing provision—reimmunized soldiers and sailors with passes, extended this protection to wives separated from them at embarcation, and gave statutory authority to Admiralty and War Office passes (which had long been in use). Unfortunately, it is unclear whether such passes were also issued to women and children before the passage of this act. Detailed accounts kept by the constables of Stone in Staffordshire in the early nineteenth century reveal that about one in seven of the travellers or groups of travellers they relieved were travelling on War Office passes, a majority of these being women and children (S. R. Broadbridge, ‘The Old Poor Law in the Parish of Stone’, North Staffordshire Journal of Field Studies, xiii (1973), 15–16). ⁵¹ See, for example, Parliamentary History, xiv 616, 726–8, 750.

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opposition were always ready to exploit); but the moves that were made were all modest and limited ones. The only routine form of provision targeted those disbanded soldiers and sailors who had completed long terms of service. From the mid-seventeenth century, it was customary for acts to be passed at the ends of wars empowering such men to practise trades wherever they pleased, regardless of whether they had completed a proper apprenticeship. By the mid-eighteenth century, these measures were usually brought in by the Secretary at War. The first acts of this kind also guaranteed such men immunity from imprisonment for debt for three years, but such provisions were omitted in 1749 and thereafter. The act passed at the end of the Seven Years War, however, added a new form of privilege: parish officers in any parish or town to which such men might choose to migrate were prohibited from removing them back to their parish of settlement (as they would normally have been able to do under the provisions of the settlement laws), unless the men applied for parish relief. This exemption was extended to militiamen in 1784, so long as they had completed a mere three years of service and been honourably discharged.⁵² The settlement laws were at this time attracting criticism from some who argued that they were a clog on mobility and exposed the poor to unreasonable harassment. Though such critics were initially unsuccessful in obtaining a general reform of the law, their thinking probably influenced the forms of provision made for working men thought to merit especially generous treatment. Similar immunity was extended to members of friendly societies in 1793, and finally made general in 1795.⁵³ Other provision was commonly made only when it was thought that two birds might be killed with one stone. In 1749 it was decided on the advice of the President of the Board of Trade, Lord Halifax, that 3,000 newly discharged soldiers and sailors should be recruited to form a nucleus of colonization in Nova Scotia, newly acquired from the French. Undoubtedly, such men’s fighting skills made them highly attractive for this purpose. This policy was speedily implemented, and the new town of Halifax grew from nothing to modest proportions. Although they acquitted themselves well in beating off assaults on the town, the new settlers had no appetite either for clearing the wilderness or for developing the fisheries, and within a few years a majority had departed.⁵⁴ A scheme for settling Chelsea Pensioners in the Highlands, as emissaries of civilization, was floated in the same year, but came to nothing. In 1763, however, the Commissioners for Annexed Estates did try to interest former soldiers and sailors in settling on the estates, the soldiers being encouraged to become ⁵² 10 Will. III c.17; 12 Ann. c.14; 22 Geo. II c.44; 3 Geo. III c.8; 24 Geo. III s.2 c.6. ⁵³ For general criticism, see, for example, [W. Hay], Remarks on the Laws Relating to the Poor (London: J. Stagg (1735)); Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. P. Langford (9 vols, Oxford, 1981–91), ii 401–3; 33 Geo. III c.54; 35 Geo. III c.101. ⁵⁴ W. S. McNutt, The Atlantic Provinces: The Emergence of Colonial Society 1712–1867 ( Toronto, 1965), 37, 53–4.


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crofters, the sailors fishermen. Once again, the settlers’ lack of appetite for the mode of living proposed to them proved a source of difficulty. (Whether men traditionally kept in order ‘by the rod’ made plausible emissaries of civilization had been questioned by sceptics from the start.⁵⁵) When eighteenth-century observers tried to think what sectors of the economy might absorb substantial quantities of new labour, fisheries and the development of wastelands tended to come to their minds. Legislation to promote the development of the fisheries followed most eighteenth-century wars. It was suggested that fisheries would serve as ‘nurseries of seamen’ for future wars, but the need to employ the recently discharged was also cited in parliamentary debate.⁵⁶ Planning for the next war usually began immediately on the establishment of peace. In this context, concern might be expressed about the state of stocks of oaken timber, needed for the construction of warships. In the closing years of the American War it was suggested that disbanded soldiers and sailors might appropriately be employed in the woods and forests. When concern both about the effective management of national resources and about the state of naval timber supplies combined in 1787 to prompt the appointment of Royal Commissioners to inquire into the management of royal forests and wastes, the hope that their inquiries might result in the creation of new jobs was again voiced. The Commissioners themselves appear to have been relatively little concerned with the employment of labour. To the extent that they attended to the matter, their view (also that of many they questioned) was apparently that, if the object were to promote ‘produce and population’, the best course would be to convert forests to farmland.⁵⁷ At the conclusions of eighteenth-century wars, statements that the time had now come to focus on the domestic scene, to take up the task of reformation at home, were often made officially—in, for example, the King’s Speech—or unofficially, in newspapers or pamphlets. The timing of such statements was partly determined by the fact that the ends of wars were apparently associated, and were expected to be associated, with the intensification of a range of social problems, partly by the fact that wars themselves posed various obstacles in the way of ambitious domestic programmes. They were so partly through their economic effects: wars were associated with high taxation, and high rates of interest, both of which made it difficult to raise money for domestic projects; also with high wages, which served to discourage building projects in particular. Wars also discouraged ambitious governmental projects on the domestic front because of the demands they placed on the time and energy of ministers, and ⁵⁵ Shaw, Management of Scottish Society, 185; Johnson, Jacobite Estates, 145–54. ⁵⁶ J. Dunlop, The British Fisheries Society (Edinburgh, 1978), esp. chs 2–3; Parliamentary History, xxv, 137–8. ⁵⁷ T. Gilbert, Plan for the Better Relief and Employment of the Poor (London, 1781), 25–7; An Account of the Workhouses in Britain in the Year 1732 (3rd edn, London, 1798), preface; CJ, xlvii, 274–6.

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on parliamentary time (fewer acts dealing with domestic issues passed in years of war than in years of peace). The waging of wars stretched the resources of eighteenth-century British government to the limits; but, in years of peace, machinery that had come into being largely to serve the needs of war could be turned to other ends.

E U RO PE A N C O M PA R I S O N S Interstate rivalry, war, and empire between them did much to shape the institutional structures of the eighteenth-century British state. A case can be made for these developments having disengaged central institutions from certain aspects of domestic government. However, the case is easily overstated. If local authorities—to whom much responsibility for such tasks had long been confided—were subject to less heavy-handed supervision in the eighteenth century than in especially the earlier part of the previous century, nonetheless, within the new institutional framework central and local authorities continued to interact in responding to a wide range of domestic issues. Wars, especially the social dislocation associated with the end of wars, posed social problems in their own right. A survey of responses to these illustrates a variety of forms of interaction between central and local authorities. Although the case for central government having disengaged from certain aspects of domestic government in Britain during these years is easily overstated, a comparison between British experience and the experience of certain continental states nonetheless suggests that emphasis on this feature is not entirely misplaced. In France, Prussia, and the Habsburg lands the eighteenth century saw an intensification of central government control over local authorities that finds no real parallel in Britain. This intensification of control had its roots at least in part in military and associated fiscal pressures. New agencies, tightly linked to the centre, were created with special responsibility for levying or supervising troops or gathering in revenues. As time passed, these agencies were assigned increasingly broadly defined supervisory powers in relation to traditional institutions of local government, increasingly condemned either as insufficiently dynamic or as excessively local in orientation. In both France and the Habsburg lands administrative reforms undertaken in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries gave way, in the closing decades of the century, to more ambitious attempts comprehensively to restructure governmental and to some extent social institutions—perestroika, eighteenth-century style. Both such ventures, of course, ultimately came more or less cataclysmically to grief.⁵⁸ ⁵⁸ C. B. A. Behrens, Society, Government and the Enlightenment: The Experiences of EighteenthCentury France and Prussia (London, 1985), provides a convenient overview. See similarly


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Why did the development of the British military–fiscal state not bring in its train analogous consequences? How was it that the amalgam of new military and fiscal and substantially traditional local-governmental institutions forged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries survived with relatively little change—some tinkering on the northern periphery apart—for the next century and a half, while Britain’s continental counterparts engaged in an ever more hectic sequence of institutional innovations? The explanation for these differences probably lies in features both of British government and of British society. By early—and even later—eighteenth-century continental standards, British local-governmental structures were, we should first note, relatively centralized, even given the winding-down of conciliar supervision and control.⁵⁹ Justices of the Peace, in whose hands much local governmental power was vested, outside (and increasingly also inside) the towns (in Scotland: Justices of the Peace, sheriffs, and commissioners of supply), operated within a framework of statute law and proved relatively responsive to central direction, when it came their way. Latent command structures, linking central with local authorities, were more frequently activated in the later than in the earlier eighteenth century. Put to the test, they proved reasonably serviceable. By the end of the century, local authorities were raising substantial military forces in the form of militia regiments, to supplement the forces of the regular army; they had made preparations to levy the posse comitatus, the English equivalent of the levée en masse, should invasion make it necessary to maximize forces for home defence; they had assisted in a series of crop surveys: gauges of the nation’s food-producing capacity; and they were about to assist in the compilation of the first census.⁶⁰ British central–local links held up relatively well in the face of strains imposed by the French Revolutionary Wars. It was no doubt fortunate, however, that British social and economic circumstances, both in this war and in earlier wars (which had not always attracted such broadly based support among local elites), made it possible to avoid putting the power and resilience of these links too severely to the test. The men who forged the basic structures of the British military–fiscal state in the late seventeenth century, and their successors who developed and maintained them, took advantage of British social and economic M. Bordes, L’Administration provincial et municipale en France au XVIII siècle (Paris, 1972), ch. 5. P. G. M. Dickson, Finance and Government under Maria Theresia 1740–80 (2 vols, Oxford, 1987), is authoritative, and see also ‘Joseph II’s Hungarian Land Survey’, English Historical Review, cvi (1991), 611–54, for some fruits of his work in progress on the later period. ⁵⁹ L. J. Hume, Bentham and Bureaucracy (Cambridge, 1981), 20–54, develops this theme. ⁶⁰ D. Eastwood, ‘Amplifying the Province of the Legislature: The Flow of Information and the English State in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Historical Research, xii (1989), 276–94; ‘Patriotism and the British State in the 1790s’, in M. Philp ed., British Popular Politics and the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1991).

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circumstances to cast these arrangements in forms that minimized the need for potentially problematic interaction between new state agencies and traditional structures of local government. A sophisticated system of deficit finance shielded taxpayers from the immediate costs of war; when these costs were ultimately borne, they were increasingly borne by customs and excise duties. This being so, British governments were able to avoid confronting the task many continental governments had to confront, that of wringing ever more revenue from the land—a task which, in the judgement of several such governments, could not be pursued in the long term except on the basis of a comprehensive reassessment of land values. British naval and military forces were recruited in as ad hoc a manner as possible: royal naval crews, forcibly, from the merchant marine; the army, from volunteers, sought especially in manufacturing towns and among the Scots. In these ways, it proved possible to mobilize sizeable regular forces without resort to elaborate systems of conscription (though it should not be forgotten that, in the later eighteenth century, the British did devise a system of conscription to man the militia, and persisted in this policy, despite initial popular hostility and complaints about the extent to which costs fell on the land). Had it been necessary, as in other states, to raise money or men in other ways, more restructuring of traditional institutions might have been necessary.⁶¹ Never did the rulers of continental states test the limits of their domestic power more than when they attempted to use the machinery of government radically to restructure society—when they tried, as successive Habsburgs tried, to reduce the scope of serfdom; or, as successive French revolutionary governments tried, to restructure relations between landed proprietors and peasants. Eighteenth-century British governments were not unprepared to lay their hands to social engineering of this kind. They sponsored it in the Scottish Highlands. They contemplated a similar exercise in Canada—and backed down chiefly because advised by military men on the spot that the status quo was best adapted to the mobilization of effective fighting forces (a high priority, as relations with neighbouring American colonists deteriorated). In India too they were to preside over a restructuring of landed society, if in the name of obtaining a stable ‘settlement’.⁶² British statesmen did not believe, however, that any significant social reconstruction was called for within the British heartland. Why should they have thought so, when ⁶¹ Paul Langford suggests that ‘[w]arfare on the English model was a triumph for an enterprising and acquisitive society, not an authoritarian state’ (A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), 697). ⁶² C. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–1830 (London, 1989), 155–60; G. S. Graham, British Policy and Canada 1774–91 (London, 1930), ch. 2; R. Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of a Permanent Settlement (Paris, 1963); R. Ray, Change in Bengal Agrarian Society c.1760–1850 (New Delhi, 1979).


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Britain’s dynamic society and economy attracted admiration from aspiring states? Continental rulers who attempted such remodelling exposed the limits of the power even a revolutionized machinery of government had given them. Britain’s eighteenth-century rulers were spared the need to confront so formidable a task.

3 The local acts of a national Parliament: Parliament’s role in sanctioning local action in eighteenth-century Britain As any historian familiar with the legislative record of eighteenth-century British parliaments will be aware, these parliaments produced a rising volume of local legislation. The 1688 Revolution produced a small but distinct upturn in the numbers of such acts passed. Their numbers rose more decisively from the mideighteenth century, from the interlude of peace between the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War. The trend of growth in legislation of this kind outstripped that of legislation that was national in application. It is tempting to interpret this pattern as evidence of vitality in the localities, offsetting moribundity at the centre. This would not be wholly unfair. The eighteenth-century British central executive was scarcely moribund: it demonstrated an impressive capacity to extract tax monies from British subjects, and to sustain global warfare. Ministers also kept an alert eye on home affairs, monitoring the pulse of the national economy, and noting, in order to contain or crush, signs of discontent or disaffection. But they did not pursue a programme of domestic improvement, nor attempt closely to monitor or direct the activities of local government in county or town, except in times of crisis. Local communities were left very much to their own initiative. The opportunity to obtain local legislation, authorizing actions that would not otherwise have been legal, or putting the coercive force of the law behind local projects, represented one of the most powerful resources available to those striving to exercise that initiative. Though central executive government kept a low profile in local affairs, central–local relations cannot be characterized entirely in these terms. For Parliament—the central legislature—was evidently crucially involved in sanctioning, or refusing to sanction local projects. In this chapter, I offer some reflections on the nature and significance of this form of central–local interaction.¹ First published in Parliamentary History, xvii (1998), 23–47. Reproduced by permission of Edinburgh University Press. ¹ For their helpful comments on this chapter as initially presented, and for additional information, I am grateful to Mark Freedland, Julian Hoppit, Marius Kwint, Paul Langford, and John Prest.

The local acts of a national Parliament

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‘Local acts’ were not formally distinguished as such until 1798. Until then, acts of Parliament were formally distinguished into two categories only, public and private. Acts were not assigned to these categories in a consistent fashion. In the decade and more following the Revolution, acts—providing, for example, for the establishment of ‘corporations of the poor’—which would subsequently have been classed as public were classed as private. Later, the first canal acts passed as private acts. By the later eighteenth century, many private acts related to the affairs of single individuals: they dealt with such matters as naturalization, change of surname, or the breaking of an entail. But enclosure acts, which required the consent of the owners of most of the land in question, and which might have significant effects on local communities, were also usually (though not invariably) classed as private acts. When we speak of ‘local acts’ therefore we speak non-technically of a category of legislation whose boundaries historians may define as they see fit (though the category of ‘local legislation’ as subsequently employed suggests guidelines).² If we adopt post-1798 categorizations as a guide, then the acts which constituted ‘local’ legislation by and large concerned the provision of amenities or social services: such matters as the paving, lighting, or watching of streets; construction and regulation of marketplaces; rebuilding of churches; improvement of roads, bridges, and harbours; establishment of theatres, county halls, and prisons; and establishment of small debt courts, workhouses, and boards of poor law guardians. Some of these matters were also addressed by national legislation in this period (national usually meaning applicable across England and Wales—though there were some general acts relating to rather different Scottish governmental structures). There are no indications that attempts to legislate generally on such matters met with opposition in principle—though practical considerations (the possible greater difficulty of securing assent for national legislation; the advantages derivable from being able to tailor an act minutely to local circumstances) usually disposed people to prefer local action to tackle the immediate needs of a locality. Local and general legislation were handled in somewhat different ways in Parliament. The first had to be inaugurated by petition; the second did not (though sometimes was). Proposals of the first kind were also more likely to be ² Several different definitions of ‘local’ might be coherently applied. For example, ‘local’ could be understood to mean all legislation applicable only to a defined area within England, Wales, or Scotland. The ‘legislation database’, for which see n. 5, makes it relatively easy to extract ‘local’ legislation by this definition; to extract a subset otherwise defined requires more labour. Another definition of ‘local’ might restrict the term to legislation procured at the instance of local groups, excluding, for instance, acts concerned with Crown grants to individuals, forfeited estates, fortifications, etc. I have taken nineteenth-century usage as my guide. This produces the smallest subset of the three. Much legislation regulating trades in particular localities, for example, in this scheme counts as ‘general’. For an account of local legislation effectively employing the second of my three suggested definitions, see S. Handley, ‘Local Legislative Initiatives for Social and Economic Development in Lancashire, 1689–1731’, Parliamentary History, ix (1990), 14–37.

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the subject of supportive or counter-petitioning—though alert local authorities might also note general legislation which affected them, and petition, or ask, their MPs to represent their views on this. There were also commonalities in their handling, however. Much the same MPs might bring each kind of measure forwards. Each was usually referred to a select committee, and such committees again might be similarly constituted (membership of committees on local bills was not restricted to people from the locality). In substance, general and local measures usually covered much the same ground. Sometimes local acts provided a model for general, sometimes the reverse. The primary difference between the two was the most obvious difference: their geographical scope. Local bills and acts have attracted much study: from historians of legislation and parliamentary procedure, such as F. Clifford, O. C. Williams, and Sheila Lambert; from historians of local government, such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their one-time research assistant, Frederick Spencer; from legal historians such as W. H. D. Winder and Bernard Rudden; from economic historians, such as W. T. Jackman, W. J. Albert, and Eric Pawson, T. S. Willan and J. T. Ward, Gordon Jackson and Malcolm Falkus.³ Most recently, Paul Langford, in his magisterial study of eighteenth-century political culture, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, has imaginatively explored the values and assumptions which influenced, on the one hand, local promoters of local legislation, on the other, parliamentarians. Meanwhile, the part such legislation played in creating ³ F. Clifford, History of Private Bill Legislation (2 vols, London, 1885–7); O. C. Williams, Historical Development of Private Bill Procedure (2 vols, London, 1948–9); S. Lambert, Bills and Acts (Cambridge, 1971); S. and B. Webb, Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes (London, 1922), also The King’s Highway (London, 1913); F. Spencer, Municipal Origins (London, 1911); W. H. D. Winder, ‘Courts of Requests’, Law Quarterly Review, lii (London, 1936), 369–94; B. Rudden, The New River. A Legal History (Oxford, 1985); W. T. Jackman, The Development of Transportation in Modern England (London, 1916); W. J. Albert, The Turnpike Road System in England 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 1972); E. Pawson, Transport and Economy: The Turnpike Road of Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977); T. S. Willan, River Navigation in England 1600–1750 (London, 1956); J. T. Ward, The Finance of Canal Building in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1954); G. Jackson, ‘The Ports’, in D. Aldcroft and M. Freeman eds, Transport in the Industrial Revolution, (Manchester, 1983), 177–209; M. E. Falkus, ‘Lighting in the Dark Ages of English Economic History’, in D. C. Coleman and A. H. John eds, Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-Industrial England (London, 1976), 248–73; E. L. Jones and M. E. Falkus, ‘Urban Improvements and the English Economy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Research in Economic History, iv (1979), 193–236. See also Handley, ‘Local Legislative Initiatives’. Other relevant studies, though not centrally concerned with legislation, include R. Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue. English Prison Architecture 1750–1840 (Cambridge, 1982); B. F. L. Clarke, The Building of the Eighteenth-Century Church (London, 1963); P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance (Oxford, 1989); and F. W. Robins, The Story of Water Supply (London, 1946). No studies that I have found say much about Scottish local legislation, though see A. Whetstone, Scottish County Government in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Edinburgh, 1981), and the report of the Scottish Municipal Corporations Commissioners: PP (1836), xxiii 1–738, at 47–50. I discuss Scotland further below.


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a dense, if highly variegated, infrastructure across (especially) rural and small town England through the middle decades of the nineteenth century has been the subject of an illuminating study by John Prest.⁴ Inevitably, parts of my brief account will retread ground these historians have trodden. It cannot begin to match the scope and depth of most of their studies. It does, however, have two distinctive features. First (less importantly), it draws upon recently completed databases of acts and of ‘failed legislation’ 1660–1800 compiled under the direction of and in part by Julian Hoppit, in association with myself and John Styles, with the aid of a grant from the Leverhulme Trust (however, it makes only limited use of these).⁵ Second, more importantly, it brings to its subject some distinctive preoccupations. In several chapters included in this volume, I attempt to show that, although the national dimension of eighteenth-century domestic governance may have been relatively underdeveloped, it was far from negligible. In The Domestic Face of the Military–Fiscal State, thus, I show that such problems were addressed through a combination of central executive, legislative, local governmental, and voluntary action.⁶ In Politics and Morals, largely a study of the late eighteenthcentury ‘Proclamation Society’, I show how this society operated across the national domain, promoting acts of Parliament and bringing test cases before the High Courts, circularizing county benches, and convening national magistrates’ conventions.⁷ Most relevantly, in Parliament and the Shaping of Eighteenthcentury English Social Policy, I noted that a thousand or so initiatives, designed to produce legislation addressing issues of domestic governance, national in scope, were brought before Parliament in the course of the eighteenth century, and I explored the way in which those general measures were generated and evaluated.⁸ In this chapter I set out to consider how proliferating local acts fit into this picture. I reflect first on the very practice of seeking sanction from Parliament for local action. What was it about the theory and practice of government in Britain in this period which made that seem necessary or desirable? Second, I consider the relationship between proliferating local acts and the smaller number of general acts which dealt with similar matters. ⁴ P. Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman (Oxford, 1991); J. Prest, Liberty and Locality (Oxford, 1990). ⁵ For a preliminary report on the project, see J. Hoppit, J. Innes, and J. Styles, ‘Project Report: Towards a History of Parliamentary Legislation 1660–1800’, Parliamentary History, xiii (1994), 312–21. For some of its fruits, see J. Hoppit ed. Failed Legislation 1660–1800, (London, 1997), a handlist with introduction. ⁶ Chapter 2 in this volume. ⁷ Chapter 5 in this volume. ⁸ Chapter 1 in this volume. The total of a thousand or so initiatives cited does not include Scotland, but my impression is that Scottish bills are unlikely to have numbered much more than fifty, if that. Totals for legislation of this kind are not readily extractable from the database as constructed, and I cannot currently provide a more precise Scottish figure.

120

100

80 Wales Scotland England

60

40

20

0 1690

1700

1710

1720

1730

1740

Figure 3.1. Local acts per session, by region, 1689–1800.

1750

1760

1770

1780

1790

1800


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T R E N D S A N D PAT T E R N S To set a context first, let us consider some trends and patterns in local legislation (Figure 3.1). In the 1690s, local acts passed at the rate of about five a session, a total which rose gradually to a level of about fifteen a session by the 1730s and 1740s, and then, in the 1750s, jumped to thirty or more, chiefly as a result of an upsurge in turnpike legislation. In the 1770s, numbers rose further, to some fifty to seventy a session, this rise reflecting an increase in numbers of acts across a broader range of fields. Numbers of acts passed decreased during the American war and subsequent political crisis, but recovered thereafter. This picture is interestingly complicated if failed legislative initiatives are also considered. From the Restoration through the 1690s, failure rates for this, as for most kinds of legislation, were high: the majority of applications for local acts did not result in the passage of an act. Numbers of applications, it seems, were in fact relatively consistent from the 1690s through to the 1740s: rising numbers of acts across this period primarily reflect Parliament’s increasing willingness to pass such acts. By contrast, increases in numbers of acts in the 1750s and 1770s reflect, primarily, not a change in Parliament’s propensity to approve but rather an increase in the numbers of applications for such legislation. In all something over 3,000 local acts passed in the course of our period; perhaps half as many bills again were canvassed in Parliament, but failed to win legislative assent, at least upon first introduction.⁹ Turnpike and other road acts dominated, accounting for more than half the total.¹⁰ Figure 3.2 breaks down local acts by subject, first for England and Wales as a whole, then for Scotland (representing about 6 per cent of the total), and finally the London metropolitan area within that (accounting for about 10 per cent of all local acts) London patterns largely reflect the distinctive needs of the urban environment; Scottish patterns, in part, reflect different Scottish circumstances (as in the strong showing made by port legislation), in part, distinctive patterns of governance and general legislation, further discussed below. To set these eighteenth-century developments in a larger context, we might note that the rising trend in the numbers of acts continued into the early nineteenth century. By the 1830s and 1840s, local acts were issuing at the ⁹ The meaning assigned to ‘failed legislation’ in the legislation database is discussed in J. Hoppit and J. Innes, ‘Introduction’, in Hoppit ed., Failed Legislation, 208–9 Briefly, a proposal mooted in Parliament is counted as having ‘failed’ if it did not result in an act in that session. A large but indeterminate number of failed initiatives did later win assent, perhaps in some modified form. ¹⁰ Especially large numbers of such acts are partly explained by the frequency with which they had to be renewed: see n. 48.

water, gaols, theatres, &c debt courts bridges drains rivers ports, etc poor law roads

canals

churches

improvement

(a) England and Wales misc rivers ports water

improvement

debt courts bridges

roads

poor law

churches

(b) London Metropolitan area water, &c canals and rivers poor bridges improvement

roads

ports

beer duties

(c) Scotland

Figure 3.2. Subject matter of local acts 1689–1800


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rate of some 100 a session. The second railway boom of 1845 pushed totals abruptly upwards to around 200 a session; in 1846, over 200 local acts were passed. During the nineteenth century, Parliament passed a number of measures intended to make local legislation less copious and less necessary. These measures (which, as we shall see, had eighteenth-century precursors) took the form both of ‘clauses acts’, providing standard clauses for incorporation into local bills, and what came to be called ‘permissive acts’, outlining a set of powers with which local bodies might equip themselves, and procedures to be followed if they wished to assume these powers. Other general measures imposed new institutions to deal with matters previously addressed by local act: of this kind were the New Poor Law of 1834, the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 (which superseded a host of local lighting and watching acts); the South Wales County Road Boards Act of 1844 (precipitated by the Rebecca Riots—turnpike trusts elsewhere were more gradually wound down)¹¹ and the County Courts Act of 1846.¹² Such measures reduced the flow of applications for certain kinds of local act, but did not entirely stem the tide. Localities already governed by local acts continued sometimes to seek new acts in order to alter existing arrangements; other localities obtained new local legislation because they valued the power to tailor it to local circumstances. By the later nineteenth century, the accumulation not merely of local acts but also of local bodies established under the terms of permissive legislation had among its other effects brought into being a variegated and untidy, but nonetheless dense, network of local authorities supplementing the services offered by the more standardized administrative entities: counties, boroughs, poor law unions, and the like. Between the 1870s and 1890s, this untidy assemblage was systematized into a newly broad, deep, and powerful local government network.¹³ Yet even that development did not put an end to local legislation. In the early twentieth century, local and private acts were still issuing at the rate of over 200 a session. Only the subsequent development of statutory instruments has made possible the late twentieth-century dwindling down of local legislation to the present level.¹⁴ This quantitative overview among other things makes plain the absence of any simple relationship between the ambition and activity of central executive ¹¹ Webb and Webb, King’s Highway, 216–23. ¹² 4&5 Will. IV c.76; 5&6 Will. IV c.76; 7&8 Vict. c.91; 9&10 Vict. c.95. The first two had Scottish counterparts, in the form of the Scottish Poor Law of 1845 and Burgh Police Act of 1833: 8&9 Vict. c.83 and 3&4 Will. IV c.76. ¹³ J. Redlich and F. W. Hirst, The History of Local Government in England, ed. B. Keith-Lucas (2nd edn, London, 1970), 197–221, or, for a more detailed account of the initial phase of this process, Prest, Liberty and Locality, 208–20. ¹⁴ By the 1920s, local acts were down below the 200 level; by the late 1930s, around 100; by 1960, around 50 a session. Since 1970, such acts have generally numbered fewer than fifty a session—a figure nonetheless comparable to that characterizing the first period of ‘upsurge’ in the eighteenth century.

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government and the flow of local acts. From the 1830s, serious attempts were made systematically to restructure local government—but it was a while before the numbers of such acts were significantly depleted; for some hundred years more, the usual sessional total surpassed eighteenth-century norms. (Of course, the composition, character, and arguably also the significance of such acts changed over time: numbers alone have only limited significance.) What this overview also suggests is that national and local activity were not antithetical. Local initiative often sketched out new fields and forms of governmental action, which national legislation might subsequently seek to systematize—and, sometimes, the central executive to supervise. On occasions, as we shall see, influence flowed the other way: national legislative initiative played a crucial part in spurring or assisting localities to act.

S O U RC E S O F AU T H O R I T Y Why were local acts sought in the eighteenth century? Why did people wishing to promote particular local projects judge it necessary or desirable to turn to Parliament for authorization? What does the fact of their having so frequently—and increasingly—made such applications reveal about the nature of central–local relations in eighteenth-century Britain? A developing tradition of constitutional thought had it that inferior parts of government needed specific sanction from either Crown or Parliament for any form of authority they wished to exercise. Institutions that were of medieval or older date might be regarded as sanctioned by tradition in the exercise of a certain range of powers. Some of the powers sheriffs exercised were of this nature; powers of manorial lords and courts similarly. Some ancient boroughs without known charters were accepted as boroughs ‘by prescription’, and custom and practice could sanction the exercise of powers by boroughs even against the norms of the common law—‘customs against common right’—that could not otherwise have been authorized. This respect for tradition had however for many centuries coexisted with an insistence on the King and his courts’ right to scrutinize claims to power. An early instrument for this purpose was the quo warranto writ, a demand for evidence of the warrant for some claim to power. By the eighteenth century, the purposes for which quo warranto could be employed had become fossilized, yet the writs had not lapsed into disuse. On the contrary: in the early eighteenth century, new legislation was passed to facilitate their use by private persons, and they became a standard tool of urban political infighting. Meanwhile, the courts had pressed hard their claim to check and discipline exercises of power not founded in tradition, common law, or royal or parliamentary sanction. In


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the mid-nineteenth century, this train of thought would give rise to the doctrine of ultra vires, applying specifically to statutory bodies: it was held that they might not exercise any power not specifically vested in them by statute, or necessary to the exercise of statutory powers.¹⁵ Already in the eighteenth century, this way of thinking was sufficiently well established for those who lacked the unquestioned sanction of tradition, common law, royal or statutory warrant for their power to feel nervous about the ability of their proceedings to withstand challenge. Thus, given that there was some uncertainty as to corporations’ right to levy rates, they often hesitated to do so—and indeed, if they did so, might face legal challenge, productive of trouble and expense even when the courts upheld their right.¹⁶ Similarly, church rates, which lacked any statutory foundation, seem to have been thought an insecure basis for any major money-raising effort (it may be that they were not judged acceptable as security for loans).¹⁷ Justices of the Peace who acted in an administrative capacity without clear warrant for their proceedings sometimes found themselves harassed in court. Even ambiguously worded statutes were a liability in this regard: in the 1730s, the Middlesex county bench was much embarrassed by suits from hostile ratepayers which time and again obstructed its attempts to levy vagrancy rates, on the basis of (relatively recent) vagrancy legislation that yet did not provide a sufficiently watertight basis for its effort.¹⁸ In this context, lack of clear authority unsurprisingly gave pause. Prison reformer John Howard’s reforming career got under way when cautious Bedfordshire magistrates proved unwilling to endorse his suggestion (as county sheriff) that the fees of acquitted prisoners should be paid from the county rate; doubtful of their right to act, they asked him to ascertain practice in other counties (which proved to be variable).¹⁹ Growing insistence on the need to be able to ground claims to power upon highly specific forms of authorization distinguished the developing British constitutional tradition from that taking shape in many continental states. Whereas in continental Europe, the doctrine developed was that the representatives of sovereign power in the localities shared, in some measure, in that power, and might exercise it at discretion in the service of the state or the public good, what ¹⁵ W. Holdsworth, A History of English Law (17 vols, London, 1903–66) ix, 48–67 (pagination as in 3rd and subsequent edns) for a general account. J. W. Willcock, The Law of Municipal Corporations (London, 1827), 13–15, 453 ff., provides a clear account of eighteenth-century developments in the use of quo warranto. ¹⁶ S. and B. Webb, The Manor and the Borough (2 vols, London, 1924), see index under ‘Rates’. For a report of an early-nineteenth-century case in which a corporation’s right to levy a rate was challenged, though held to be valid under legislation, see English Reports, ciii (1809), 969–71. I owe this reference to Roey Sweet. ¹⁷ S. and B. Webb, The Parish and the County (London, 1906), p. 24n. ¹⁸ 12 Geo. II c.29. Innes, ‘Parliament and the Shaping’ (see above pp. 21–47). ¹⁹ The Fees Act 1774 (14 Geo. III c.20) resolved the point at a national level by making it not merely possible but mandatory for magistrates to pay.

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triumphed in England was a much more restrictive assessment of inferior bodies’ governmental capacity.²⁰ W H Y L E G I S L AT I O N ? Crown or Parliament could sanction exercises of authority. In the seventeenth century, Crown authority sanctioned a number of initiatives that in the next century would almost certainly have been sanctioned, if at all, by local act. Thus a charter was granted to the town of Halifax, in the 1630s, when they wished to establish a workhouse to employ local poor; also to the London suburbs of Stepney and Hackney, in the 1660s, when they wished to establish small debt courts.²¹ Both courts and Parliament long strove to restrict the Crown’s field of action. But it is possible to imagine that, if English political conflicts had eventuated differently, a rather larger field for Crown action might have been marked out, and charters, patents, and other forms of royal warrant more frequently and diversely employed.²² In the event, 1688 set English constitutional development off on a different course. The Crown (commonly acting in practice, of course, under the direction of ministers) retained some scope for independent action: trading companies were chartered, as were some societies; market rights were conferred by patent; county Justices of the Peace routinely operated by the King’s commission—and when boroughs wished to expand the number or extend the jurisdiction of their magistrates, it seems always to have been thought necessary (and sufficient) for the borough to obtain a new charter.²³ But Crown action was often shadowed by parliamentary action. Trading companies, thus, were commonly sanctioned and regulated by statute as well as charter. The 1737 Stage Licensing Act, strikingly, limited the King’s power to issue patents for theatres to the city of Westminster, and other places where he himself resided.²⁴ ²⁰ For an interesting reflection on the theme of the English, rather than the continental, tradition having in the long term proved the more ‘centralizing’, see C. Harvie, ‘English Regionalism: The Dog that Never Barked’, in B. Crick ed., National Identities (Oxford, 1991), 105–18, esp. 107–8. ²¹ M. Ellis, ‘A Study in the Manorial History of Halifax Parish’, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Journal, xl (1960–1), 440; Holdsworth, History of English Law, i 189. ²² Cf. Victor Morgan on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century developments in the facilitative use of prerogative powers: ‘Whose Prerogative?’, Journal of Legal History, v (1984), 39–64. ²³ For defence of the royal prerogative in relation to market rights against some American legislatures’ attempts to move into this field, see E. B. Russell, Review of American Colonial Legislation by the King in Council (London, 1915), 177. For borough charters and justices, e.g. S. Macintyre, ‘Bath: The Rise of a Resort Town 1660–1800’, in P. Clark ed., Country Towns in Pre-Industrial England, (Leicester, 1981), 237. ²⁴ 10 Geo. II c.28. V. Liesenfeld, The Licensing Act of 1737 (Madison, WI, 1984), shows that this was a point which the bill’s opponents tried to exploit, e.g. 43. P. T. Underdown, ‘Religious Opposition to Licensing the Bristol and Birmingham Theatres’, University of Birmingham History Journal, vi (1957–8), 149n., reports that royal protection was extended to theatres in Windsor, Richmond, and Brighton—the last presumably in the days of George IV.


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Not only was parliamentary authority exalted in point of principle: annual and prolonged sessions of Parliament also made it easier than ever before for local groups to bring proposals with some realistic hope of seeing them thoroughly considered before the session terminated.²⁵ Initially, indeed, as we have noted, more frequent and longer sessions of Parliament did not suffice to get a high proportion of local applications on to the statute book. But by the early years of the eighteenth century, Parliament seems to have made progress in sorting out its ideas about what it would sanction, and on what terms, and applicants had also developed a clearer sense (or their MPs, or legal agents had) as to what kinds of application could be expected to succeed. It was as a result of this two-sided learning process that the pass rate improved. As more time passed, Parliament also seems to have developed more facility in handling large quantities of legislation. In the early eighteenth century, it had felt overwhelmed by numbers of proposals it processed with apparent ease half a century later. Both constitutional and administrative developments, therefore, played a part in making possible an expansion of Parliament’s role.²⁶ Exalted views of parliamentary power in theory are entirely compatible with the vesting of significant discretionary powers in central executive bodies—so long as those powers are vested by statute. That was the way in which central executive authority was to increase in the nineteenth, and indeed twentieth, centuries: Parliament consigned various powers, to authorize, monitor, and direct, to central boards or departments. Eighteenth-century parliaments, by contrast, showed little interest in blanket authorizations. This caution presumably sprang not only from distrust of monarchs as such, but also from distrust of ministerial cliques and political factions, from fears of ‘jobbery’ and ‘corruption’. There were instances in which statute conferred special discretionary powers on the Privy Council; to deal with plague, for example.²⁷ But, by and large, Parliament kept as much decision-making power as possible in its own hands. (Even revenue departments in this era had their hands tied by statute in terms of what they were allowed to do with the proceeds of most taxes.²⁸) Eighteenth-century local acts were—necessarily in point of form, but also actually in practice—the outcome of local initiatives. What the preceding sketch has attempted to bring out, however, is some of the ways in which the form, and even to some extent the scale, of local initiative was shaped by a larger institutional and political context. Eighteenth-century localities sought local acts because they needed authorization from the centre to proceed with certain ²⁵ Langford, Public Life, 141–2, conveniently displays information about the changing pattern of parliamentary sessions. ²⁶ For a discussion of these issues more generally, see Hoppit and Innes, ‘Introduction’, Hoppit ed., Failed Legislation. ²⁷ 7 Geo. I c.3. ²⁸ R. Jarvis, ‘Critical Historical Introduction’, to E. E. Hoon, The Organisation of the English Customs System 1696–1786 (Newton Abbot, 1968), xviii–xix.

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projects. Parliament’s growing willingness to process such applications, and skill in doing so, allowed their number to expand (without of course determining that they would do that). Parliament’s pre-eminence as the source of authorization for local projects was a feature of a particular phase of British constitutional development, in which both the theoretical and the practical supremacy of statute had been firmly established, but the political classes were not as yet willing to use statute law to define broad agendas for central executive bodies to pursue in association with local authorities or communities.

S U B J E C T M AT T E R So far we have emphasized the need for inferior bodies operating in eighteenthcentury Britain to seek higher authority for their governmental operations. But some parts of this picture clearly need filling out. For some local services were provided without reference to any of the sanctions so far described. Some were run as businesses; water companies, for example, took over responsibility for water supply in many British towns in the course of the century. Some were managed as charitable trusts; thus many schools. Numerous eighteenth-century local enterprises were financed wholly or in part by subscription, and run by boards of management elected by subscribers, perhaps most notably numerous voluntary hospitals, which multiplied, first spottily, then at a growing pace, following the pioneering Westminster foundation of 1720. Lighting and watching—services in many places regulated by local act—elsewhere operated on a more informal, subscription basis.²⁹ Scope for associative activity of these, and other, kinds had opened up in Britain in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The establishment of a relatively liberal political climate encouraged a more relaxed attitude to voluntary association than prevailed in most continental states.³⁰ The development of the law of trusts and of charitable trusts provided legal resources some voluntary bodies were able to exploit.³¹ Some uncertainty seems to have prevailed, especially in the first half of the century, as to the kind of legal status such bodies needed, or in prudence were well advised to seek. One school of thought apparently had it that only incorporation ²⁹ Robins, Water Supply, 157 ff.; R. S. Tompson, Classics or Charity: The Dilemma of the Eighteenth-Century Grammar School (Manchester, 1971); D. Owen, English Philanthropy 1660–1960 (Cambridge, MA, 1964), 11–133; J. Woodward, To Do the Sick No Harm (London, 1974); J. D. Marshall, ‘Social Change in Kendal and Westmorland c.1760–1860’, Northern History, xii (1976), 133–4. ³⁰ This theme is developed in P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: the Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2000). ³¹ F. W. Maitland, Collected Papers, ed. H. A. L. Fisher (3 vols, Cambridge, 1911), iii, 271–84, 321–404, for characteristically wide-ranging and thoughtful reflections on this theme.


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provided a really secure foundation for bodies with funds to administer. A failed poor bill of 1704 would have facilitated the incorporation of parish and town charities, while at the same time placing them under the superintendence of Justices of the Peace, rather than chancery. Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls in the Walpolean era, constantly urged the importance of formally incorporating even statutory bodies. In practice, however, most voluntary bodies had much less clearly defined legal status.³² If many forms of local service could be provided without resort to legislation, or indeed any kind of official sanction, then we need to be able to specify more precisely when legislation was necessary, or what special benefits it was expected to confer. The need to assert some form of authorization, statutory or otherwise, seems to have been felt especially in three circumstances. First, when power to impose taxes or tolls not otherwise warranted was sought. Second, when other powers coercively to dispose of persons or property were sought. And third, when a desired course of action breached the terms of another statute. Let us look in a little more detail at how these general principles applied in practice, and at the extent to which, and reasons why, legislation was the form of sanction preferred. County magistrates had no right to impose a rate except as empowered by statute. Corporations, by contrast, could sometimes invoke the authority of charters or tradition. However, most eighteenth-century corporations seem to have been chary of doing so—fearing to provoke a challenge from some group of ratepayers generally ill-disposed to the claims of that, or all corporations.³³ Legislation was commonly their preferred sanction—partly, no doubt, because the supreme authority of Parliament was, by this period, almost unchallengeable, partly because Parliament seemed a particularly appropriate body to regulate any interference with subjects’ property.³⁴ Statute law also made possible the tailoring of rate regimes to particular local circumstances (thus, the balance of responsibility between landlord and tenant was differently struck in different cases). General legislation provided a starting point here for both counties and boroughs. From the sixteenth century, county magistrates had been empowered to raise rates for certain purposes; the 1739 County Rates Act consolidated their powers. It was plain from the start that those cities and towns that were also counties in their own right could take advantage of this. In 1740, a clarifying clause in a miscellaneous, ‘hodge podge’ act provided that all boroughs not ³² For the 1704 bill see House of Lords MSS, new ser., vi, 273–87; for Jekyll, N’hants RO, L (C) 1733: William Hay diary, 2 May 1735. Growing confidence in the devices of the trust and the parliamentary trust may have eased this anxiety—though it certainly never entirely disappeared. See on this theme works cited in n. 39. ³³ Langford, Public Life, 216–20, for hostility to corporations in general; H. T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1995), ch. 3, for particular squabbles. ³⁴ Langford, Public Life, ch. 3, illuminatingly enlarges on this theme.

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paying to the county rate might levy such rates on their own account.³⁵ Statutory poor rates were another possible resource: their proceeds might be employed for a variety of unauthorized purposes.³⁶ However, use of statutory monies for non-specified purposes was open to challenge—and when bodies which did not otherwise rate wished to be able to levy a rate, they probably invariably concluded that they needed statutory sanction to proceed.³⁷ The importance of acquiring compulsory rating powers, as opposed to attempting to finance a project by other means, varied depending on the form of service or amenity in question. Even though some lighting and watching schemes did apparently operate on a subscription basis, it is not hard to see why promoters of these schemes should often have wanted powers to tax. Voluntary schemes of this kind were by their nature likely to run up against the ‘free rider’ problem: those deficient in public spirit would be tempted to let their neighbours carry the cost; if enough people chose that course, a scheme would collapse. Such difficulties did not arise to the same extent in the case of amenities and services better able to limit benefits to subscribers. Thus, they did not arise in the case of voluntary hospitals, which customarily admitted only patients nominated by subscribers. And they arose only in a limited way for water suppliers: though such might be expected to maintain public wells or taps, they could at least charge those users who wanted water piped into their homes. These enterprises could therefore run on a voluntary or commercial basis. More often than in the case of rates, toll collection rested on historic, nonstatutory, foundations. Corporations and other holders of market rights were usually empowered, by charter, patent, or other title, to impose tolls on market users; also, corporations were often empowered by charter to collect port or harbour dues. The right to collect such tolls and dues was often contracted out. The levying of tolls on users of the King’s highway, by contrast, had no such traditional basis, and therefore (it would seem) required special statutory authorization. Established courts—including not only the High Courts, courts of quarter sessions, and borough courts, but also county, hundred, and manorial courts, where these continued to operate—were regarded as having sufficient warrant for their proceedings in the form of the King’s commission, charter, or the ³⁵ See n. 11 above. The act was 13 Geo. II c.18, s.7—one the Webbs seem to have missed. ³⁶ J. R. Kent, ‘The Centre and the Localities: State Formation and Parish Government in England, c.1640–1740’, Historical Journal, xxxviii (1995), 363–404. ³⁷ In the case of church building, the inadequacy of non-statutory church rates to underpin major expenditure seems to have provided one common reason for applying for legislation. When it was possible to raise sufficient monies by ordinary church rates, brief, gifts, or subscriptions, legislation might be avoided. Other reasons for obtaining acts to authorize church building included the need for compulsory purchase powers, and the desire to establish a new parish. I have not found much useful discussion of the topic, but see Clarke, Building of Eighteenth-Century Church, chs 5–8. The Church Building Act of 1818 (58 Geo. III c.45), while primarily concerned with the provision of subsidies, also attempted to devise a more general framework for dealing with this problem.


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traditional constitution of English local government. However, when localities wished to deal expeditiously with ‘small debts’ nonetheless exceeding the very low maxima operating in county, hundred, and manorial courts, either by enhancing the powers of those courts or by establishing special new ‘courts of requests’, some form of sanction for proceeding against the property or bodies of debtors was needed—and statute provided both the easiest and the most secure option. Parliamentary sanction also seems to have provided the only secure ground for the grant of powers of compulsory purchase. Town ‘improvement’ acts sometimes, canal acts usually included these. Town improvements could be effected without resort to legislation at all, however, if relevant properties were already in the hands of an improving corporation, or could be acquired by other means. To cite a spectacular early nineteenth-century example, the remodelling of Newcastle city centre in the 1830s was accomplished without resort to a local act.³⁸ Parliamentary sanction might be sought, finally, if implementation of a project entailed breach of an existing act. Fear of breaching the terms of the rather vaguely worded Bubble Act may have spurred some companies providing public services to seek parliamentary sanction (the act forbade unincorporated bodies to act like corporations).³⁹ The history of the effects of this act is marked by a mixture of ingenuity in finding a way around it, and cautious respect for its provisions. Legal historian A. B. Dubois notes that, in the later eighteenth century, it was increasingly held in legal circles that, against the background of the act, prudence dictated that express authorization be obtained before any corporation could borrow under its common seal.⁴⁰ Another example of an act localities sometimes sought special authority to circumvent was the 1737 Stage Licensing Act. When, from the 1760s, an increasing number of towns decided to promote the establishment of local theatres, they frequently sought local acts, empowering the King to license them, despite the 1737 act’s restrictions.⁴¹ ³⁸ Langford, Public Life, 224–5, discusses compulsory purchase and urban improvement; Ward, Finance of Canal Building, ch. 6; P. Cadogan, Early Radical Newcastle (Durham, 1975), 107–8. ³⁹ 6 Geo. I c.18. On the act and its consequences, see C. A. Cooke, Corporation, Trust and Company (Manchester, 1959), ch. 6, and at much greater length A. B. Dubois, The English Business Company after the Bubble Act 1720–1800 (New York, 1938), esp. ch. 1. The act expressly provided that possession of a royal charter might earn exemption, but in practice applications for charters were increasingly directed to Parliament (Dubois, English Business Company, 26); Parliament with its supreme authority also gave its blessing to bodies to act like corporations even without incorporation (Dubois, English Business Company, 228–9). Dubois’ discussion makes plain how closely (what we might term) local government law and business law were intertwined, around the theme of the ‘corporation’. Sgt Pengelley, prominent among the early purveyors of counsel on the Bubble Act, was also a leading figure in municipal corporation disputes. For citations of local legislation, see Dubois, English Business Company, 15, 99, 103, 110, 113, 219. ⁴⁰ Dubois, English Business Company, 112. ⁴¹ The first such act was the Bath Theatre Act of 1768 (8 Geo. III c.10), which was followed by acts relating to eight other towns; there were also some wholly unsuccessful applications.

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Though these broad principles governing the decision to apply for legislation can be identified, it needs stressing that it was by no means always obvious to those involved, in any given case, first whether legislation was necessary, or second whether it was on balance desirable. The extent of corporate powers, for example, was often uncertain; statutes often left scope for interpretation; in practice moreover it was sometimes possible to get away with things that might not have withstood legal challenge. The decision to apply for a local act commonly represented someone’s guess or judgement as to how it was best to proceed.⁴² Local acts not infrequently bestowed new powers on existing magistrates or municipal corporations. From the 1690s, however, it was also common for local acts to summon new forms of local authority into being; sometimes boards of named people with power to co-opt their successors; sometimes boards consisting wholly or partly of representatives elected by ratepayers; sometimes, boards open to anyone who met a certain property qualification and wished to serve.⁴³ The chance to create a new form of authority made local legislation attractive when no existing official body was well placed to deliver a particular form of service, its jurisdiction being too large, or too small, or its personnel inappropriate. When new or growing urban areas fell outside the bounds of traditional urban government, for example, local acts provided one possible way of meeting their needs.⁴⁴ Even when existing bodies, such as corporations, might, in purely practical terms, have delivered the service, the establishment of a new body might seem desirable if the corporation commanded insufficient public confidence to act effectively—or if its members did not wish to assume the entire weight of new responsibilities. The decision to try to solve a problem by creating a new authority armed with taxing or other coercive powers inevitably entailed resort to Parliament. ⁴² Langford, Public Life, 222–4, cites some cases where the extent of corporate rights became a matter of dispute. Note similarly that by no means all theatres were licensed. C. W. Chalklin, ‘Capital Expenditure on Public Building in Provincial England 1730–1830’, Business History, xxii (1980), 51–70, reports that purpose-built theatres began to appear in the larger provincial towns from the 1730s, antedating the legislation; also that twenty towns built theatres 1764–78, many of them obviously not protected by legislation. It seems that borough magistrates were often happy to tolerate a certain amount of ‘illegal’ acting, secure in the knowledge that they could if they saw the need drive players out by threatening prosecution. In this context, theatre managers had to weigh up the advantages of gaining more security against possible losses from challenging the status quo. See C. Price, Theatre in the Age of Garrick (Oxford, 1973), 181–93, for brief accounts of the background to half a dozen successful and unsuccessful applications. ⁴³ Webb and Webb, Statutory Authorities, provide a general overview of the legislation; Langford, Public Life 75–6, 222–47, discusses property and other qualifications. ⁴⁴ Even quite large towns sometimes operated successfully for a long time without such legislation, however: the unincorporated town of Sheffield, for example, did not get a local improvement act until 1818, by which time its population topped 50,000. For the institutions by which it was governed, see D. Hey, The Fiery Blades of Hallamshire. Sheffield and its Neighbourhood 1660–1740 (Leicester, 1991), ch. 6.


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O N E T H I N G L E A D S TO A N OT H E R Once Parliament had legislated in a field, that legislation might operate to encourage further legislation both positively (by providing a model) and negatively (by instilling anxiety). When a scheme being promoted was not of a kind that Parliament had previously approved, the trouble, loss of time, and expense involved in a speculative application to Parliament must often have been deterrent. Conversely, once a pioneering scheme had been approved, the risks and costs for others who wished to proceed in a similar way must have been substantially reduced. This being so, one local act often helped to bring forth imitators. Patterns in applications for, and approval of, bills for the establishment of small debt courts illuminate this. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, faced with a stream of applications for the establishment of local small debt courts, Parliament approved only three, and rejected all others. The belief that such applications would not be met with favour evidently got around, and they dwindled almost to nothing. At mid-century, however, Parliament changed its tune. It approved a couple of metropolitan applications—and provincial applications also began to flow in. The quickening of economic activity from mid-century no doubt helps to explain the upsurge of interest; the detailed geography and chronology of applications was also undoubtedly shaped by local circumstances. But Parliament’s changing willingness to approve such applications must also have been a crucial factor, operating in part through the way in which it affected calculations in the localities.⁴⁵ It is less obvious when the anxiety-instilling effect was at work—yet surely it did operate. If one county, town, or district was known to have obtained parliamentary sanction for its efforts, its neighbours might wonder all the more if they could safely proceed on another basis. General acts intended to empower local authorities could also operate to this effect. The 1700 County Gaol Building Act provides an illustration of this. The act appears to have been passed because there was dispute as to where responsibility for building and maintaining gaols lay. Sixteenth-century legislation had empowered county magistrates to raise rates for this purpose—but that legislation had been only temporary. Subsequently, some county benches willingly paid for the maintenance of gaols from county rates; some acted ⁴⁵ There were twenty-eight applications 1689–1705 (including numerous repeat applications), and only four more down to the point at which Southwark’s application was finally granted, in 1749 (22 Geo. II c.47).

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only when pressured by circuit judges; some flatly refused to act, insisting that responsibility lay with the Crown.⁴⁶ In the seventeenth century, those county benches which financed gaol rebuilding or repairs did so without seeking special authorization: no local acts were passed in that century to authorize expenditure on county gaols. By contrast, after the 1700 act had placed responsibility squarely on the shoulders of magistrates (paradoxical as it might seem), a stream of applications for local legislation ensued. Apparently counties now supposed that, if they wished to employ any powers beyond those assigned to them by the act, they could not safely proceed without further parliamentary authorization.⁴⁷ Once a particular district had obtained parliamentary sanction for some enterprise, that district often found itself locked into a cycle of repeated applications. For, if it wished to vary the terms of the original authorization, it could do that only by turning to Parliament again. Eighteenth-century legislative draughtsmen produced measures that, by the standards of earlier centuries, were extremely detailed and precise. That very detail and precision restricted room for manoeuvre. Over a third of all eighteenth-century local acts continued, amended, or repealed previous local acts.⁴⁸ Local legislation can be—and is properly—presented as empowering local communities: bestowing upon them powers they could not otherwise have securely claimed, giving them the opportunity (as Paul Langford has suggested) to bring into being an (admittedly patchy) new local governmental order, more in tune with the values of eighteenth-century propertied society than were older institutions. The account presented here is entirely compatible with that account. However it has also attempted to bring into view other aspects of the central–local relationship implicit in these proceedings: to suggest that the quest for local legislation reflects in part local communities’ lack of self-acting powers, and consequent need to obtain approval from national institutions for many of the projects on which they wished to embark. It has also suggested that the grip of that dependency tightened through time. ⁴⁶ This section draws on my own extensive research on prisons. For sixteenth-century legislation, see R. Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1968), 343–6. For seventeenthcentury disputes, see J. S. Cockburn, Western Circuit Assize Orders (London, 1979), nos 351, 1002; J. Tremaine, Placita Coronae (1723), 508. ⁴⁷ 11 Will. III c.19. Hertfordshire Justices applied for a local act immediately after the passage of the general act (12 Will. III c.21), but most counties proceeding at that time (e.g. Shropshire, Yorkshire) proceeded without special legislation. Later, the balance changed. Westmorland Justices of the Peace were unusual in setting about rebuilding their gaol without a local act as late as the 1770s (they did subsequently obtain an act—17 Geo. III c.54—in order to discharge the debts they had incurred). ⁴⁸ The proportion was especially high in the case of turnpike and other road legislation, where it topped 50 per cent: these acts were commonly passed for periods of 21 years only, and then had to be renewed. However, the ratio stood at no less than 20 per cent for all other kinds of local act.


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I N T E R AC T I O N W I T H G E N E R A L L E G I S L AT I O N Let us consider now the relationship between local and general legislation. Clearly nothing that Parliament endorsed in our period prefigures in any very substantial way the kind of systematizing and centralizing programme set on foot by the Whigs in the 1830s. On the other hand, the proliferation of local acts did not betoken a complete lack of interest on the part of the nation’s governing classes in acting in a general way to address problems of domestic governance. I have considered in chapter 1 the 500 or so acts passed by Parliament in the course of the eighteenth century which embodied just such a general approach. Some of these dealt with matters—such as the definition and punishment of crimes—that were never the subject of purely local legislation (though certain aspects of law enforcement and penal practice did figure in local acts). Others, however, dealt with matters which were frequently the subject of local acts: thus, with prison provision, provision for the poor, debt collection, and road maintenance. Here we will consider the ways in which the projects embodied in these contrasting forms of legislation related and interacted. Since the process of applying for local legislation did entail costs, not only in money but also in trouble and time, and not only for their promoters but also for the MPs and clerks who had to process them, there were good practical reasons for the governing classes to be interested in addressing problems by means of general measures—when that seemed practicable, and insofar as the special advantages that might arise from tailoring legislation to local circumstances were not lost. The 1700 County Gaol Building Act, discussed above, represents an example of an attempt to tackle a general problem through a general measure. It is improbable that its promoters—themselves hailing from counties with a live interest in the matter—envisaged that their successors would see the need to obtain local acts.⁴⁹ In 1784, a revised Gaol Building Act incorporated many provisions that had figured in local acts, the intention again presumably being as far as possible to empower counties to proceed without recourse to special legislation. In fact, local gaol building acts continued to issue—though they bore witness to the utility of the 1784 act inasmuch as they echoed some of its more innovative provisions in their own texts.⁵⁰ ⁴⁹ Its chief promoters, Boscawen, Byerly, and Brotherton—men generally active in shepherding government business through the House—represented seats in Cornwall, Yorkshire, and Lancashire. Cornwall had been in dispute with the Crown on the issue; Yorkshire lavishly rebuilt its gaol at the turn of the century; Lancashire also undertook extensive rebuilding at this time. I owe information about the MPs in question to Eveline Cruickshanks. ⁵⁰ For the 1784 act—24 Geo. III s.2 c.54—see Evans, Fabrication of Virtue, 135–42, and for localities continuing to proceed under local legislation, e.g. J. R. S. Whiting, Prison Reform in Gloucestershire 1770–1820 (London, 1978), chs 2–3.

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In other cases, local legislation opened the way, serving to identify a problem which general legislation subsequently tried to address in a more general fashion. The case of stage licensing provides an example here. As we have noted, several local bills allowing the licensing of provincial theatres did pass in the later eighteenth century. These applications often gave rise to controversy, opponents arguing that theatres undermined public morals. In 1788, in a debate in the House of Lords on a Brighton Theatre bill, the Lord Chancellor criticized the whole system of licensing by Parliament, arguing that it would be better for decision-making power in such cases to lie in the hands of ‘the principal gentlemen of the several counties’, since in Parliament ‘such bills were carried more by interest and favour than by any other inducement’. General legislation introduced in the wake of this intervention was designed both to devolve power away from Parliament, and to do so in a way that would better serve the cause of morality. (The Earl of Radnor, who promoted the bill along with the Lord Chancellor, was a member of Wilberforce’s moral-reforming Proclamation Society.) The bill (which became the Theatrical Representations Act) empowered Justices of the Peace to license theatre companies to perform for up to sixty days—with the proviso that no second such licence might be granted for another eight months. This procedure seems to have held the day for the rest of the century, although further local theatre acts did issue in the early nineteenth century.⁵¹ Interaction between local and general activity proceeded in an especially complex and striking way in the case of schemes to improve the administration of the poor laws.⁵² The first acts establishing local corporations of the poor appeared at a time when general legislation—proposing to divide the country into supraparochial districts—was also under debate in Parliament. When interest in promoting general measures on this topic was renewed, in the 1730s, it was spearheaded by MPs from districts governed by local acts.⁵³ One of the sponsors of a later, mid-century attempt at general legislation, Sir Richard Lloyd, upon the failure of his general measures, helped to promote the first of a string ⁵¹ 28 Geo. II c.36. I am indebted to Marius Kwint for information about this act; also to Gillian Russell for showing me her unpublished paper, ‘Theatre History as Cultural History: John Palmer and the Case of the Royalty Theatre’. For the Lord Chancellor’s remark, see London Chronicle (1788), 436: news dated 5 May. The act extended powers which London and Westminster Justices of the Peace already enjoyed under 25 Geo. II c.26 to license other entertainments. Strikingly, the act—as the Lord Chancellor seems from the start to have envisaged—did vest this power only in Justices of the Peace of counties, ridings, and liberties, not borough magistrates, though the mayor had to be notified of a proposed application, presumably so that he might object. W. Nicholson, The Struggle for a Free Stage in London (London, 1906), 124–40, sets the bill in the context of metropolitan theatre politics. ⁵² I have outlined patterns of general activity in relation to the poor laws in ‘Parliament and Social Policy’ (above, pp. 27–8, 44). For more detail, see also J. Innes, ‘The ‘‘Mixed Economy of Welfare’’ in Early-Modern England: Assessments of the Options from Hale to Malthus (c.1683–1803)’, in M. Daunton ed., Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare in the English Past (London, 1996), 139–80. ⁵³ CJ, xxi, 432.


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of local acts establishing rural incorporations.⁵⁴ Finally, in the 1770s, Thomas Gilbert, last and most assiduous of the promoters of general legislation of this kind, attempted to lay the groundwork for discussion of national measures by surveying the experience of all the districts operating under local acts.⁵⁵ One of the few minor successes scored by campaigners for a general recasting of the poor laws was ‘Gilbert’s Act’ of 1782. That act supplied a model for nineteenth-century ‘permissive’ legislation. Eighteenth-century general acts were often permissive, in the sense that they empowered but did not require local authorities to act. The distinctive feature of Gilbert’s Act was not this, but rather the fact that it provided a framework that permitted the establishment, without further resort to Parliament, of a new, rate-supported local authority. Gilbert himself saw the act which bears his name as an unsatisfactory compromise—the most he had thought he could get through a wartime Parliament. As he envisaged things almost twenty years before, when the matter first engaged his attention, the decision to create a poor law union would have been made by Quarter Sessions, acting on the petition of those with sufficient property to qualify as guardians.⁵⁶ Compared with this, the 1782 act was notably more cautious, and respectful of the fiscal prudence of the small ratepayer. It provided that the decision whether to join unions or not should be made parish by parish, and that the approval of two-thirds of the ratepayers was needed in each case. In two senses the act had a measure of success. Though not providing a basis for the comprehensive unionization Gilbert aimed at, it did provide a basis for extensive local action: by 1834, some thousand parishes (about 7 per cent of the total) had opted into Gilbert unions (many hundreds of others were governed by their own local acts).⁵⁷ More broadly, the mechanisms provided in the act surely influenced nineteenth-century legislators. Permissive lighting and watching legislation, for instance, proceeded on a parish-by-parish basis. The first such act for England and Wales, in 1830, required the approval of three-quarters of ratepayers for adoption, but when the act was recast in 1833, two-thirds was settled upon.⁵⁸ ⁵⁴ For Lloyd, see Innes, ‘Mixed Economy’, 159–60; also R. Potter, Observations on the Poor Laws (London, 1775), 33. ⁵⁵ For Gilbert, see Innes, ‘Parliament and Social Policy’ (above, p. 44) and for his survey Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, ix (1803), 252–96. ⁵⁶ 22 Geo. III c.83. T. Gilbert, A Scheme for the Better Relief and Employment of the Poor (London, 1765). As very first conceived by Gilbert at the end of the preceding session, the scheme would indeed have been compulsory, but after consulting others and ‘on mature consideration’ he thought it proper to try to make only ‘gradual advances’. In Considerations on the Bills for the Better Relief and Employment of the Poor (London, 1787) 5, he recorded his belief that the 1782 bill was not suited to serve as more than a temporary expedient, ‘partly from the difficulties of uniting parishes in the mode and on the terms described’. ⁵⁷ F. Driver, Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System, 1834–1884 (Cambridge, 1993), 42–7. ⁵⁸ Prest (Liberty and Locality, 11) suggests that the 1833 act was directly modelled on Hobhouse’s act of 1831, which required approval of two-thirds of ratepayers for the dissolution of a select

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R E S P O N D I N G TO G ROW I N G D E M A N D As well as attempting to provide for local needs by general measures, Parliament also made a variety of attempts to get to grips with the apparently unstoppable proliferation of local measures—especially from the 1770s, when twenty years’ worth of acts had accumulated since the mid-century upturn, and the pressure of rising numbers of applications was beginning to be felt across a wide range of kinds of local act. The Commons—the House into which such acts were normally first introduced—responded both by refining its procedures and by instituting enquiries. In 1774, thus, standing orders were adopted specifying procedures to be followed in the assessment of applications for turnpike, river, canal, and enclosure acts; similar orders in respect of other categories of local legislation followed.⁵⁹ In 1779, the clerk of fees was paid an additional salary for making sure that nothing included in local and private bills was detrimental to the public interest. (Among MPs the Chairman of Ways and Means was supposed to play a similar role.)⁶⁰ Attempts were made to monitor the results of certain turnpike acts, in part by setting up select committees to inspect commissioners’ accounts. (Especially close monitoring was attempted in the metropolitan area.⁶¹) Some attempts to grapple with the consequences of local legislation themselves took the form of legislation. Laws attempting to safeguard road conditions on turnpikes, specifying clauses that must be included in local legislation, appeared from the 1740s. In 1766, Thomas Gilbert—then an MP of only three years’ standing, but already embarked on that course of parliamentary diligence which would in time lead to his appointment to the pivotal post of Chairman of Ways

vestry. For attempts to establish general, extraparliamentary procedures in relation to private legislation, note the General Naturalisation Act of 1709 (7 Ann. c.5, repealed 1710, and another failed bill, in 1747, to the same effect: T. W. Perry, Public Opinion, Propaganda and Politics (Cambridge, MA, 1962), 31–44); also the Board of Agriculture’s unsuccessful attempts to promote a General Enclosure Act in the 1790s: they ultimately had to content themselves with a ‘clauses act’ (R. Mitchison, Agricultural Sir John: The Life of Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster 1754–1835 (London, 1962), 154–8). In 1725, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu joked to her sister that individual divorce acts should perhaps be superseded by general legislation: ‘The best expedient for the public and to prevent expense to private families would be a general act divorcing all the people of England’: Selected Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. R. Halsband (Harmondsworth, 1979), 139. In fact, the experience of handling divorce cases seems most commonly to have suggested to MPs the need to legislate against adultery—as was attempted at both ends of the century, when private acts proliferated. See L. Stone, The Road to Divorce (Oxford, 1990), 320–1, 333. ⁵⁹ Williams, Private Bill Procedure, ii, 264–6. Other standing orders related to bridge, small debt, and improvement bills. In 1799, canal standing orders were extended to bills for ‘railways or dram roads’. ⁶⁰ O. C. Williams, The Clerical Organisation of the House of Commons 1661–1850 (Oxford, 1954), 170; Lambert, Bills and Acts, 103. ⁶¹ Lambert Bills and Acts, 169–70.


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and Means—attempted to codify these provisions into a general law. In 1773, he sought to improve upon his previous effort.⁶² In the 1780s, statutory small debt courts attracted critical attention, spurring a similar regulatory effort. In 1786, a bill introduced in the previous year to govern the operation of small debt courts in the metropolis was extended to all small debt courts (including statutory courts) throughout the country. It passed in that form. This act attempted to eliminate features of such courts that had been judged especially objectionable, providing inter alia that every day’s imprisonment should be reckoned as discharging 1s. of the debt (in this way effectively setting a limit of 100 days to the term of imprisonment any such court might impose).⁶³ It is evident that general and local legislation did not constitute two independent streams of legislation. On the contrary, in numerous instances the one can only be fully understood in the context of the other. This is scarcely surprising: they were, after all, products of the same legislature, promoted and assessed by the same body of MPs (often indeed of the same subset of MPs: a corps of active backbenchers—men such as Thomas Gilbert—played a prominent part, both in promoting and in committee vetting of local acts, and in the same roles in relation to general measures bearing on domestic government).⁶⁴

T H E S C OT T I S H C A S E Scottish local governmental institutions up to and through the eighteenth century developed differently from their English counterparts. In Scotland, for instance, the sheriff, or shrieval office, remained more powerful than in England; Justices of the Peace, by contrast, were relatively recent imports, not universally established until after the Union, lacking some of the powers invested in their English counterparts (though also coming to acquire some that were peculiarly theirs).⁶⁵ Within this different context, post-Union parliaments approved distinctive legislative solutions to Scottish problems. The combination of a distinct heritage, and a distinct, subsequently accumulated body of general legislation, ensured ⁶² 6 Geo. III c.43; 13 Geo. III c.84. Webb and Webb, King’s Highway, 121, and more generally Langford, Public Life, 163; Lambert, Bills and Acts, 169–70. On each occasion, Gilbert also sought to codify provisions relating to the ordinary highways: in 1766 in the same, in 1773 in another act. ⁶³ 26 Geo. III c.38. New standing orders for future local acts of this kind followed: Williams, Private Bill Procedure, i, 265. Nonetheless, parliamentarians, presumably concerned by what had been revealed, refused to pass such bills for several years (see Parliamentary Register, xxii, 274; York Courant, 12 June 1787). The flow of acts resumed in the early 1790s. ⁶⁴ For the kinds of MPs who promoted general legislation, see Innes, ‘Parliament and Social Policy’ (above, p. 36). ⁶⁵ Whetstone, Scottish County Government, is the most accessible account—though there were in addition far-reaching differences in the court and legal system, and some differences in town government not covered by her.

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that the pattern of Scottish local legislation would differ in certain respects from the English. The Anglo-Scottish comparison nicely brings out some of the contingencies of legal development—and provides another perspective on the interaction between national and local measures. One distinctive series of Scottish local acts continued a pre-Union tradition. Since the mid-seventeenth century, acts had occasionally been passed empowering Scottish burghs to impose additional duties on the sale of beer, to augment burgh revenues. The Westminster Parliament continued to authorize levies of this kind. Though purposes on which such sums were to be spent were specified in these acts, they were often numerous and diverse: an Edinburgh bill of 1717, for example, listed eight different purposes, including renewing water pipes, deepening Leith harbour, building two new churches, setting the poor to work, and paying the Professor of Law at Edinburgh University—and this seems to have been fairly typical. Scots burghs, by such means, gained less tightly constricted additions to their disposable funds than English corporations ever did by their local acts.⁶⁶ Scotland did not set up equivalents to English courts of request. One explanation for this may be that the Scottish burgh system corresponded more effectively to the geography of urban Scotland than the English borough system did to eighteenth-century urban England—such that burgh courts were commonly available to serve urban needs. But where they were not, the Scots devised their own expedient: Justices of the Peace heard small debt cases. In 1795, that practice was ratified by general legislation.⁶⁷ In the case of roads, it was the English rather than the Scots who improvised a solution to an administrative deficiency. In the late seventeenth century, the English Parliament had struggled but failed to pass effective legislation permitting the levying of highway rates—in place of reliance on the forced labour of local inhabitants. Despite legislative failure, a system was devised, adapting the power of Justices of the Peace to fine parishes failing to maintain their roads (under sixteenth-century legislation) to a form of sanction for the levying of a rate. Eighteenth-century English road and turnpike legislation therefore was not centrally concerned with statute labour commutation.⁶⁸ In Scotland, by contrast, a similar expedient was for some reason not adopted (perhaps because a late seventeenth-century road act specified a limit on the sums that could be raised by assessment). In the 1750s, at the same time that—as the ⁶⁶ PP (1836) xxiii, 47–50, for the history of the practice. The Edinburgh act was 3 Geo. I c.5. Funds were not placed freely at the disposal of burghs, but were put into the custody of trustees. As in England, informal projects sometimes metamorphosed into statutory projects: in Greenock, for example, a mere burgh of barony, advantageously situated on the Clyde, the first attempt to build a harbour relied on voluntary subscription—but when after some decades funds were still short, resort was had to a beer duties act, 24 Geo. II c.38. ⁶⁷ Whetstone, Scottish County Government, 50–1. ⁶⁸ Webb and Webb, King’s Highway, 19–24.


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evidence of local acts suggests—local activity in relation to both roads and other matters was quickening in England, Scots county leaders for their part began developing a series of new initiatives to address local problems, including the need to substitute rating for statute labour. The issue was taken up centrally in the early 1770s by the rising young politician Henry Dundas, at that time Solicitor General for Scotland, who sent letters to counties asking for information on statute labour and its problems. But his interest apparently waned, and counties were left to promote their own commutation acts.⁶⁹ One of the most striking differences between Scots and English ‘local legislation’, in a broad understanding of that term, falls outside the main scope of this chapter, but deserves brief notice: the absence of enclosure legislation in Scotland. Reflecting in part a different system of land-holding, that absence also attests to the relative success of two late seventeenth-century Scottish general acts, which had established a local institutional framework for dealing with this issue.⁷⁰

T H E C H O I C E B E T W E E N LO C A L A N D G E N E R A L A P P ROAC H E S Given that both local and general acts, sometimes dealing with similar subject matter, were passing through the same institution—and given indeed that the same Parliament sometimes endorsed local legislation in one part of the kingdom, general legislation in another—explaining why such matters were handled as they were clearly involves explaining not absolute, but relative and contingent preferences. General measures, when they could be steered through, had certain obvious advantages. Mobilizing consensus behind a general measure might be a tricky business, however. Ministries did not commonly throw their weight behind general measures. In the absence of government departments (or royal commissions, on an early nineteenth-century model) to research the problems general measures sought to address, winning confidence in the appropriateness of any particular measure could not be easy—though an experienced magistrate or parliamentarian, who took sufficient care in formulating a measure, might succeed in convincing others of his own ilk in the House, and their support suffice to carry a bill.⁷¹ ⁶⁹ Whetstone, Scottish County Government, 80–89. ⁷⁰ I. Whyte, Agriculture and Society in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1979), 100–10, for the general legislation, also M. Turner, Enclosures in Britain 1750–1830 (London 1984), 28–32. The 1695 ‘Act Anent Lands Lying Run-rig’ allowed sheriffs, Justices of the Peace, or lords of regality to force consolidation of lands held piecemeal; the act for the Division of Commonties empowered the court of session on the instance of a single proprietor to appoint the same officials to oversee the division of common lands. ⁷¹ Innes, ‘Parliament and Social Policy’ (above, pp. 21–47).

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By no means every MP was motivated to exert himself to further such broad visions of the public good, however. The majority probably saw no reason to aspire to be more than good constituency MPs, addressing the problems of their immediate locality, seeking effective levels of support in the first instance in a known and limited district, and only on that basis approaching the House. Sir John Barnard, an active London MP, and not a man of narrowly parochial views, nonetheless expressed the outlook of the ‘good constituency MP’ in an incident of the 1730s. Barnard had brought into the House a bill to establish a new small debt court for London. It was argued in the House that ‘when the Evil is general the remedy ought not to be particular’, and that the bill should therefore be extended to the country at large. Barnard withdrew in disgust, proclaiming that, since a general bill would certainly be lost, he wanted no further part in it. (The bill did indeed fail.)⁷² Crucial, then, were MPs’ own aspirations: general measures were usually only canvassed, and were certainly only likely to succeed, when some especially public-spirited MP became fired with enthusiasm for a particular project.⁷³ These very general considerations apart, the relative attractiveness of the two approaches in relation to particular species of legislation varied, in significant part, according to the extent to which appropriate executive agencies were generally available. If it was possible to proceed by confiding powers in Justices of the Peace, or parish officers, or some other such universally available official, then it was not a very formidable matter to adopt a general approach. Municipal corporations were much too disparate to be treated in that way, however. Parishes also, though they could be treated as a uniform mass for certain purposes, were too disparate in size, and in the number and character of their inhabitants, for it to seem appropriate to equip them uniformly with any very wide range of powers. One of the great attractions of local legislation was that it could be made to apply to whatever stretch of territory made most sense in terms of its purposes. Furthermore, the social character of the governing authority could be tailored to fit the milieu.⁷⁴ In the nineteenth century, the problem of identifying suitable agencies across a very heterogeneous administrative and social landscape without completely redrawing the administrative map was tackled most ambitiously in the case of sanitary legislation. The provisions of the 1858 Public Health Act could be invoked by the inhabitants of any parish or group of parishes, or any ⁷² For Barnard, see N’hants RO, L (C) 1732: William Hay’s parliamentary diary, 7 Feb. ⁷³ Contrast Barnard’s attitude with that of the promoters of the Middlesex Small Debts bill of 1785, discussed on p. 101 above. Two of them—Lord Beauchamp and Michael Angelo Taylor—also took responsibility for the more general measure. Beauchamp, who was vice-president of the Thatched House Society for the Relief of Small Debtors, undoubtedly had a more than parochial concern with the subject. ⁷⁴ Langford, Public Life, 232–50, discusses the enormous variety of qualifications prescribed in eighteenth-century local acts, and their implications.


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otherwise (e.g. statutorily) defined administrative district (so long as there was sufficient support). Property qualifications for board of health members varied depending on the population of the district, being higher in larger districts. (Even this arrangement made no allowance for regional wealth differentials—though lower qualifying thresholds were specified for Scotland.) The very open-meshed character of these provisions points up the difficulties with which would-be promoters of general legislation had long had to contend.⁷⁵

H I S TO R I C A L C O N T I N G E N C Y In all the circumstances, it is not surprising that general legislation often did not commend itself to eighteenth-century Britons. Though it was sometimes possible for Parliament, as constituted and managed at this time, to devise measures at a sufficient level of generality to cope with diverse local circumstances, it was not always so. Yet Parliament was the only central institution the eighteenth-century British governing classes were prepared to see wielding discretionary powers to intervene in, and from time to time reshape, the structure and powers of local government. How else might British government have developed? Respect for the power of Parliament was so entrenched in the English governmental tradition as to make it seem improbable that any regime could have functioned effectively while dispensing with Parliament altogether. Nonetheless it is possible to imagine an alternative course of development in which Parliament would have met more intermittently, and tolerated the exercise of greater powers by the King’s agents (or even itself confided in them greater powers). Much more local innovation might have taken place on the basis of charters, patents, or approval signified by royal agents. Had British government developed in that way—rather more, that is to say, along the lines of many continental states—then expertise in handling such matters would have accumulated in the hands, not of a subset of MPs, but rather in those of ministers or other central government officers. The fact that, as British government in fact developed from 1688 down to the 1830s, and to some extent even beyond, such matters came to the legislature determined that this expertise instead accumulated in the hands of parliamentarians, ensuring their pre-eminence in the field down to the era of royal commissions, of new central bureaux, and ‘statesmen in disguise’. ⁷⁵ 21&22 Vict. c.97.


PART II E M PI R I C A L E N QU I RY


4 Power and happiness: empirical social enquiry in Britain, from ‘political arithmetic’ to ‘moral statistics’ It has often been suggested that between the ‘political arithmetic’ of the late seventeenth century and the ‘statistics’ and ‘statistical societies’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there intervened a caesura—a lapse of interest in the project of systematically amassing and analysing, partly by means of counting, information about state, economy, and society: about the various phenomena that can be lumped together as constituting the ‘civil’ as opposed to the natural world. Early warrant for this view can be found in a statement by the pioneering historian of British economic thought, J. R. McCulloch. McCulloch wrote that ‘during the long interval between Sir William Petty and Dr Beeke, statistical science could hardly be said to exist.’¹ Petty has enduring fame as one of the founding fathers of political arithmetic, and as the most energetic publicist of the practice. Beeke—who, in the 1790s, strove to improve on existing accounts of national income—is more obscure; this can only enhance the prevailing impression that, if there was a revival, it did not come with a bang. Mary Poovey, in her History of the Modern Fact, recently posited a link between decline in interest in such practices and changes in the relationship between government and society. She suggests that the rulers of eighteenth-century Britain saw themselves as ruling chiefly by negotiating ‘opinion’; they did not aspire to a form of ‘governmentality’ requiring the collection and analysis of social data. Accordingly, during this period studies of society took a different, more qualitative, turn.² Since I have worked on this topic on and off for two decades, I cannot hope to acknowledge all those from whom I have learnt over that time—but for comments on the chapter in its current form, thanks to Julian Hoppit, Sarah Lloyd, Philip Kreager, Paul Slack, and Roey Sweet. ¹ Cited by D. V. Glass, Numbering the People: the Eighteenth-Century Population Controversy and the Development of Census and Vital Statistics in Britain (Farnborough, Hants, 1973), 11, among others. For McCulloch—who argued that the collection of statistical data should be cultivated as a skill in itself, and distinguished from both political economy and political science—D. P. O’Brien, J. R. McCulloch, A Study in Classical Economics (London, 1970). ² M. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998): a very stimulating survey. ‘Governmentality’ is a word especially associated

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It is possible for historians to angle their accounts in such a way as to justify the notion of a caesura. The eighteenth century indeed brought few notable advances in what we would now call statistical technique: by and large, practitioners continued to employ the intellectual tools developed by the political arithmeticians. It is true also that central executive government did not vastly extend the range of its systematic data-collecting activities between the later decades of the seventeenth century, when the bureaucratic apparatus of the military–fiscal state was mainly formed, and the 1830s, when the General Register Office was founded. (The British national census of 1801 certainly broke new ground—but that was as much a parliamentary as a governmental venture, a distinction to which I shall return.) It is finally true that interest in amassing and analysing information about the state’s wealth and power declined after the death of Charles Davenant, in 1714. That particular decline is, however, surely largely to be explained by the fact that a quarter of a century of European warfare then came to an end: interest in those issues revived in a small way during the mid-century wars, and much more energetically in the era of the American Revolutionary War. Thus, though there was indeed something of a gap in this particular respect, it was not a very long one, and need not be taken to reflect a larger shift of interest. Some historians have noted continuities of interest, and indeed charted new developments. Julian Hoppit has noted that Parliament emerged, from the late seventeenth century, both as stimulator and increasingly also as organizer of data-collection efforts and also as a channel through which such information sometimes entered the wider public sphere.³ D. V. Glass—one of the founders of modern British historical demography—long since charted continuing and developing interest in the project of ‘numbering the people’ from the days of Graunt and Petty, Davenant, and King through to the era of the first national census.⁴ Andrea Rusnock has more recently charted and compared interest in medical statistics in mid-eighteenth-century England and France, noting that while French efforts in this connection were sometimes state-sponsored, and attracted sustained and ingenious effort from a small scientific community, with Foucault, who linked the rise of government interest in ‘information’ to the development of a form of ‘governmentality’ based on biopower: control over human and natural resources. See now Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France (trans. G. Burchell) (Basingstoke, 2007; original French edn, 2004). Poovey suggests that in eighteenth-century Britain there obtained by contrast a regime of ‘liberal governmentality’, associated with a shift in intellectual interest towards subjectivity: see esp. 147 ff., 214–17, 238–48, 280–2. She does however note that from c.1776 there was a revival of interest in ‘facts’. Indeed, at 214, she indicates that this interest never disappeared—but then shifts focus to whether the use of data was effectively theorized, which I take to be a different issue; at 280, she suggests that continuing interest deserves more research. ³ J. Hoppit, ‘Political Arithmetic in Eighteenth-Century England’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. xlix (1996), 516–40. ⁴ Glass, Numbering.

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British efforts were more widely publicized, and accordingly attracted more broadly based and diverse attention.⁵ In this chapter, I want to reinforce and extend this story of continuing interest and development in the empirical study of society, and also to characterize in what I think are new terms certain developments that took place.⁶ This is where the ‘power’ and ‘happiness’ of my title come in. I shall suggest that the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century political arithmeticians were mainly (not exclusively, but mainly) preoccupied with ascertaining the wealth and power of the state, conceived as deriving, in significant part, from the size and wealth of the social aggregate on which it rested. Men of this generation talked a good deal about ‘happiness’.⁷ But happiness, as they conceived it, largely arose from membership in a powerful social body. It is not surprising that people who lived, as they did, through an era of fierce inter-state competition, threatening in its religious, cultural, and political implications, should have been preoccupied with state power. Because they were concerned above all with the state, and with society as an aggregate, their calculations tended to focus on the larger whole. They were naturally especially hungry for national data; this they were able to obtain because their personal positions and connections gave them access to the higher reaches of government. Though such interests waned (as I have noted) in the relatively pacific 1720s and 1730s, they revived in the mid- and especially the later eighteenth century, as Britain engaged in a further series of expensive conflicts. It continued to be the case at that time that men who had privileged access to government data were especially well placed to pursue such enquiries; yet, the fact that Parliament increasingly put governmental information in the public domain also made it more possible than it had been earlier for private citizens to enter into discussion and, in their turn, amass and present data for ⁵ A. Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Cambridge, 2002), and see also her ‘Biopolitics: Political Arithmetic in the Enlightenment’, in W. Clark et al. eds, The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago, 1999), 49–68. U. Tröhler, ‘Quantification in British Medicine and Surgery, 1750–1830’, (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, London, 1979), has much of interest to say; his book, ‘To Improve the Evidence of Medicine’: the EighteenthCentury British Origins of a Critical Approach (Edinburgh, 2000), is differently organized and in some respects narrower; here I cite the thesis, with cross-references to the book when information is replicated there. Also of interest is P. Kreager, ‘Anthropological Considerations for a Theory of Fertility’, (unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1980); this offers ‘a historical epistemology of population analysis, from Halley to Lotka’. Kreager’s many articles focus especially on Graunt, and say less about the eighteenth century. ⁶ M. Donnelly, ‘From Political Arithmetic to Social Statistics: How some Nineteenth-Century Roots of the Social Sciences were Implanted’, in J. Heilbron and L. Magnusson eds, The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity (Dordrecht, 1998), 225–41, sets up the nature of change in broadly similar terms—but differs from me in positing a radical break between political arithmetic, portrayed as dying in the early eighteenth century, and new early-nineteenth-century developments. ⁷ P. Slack, ‘The Politics of Consumption and England’s Happiness in the Later Seventeenth Century’, English Historical Review, cxxii (2007), 609–31.

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wider public consumption. Beeke’s estimate of national income (which earned him McCulloch’s favourable notice) seems initially to have rested wholly on published data and the fruits of Beeke’s private research. Alongside the statistics of power, there meanwhile developed a second line of enquiry. This was not aggregative but disaggregative. It focused on local and social difference, on the health and prosperity of communities and members of different social groups—in general, on the distribution of happiness and pain across the social body. In characterizing this second kind of enquiry, by way of shorthand, as focusing on ‘happiness’, I follow Sir John Sinclair, who, in the preface to a set of extracts from his multi-volume Statistical Account of Scotland, explained that his object in pursuing these enquiries had not been to aid those concerned with taxation or war, but rather to illuminate the ‘quantum of happiness’ arising from, for example, the availability of education.⁸ The two lines of enquiry often intersected; the same practitioners might contribute to both (as did Sinclair himself ), or the same data serve both. But those who pursued the second kind of enquiry were more numerous and diverse.⁹ They included many clergymen and medical men whose sphere of operations and knowledge was localized. Such men had the potential to illuminate aspects of society that government was not well equipped to survey directly. They included also supporters of charitable societies—and thus potentially not only men but also women.¹⁰ Enquiries of this kind provide the most direct precedent for the ⁸ Sinclair, ‘Address to the Reader’, in Specimens of Statistical Reports: Exhibiting the Progress of Political Society, from the Pastoral State, to that of Luxury and Refinement (London, 1793), x. The idea (with Aristotelian roots), that ‘happiness’ was the natural goal of human striving was an eighteenthcentury commonplace. Happiness so conceived incorporated both ‘pleasure’ and ‘welfare’: for a recent discussion, D. M. McMahon, Happiness: a History (New York, 2005). Statisticians using the word included: J. Haygarth, ‘Observations on the Bill of Mortality, in Chester, for the year 1772’, Philosophical Transactions, lxiv (1774), 67; R. Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution (London, 1784), 18–19; T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London, 1798), 32–3. In the 1820s, the question whether national well-being was a matter of wealth only or more broadly of ‘happiness’ was central to the ‘Malthus–Ricardo debate’: Poovey, History, 295. I am not concerned in this chapter with the history of the ‘felicific calculus’: the idea, now associated particularly with Bentham but then more widespread (e.g. under the name of ‘moral arithmetic’) that precise calculations about the quantum of happiness arising from actions might aid decision making. For this, see Poovey, History, esp. 181, 185–6, 282, and G. D. Brooks and S. K. Aalto, ‘The Rise and Fall of Moral Arithmetic: Francis Hutcheson and the Mathematicisation of Psychology’, Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences, xvii (1981), 343–56; also L. Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1995), chs 2, 4. For Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London, 1989), ch. 4, ‘Value of a Lot of Pleasure or Pain, How to be Measured’. Sometimes linked with such calculations, and again not my concern here, is the argument that the object of public policy should be ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’—though see n. 222 for the possible influence of writings around this theme for empirical enquiry. ⁹ This shift in personnel, and therefore in modes of operation, has previously been noted: see, for example, P. Buck, ‘People who Counted: Political Arithmetic in the Eighteenth Century’, Isis, lxxiii (1982), 28–45, and Rusnock, ‘Biopolitics’. ¹⁰ Though no women came to prominence as data gatherers in this period, here as in many other contexts they probably made a variety of hidden contributions by assisting men, though the

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activities of early Victorian statistical societies. It is the development of this kind of activity across the eighteenth century that we must chart if we want to understand why the early nineteenth century ‘statistical movement’ took the form that it did.¹¹ Up to a point, I agree with Mary Poovey: inasmuch as forms of British governance changed, interest in empirical social enquiry was also reshaped. However, inasmuch as eighteenth-century Britain continued to be a fiscal-military state, enquiries that were encouraged by the nature of that state continued to be undertaken—if in changing forms, mirroring changes in those aspects of government. In relation to domestic governance, broadly conceived, empirical enquiry, from very small beginnings, grew and flourished. We should be alerted by this to the need not to underestimate the significance and vigour of this latter aspect of government—even while we are reminded of the complexity of interrelations between government and civil society in this sphere.¹² B AC O N Throughout the later seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, empirical enquirers into both natural and social worlds hailed Francis Bacon, Lord historiography provides only an occasional glimpse of this: see, for example, E. G. Wilson, Thomas Clarkson (London, 1989), 92. I owe this reference to Kaz Oishi. ¹¹ For early-nineteenth-century developments, T. S. Ashton, Economic and Social Investigations in Manchester 1833–1933 (Manchester, 1934); M. J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: The Foundations of Empirical Social Research (Hassocks, Sussex, 1975); L. Goldman, ‘The Origins of British Social Science’, Historical Journal, xxvi (1983), 587–616, among others. ¹² There has been a vast amount of work in this field in recent years. Apart from works already cited, I have found the following general studies especially useful: among older surveys, J. Koren ed., ‘The History of Statistics: Their Development and Progress in Many Countries’, in Memoirs to Commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the American Statistical Association (New York, 1918), and H. Westergaard, Contributions to the History of Statistics (London, 1932). For British economic data and estimates: G. N. Clark, Guide to English Commercial Statistics (London, 1938); P. Deane, ‘The Implications of Early National Income Estimates for the Measurement of Long Term Economic Growth in the United Kingdom’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, iv (1955), 3–38; S. H. Palmer, Economic Arithmetic: a Guide to the Statistical Sources of English Commerce, Industry and Finance 1700–1850 (New York, 1977), and for their role within economic analysis, T. Hutchison, Before Adam Smith: the Emergence of Political Economy 1662–1776 (Oxford, 1988). R. Stone, Some British Empiricists in the Social Sciences 1650–1900 (Cambridge, 1997), is disappointing to a historian, full of detail but lacking in historical analysis, but Stone does assess the persuasiveness of his authors’ statistical work. For medieval background P. Biller, The Measure of Multitude: Population in Medieval Thought (Oxford, 2000); for the seventeenth century P. Slack, ‘Government and Information in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, clxxxviii (2004), 33–68, and ‘Measuring the National Wealth in Seventeenth-Century England’, Economic History Review, lvii (2004), 607–35, and various works by B. Shapiro, including her A Culture of Fact: England 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY, 2000). I have not attempted to include within this survey patterns in the empirical study of empire, but see among other works P. C. Cohen, A Calculating People: the Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago, 1982); E. Ellsworth, Science and Social Science Research in British India 1780–1880 (London, 1991), and J. Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1994).

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Verulam, as their progenitor, and indeed as a kind of patron saint, model, and inspiritor of their efforts.¹³ No sharp distinction was then drawn between what we might term natural and social science: practitioners of both figured among Fellows of the Royal Society, united by their commitment to the systematic study of phenomena that were not the product of human design, and sometimes also by certain observational practices, such as tabulation and counting.¹⁴ To turn to Bacon’s own writings is however to be reminded how slight and undeveloped were his own ideas about the study of the social world.¹⁵ Bacon—thinking and writing in the early years of the seventeenth century—in truth did not go much beyond suggesting that statesmen might have a use for knowledge of certain features of the natural world, as that had been wrought upon by human beings. Thus, he suggested that it might be useful for them to have maps, and surveys of their territories. Bacon was fascinated by life and death—but seems to have conceived of the study of circumstances affecting these as primarily of interest to individuals and their physicians. Later generations would associate with Bacon the slogan ‘knowledge is power’, but Bacon himself seems to have had no very elaborate ideas as to how knowledge might underpin state power. One line of enquiry in which Bacon, by the standards of his successors, showed surprisingly little interest involved the use of information gathered by government itself, at various levels, in the course of its operations: in fiscal data, muster rolls, surveys of the poor, and the like. Later ‘Baconian’ students of society sometimes collected their own data, but very often they economized on effort by using such independently generated information. In practice, use of such information sources brings in its train a set of problems more and less akin to those faced by students of the natural world. First, what is recorded is likely to be affected both by the purposes for which it was assembled and by the processes through which it was gathered. The more acute students of society would later develop considerable sensitivity to such problems, and would try ¹³ By the end of the century, the catchphrase associated with him, ‘Knowledge is Power’, had begun to be used in this context: see, for example, J. Currie, A Letter, Commercial and Political (London, 1793), 3; J. Anderson, Recreations in Agriculture, Natural History, the Arts and Miscellaneous Literature, iv (London, 1800), title page. ¹⁴ History was contrasted with philosophy/science, but these terms related to differences of approach, not subject matter. Several recent writers have stressed that the notion of ‘fact’ was developed initially in relation to assessing human actions; Bacon and others extended it to phenomena of the natural world: Shapiro, Culture of Fact, 106–9. ¹⁵ Francis Bacon, Works, ed. J. Spedding et al. (14 vols, London, 1857–74), and for the English writings more accessibly Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. B. Vickers (Oxford, 1996)—a new edition of major Latin works is also promised. There is a vast body of writing on Bacon. For an introduction, Poovey, History, 96–103, and M. Peltonen, The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (Cambridge, 1996). R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), sets him in the context of a ‘Tacitean’ reason-of-state tradition. J. Martin, Francis Bacon, the State and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, 1992), seems to me to overstate the political utility of Bacon’s agenda. W. T. Lynch, Solomon’s Child: Method in the Early Royal Society of London (Stanford, 2001), stresses the diversity of ways in which Bacon’s views on method were appropriated.

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to take them into account in interpreting the data. Second, while some of the things on which governments sought to collect information might be regarded as natural facts—thus, numbers of people in a given territory, or numbers of men of fighting age—other administrative data related to complex social artefacts. Thus, records of poor-relief expenditure, or crimes brought to trial, might be thought to reflect something about the prosperity of the community or the conduct of its members, but in the first instance these are simply records of encounters between administrators and members of the public—encounters shaped by a sequence of decisions made by various parties. Some data found in records of this kind, third, is susceptible to counting only inasmuch as it takes the form of a list of sums of money—introducing a further set of complications when totals derived from such lists are compared with other totals also calculated in monetary terms; the meaning of such comparisons, always problematic, is even harder to determine when comparisons are made across time. Social enquirers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and since have shown varying degrees of sensitivity to these difficulties.¹⁶ Bacon did not himself advocate the use of information adventitiously generated by governmental processes to yield insights into society. But government records had for some time occasionally been used in that way: for example, as a basis for population estimates, and in attempts to estimate the ‘balance of trade’ between England and other countries. The history of such efforts—recently surveyed, from a seventeenth-century vantage point, by Paul Slack¹⁷—reveals a long-standing if minority interest in thinking about society through the medium of numbers; also a persistent, and sometimes heroic determination to make a little data go a long way. Estimates of the land area of the kingdom or rough counts of numbers of parishes provided bases from which bits of local data (or even just plausible guesstimates) could be multiplied up to yield a national estimate. Thus, around 1600, Gerard Malynes, a Mint official with a wider interest in such things, attempted a comparison of English and French territory and population (optimistically concluding that the English population approached the size of the French, when in fact it was probably more like a quarter of its size).¹⁸ At about the same time, the economic cost of idleness was estimated by proposing a plausible average of idlers per parish, multiplying up by the number of parishes, and then again multiplying by an estimate of how much each could potentially make by his or her labour. (This mode of thinking was encouraged in this instance by the fact that the calculators were projectors, who were proposing to contract for the management of the London Bridewell.¹⁹) ¹⁶ For early recognition of such problems, Poovey, History, 76, 78, 83. ¹⁷ Slack, ‘Government and Information’. ¹⁸ Ibid., 41. ¹⁹ Stanleyes Remedy: or, the Way to Reform Wandering Beggars . . . (London, 1646 [though written earlier]), 2.

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Two examples will give some sense of the ways in which Bacon’s immediate contemporaries sought to bring conclusions founded on the study of governmentgenerated information to bear on policy debates. In the early seventeenth century, a paper presented to the Privy Council set acreage estimates for two counties more and less affected by enclosure alongside population estimates derived from muster rolls—to ground the conclusion that enclosure was not depopulating.²⁰ In the 1630s, London lawyer Rice Vaughan used local magistrates’ wage assessments—prescriptive rather than descriptive material, apparently interpreted by him as reflecting and stabilizing rather than as straightforwardly determining wages—as a source of data for a relatively sophisticated enquiry into the relationship between trade flows and the value of money. In Vaughan’s thinking (as in much other thinking of the time) the economy (though not as such a concept available to him) was conceptualized as having a logic of its own: this assumption informed both his use of records and his policy recommendations.²¹

POLITICAL ARITHMETIC Though Bacon himself does not seem to have grasped the full potential for his broadly conceived knowledge-project of social and economic data, generated either by government or by other means, during the later seventeenth century some of his self-proclaimed disciples did see this. These men were the founding fathers of ‘political arithmetic’. They brought a Baconian scientific zeal and expansive sense of possibility to information sources that had previously been exploited, if at all, in limited and particular ways. When people in the mideighteenth century began to outline a political-arithmetic tradition, they focused above all on four men: William Petty (who coined the term ‘political arithmetic’, and used it in the title of one of his treatises); his friend John Graunt; and, in the next generation, Charles Davenant and Gregory King.²² I shall start with them too. Certain features of the late seventeenth-century scene helped to shape the ways in which these men thought and worked. First, culturally: utopianism, science, and hopes that England’s economy might be advanced by a mix of conquest and plantation, trade, technical improvements in agriculture and manufactures, and the formation of a skilled and disciplined workforce combined to produce a heady vision of possible ‘improvement’ that inspired many mid- and ²⁰ Slack, ‘Government and Information’, 42. ²¹ R. Vaughan, Discourse of Coin and Coinage (London, 1675)—though composed in the 1630s. I owe this reference to Michael Roberts. ²² See n. 76. As I note at various points below, works by Graunt and Petty were reprinted in the 1750s; Davenant, in the 1770s; King (once his original mss. had been discovered), in 1803.

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later-seventeenth-century Englishmen.²³ This vision was compatible with a variety of forms of religious and political commitment; it also provided an alternative focus for those frustrated or disillusioned on other fronts. The hope that society might be at once materially and morally improved encouraged attempts to yoke the pursuit of knowledge to various forms of public policy. At the very least, hopes of this kind coloured rhetoric. Late-seventeenth-century virtuosi sought to legitimate their wide-ranging curiosity by claiming that their enquiries and endeavours were potentially ‘useful’.²⁴ Late-seventeenth-century empirical enquiries and accounts took many forms. But the use of numbers in reporting or analysis was encouraged by the spread of arithmetical facility. Previously such skills had been held chiefly by the merchant community, and by practitioners of such avocations as surveying, navigation, and almanac making. In the late seventeenth century, not only were such practical skills much in demand, but also counting and accounting were increasingly valued as tools of government. Senior officials, such as Samuel Pepys, set about learning multiplication tables; excisemen had to learn to measure commodity output. Gambling supplied leisure applications for these skills. The literate classes increasingly sought to round out their education with numeracy.²⁵ The period was also marked by lively inter-state competition. The Dutch, English, and French competed commercially—and appreciated that wealth generated by commerce provided important foundations for other forms of state power. Defenders of the Protestant interest saw special reason for England to resist being too much overshadowed by France. The Civil War—both in its English and in its British dimensions—had tested English governmental capacity, and encouraged innovation and experimentation in the practice of rule. Though some constitutional forms were restored in 1660, administrators sought to consolidate and develop new fiscal, military, and other regulatory capacities. Inter-state competition helped to spur these efforts. The more and less permanent central bodies established to oversee government operations opened a host of new opportunities to men with the right connections, ambitions, and skills, including managerial, technical, and analytical skills; men ²³ C. Webster’s account of this milieu, in The Great Instauration (London, 1975), has been especially influential. See also P. Slack, From Reformation to Improvement (Oxford, 1998). For the survival of a scientific/projecting culture into the early eighteenth century, L. Stewart, The Rise of Public Science (Cambridge, 1992). ²⁴ There were other legitimating rhetorics, which also probably played their part in shaping motivations—not least the desire to illuminate the works of God. See K. T. Hoppen, The Common Scientist in the Seventeenth Century: A Study of the Dublin Philosophical Society (Charlottesville, VA, 1970), 79–84. Petty claimed to have undertaken his first mathematical calculations to refute the impious suggestion that ‘there would be neither sufficient space nor matter for the generations of men at the time of the Last Judgement’ (E. Strauss, Sir William Petty (London, 1954), 209). ²⁵ K. V. Thomas, ‘Numeracy in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. xxxvii (1987), 103–32. Bacon himself, though urging the use of ‘number, weight and measure’ in descriptions, did relatively little with them.

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with these skills then helped to devise new ways of carrying out the work of government. These developments encouraged the intermeshing of genteel culture, office-holding, and science, reflected in the substantial overlap between MPs, higher officialdom, and members of the Royal Society.²⁶ These were, taken together, propitious circumstances for the development of an empirical science of state power. Of my four ‘founding fathers’, John Graunt (1620–74) was the one least touched by these developments, and also the one whose work least fits this description—though the reception of his work was shaped by this context.²⁷ A Londoner, and a haberdasher by trade, Graunt brought his ‘shop arithmetic’ ingeniously to bear on the analysis of London ‘bills of mortality’: lists giving numbers dying each week, grouped by cause of death, compiled by London parish clerks (on the evidence of women who ‘searched’ the bodies of the dead), with a view chiefly to alerting residents and visitors to the onset of epidemics.²⁸ Graunt innovatively summed and tabulated this data, creating time series, then explored relationships within his data by means of ratios and percentages; used subtraction, to highlight change over time, and relative time-frames, to search for patterns. He noted some problems with the reliability of the raw data, and sought ways to compensate for that; he also obtained some comparative provincial data (relating among other places to Romney, a clothing town in Hampshire, William Petty’s home town). Though he lacked age data, he attempted to construct a form of mortality table by separating out causes of death which he thought especially likely to afflict children under six, then assuming that chances of life and death remained constant over the next seven decades of life. Graunt suggested that his calculations (which he published in 1662) were potentially useful—but the range of persons he identified as possible users of his data was strikingly wide, including government, physicians, and people searching for somewhere to live. It does not appear that he was especially concerned to serve the needs of particular users; his exercises were more redolent of utility than they were actually functional. They were also empirical only up to a point: he was disposed to find certain kinds of regularities and patterns in his data; these assumptions shaped the forms of analysis he employed and even, as we have ²⁶ G. E. Aylmer, The Crown’s Servants. Government and the Civil Service under Charles II, 1660–1685 (Oxford, 2002), 162. For new information initiatives, J. Brewer, Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (London, 1989), ch. 8; Clark, Guide. ²⁷ Almost all the individuals discussed in this essay are noticed in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, generally an excellent first port of call. ²⁸ J. Graunt, Natural and Political Observations . . . made upon the Bills of Mortality (London, 1662), reprinted F. W. Willcox ed. (Baltimore, 1939), and in facsimile in The Earliest Classics—John Graunt—Gregory King, ed. P. Laslett (London, 1973). Graunt saw himself as building on Bacon’s project for a natural history of life and death—but the means he employed transformed the project. In using tables, Graunt also conformed to Baconian injunction, but with a difference—Bacon’s own tables were not number-based (see Rusnock, Vital Accounts, 16–17). There is a large but dispersed literature on Graunt. See inter alia, Rusnock, Vital Accounts, ch. 1; Stone, Some British Empiricists, ch. 7.

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seen in the case of age data, encouraged him to manufacture data on the basis of his own assumptions. Graunt clearly relished above all experimenting with techniques for searching out and displaying pattern in information. It was his aptitude in this regard which especially distinguished his work, and which excited his contemporaries—winning him a Fellowship in the new Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. Graunt indeed developed pretty much the whole bag of tricks which his successors would use for more than a century: technically, it would be a long time before many workers in the field advanced much beyond Graunt in this regard.²⁹ But later writers asked different questions, explored different data sources, and struggled with new kinds of interpretative problem to which their efforts gave rise, while the number and range of enquirers in the field grew enormously. These are the main senses in which political arithmetic continued to develop for the next century and a half. William Petty (1623–87) was a friend and collaborator of Graunt’s, in effect co-founder of political arithmetic.³⁰ Both in reality and in aspiration, Petty stood much closer to the sources of state power, and was more self-consciously concerned to understand and enhance it: he if anyone was the progenitor of the quantitative study of ‘power’. Petty had developed mathematical and scientific interests in the course of a boyhood stint at sea, schooling in France, and an English university medical education. Against this background, he also taught himself the art of surveying, and applied it to the occupied territory of Cromwellian Ireland—amassing a great estate for himself in the process. From an early date Petty was fascinated by the potential of numbers to unlock knowledge; he is reported to have hung around the coffee house where Harrington’s ‘Rota’ club met in the late 1650s, pestering people with his ‘Arithmeticall proportions: reducing Politie to Numbers’.³¹ Petty was a sloganizer—‘political arithmetic’ was his coinage, and the Biblical phrase ‘number, weight and measure’ his mantra. He did all he could to publicize the power of these methods, and to advance his own career on the back of them. But he also wrestled creatively with some of the conceptual problems entailed, in ways that have continued to impress later generations. He was particularly interested in developing ways of estimating ²⁹ How early empirical enquirers processed and used their data has not been the main focus of most accounts, but see A. M. Endres, ‘The Functions of Numerical Data in the Writings of Graunt, Petty and Davenant’, History of Political Economy, xvii (1985), 245–65; J. L. Klein, Statistical Visions in Time: a History of Time Series Analysis 1662–1938 (Cambridge, 1997) and Kreager, ‘Anthropological Considerations’. ³⁰ I am indebted especially to Strauss, William Petty and to Alessandra Roncaglia, Petty: The Origins of Political Economy (Cardiff, 1985). For modern editions of Petty’s writings see The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. C. H. Hull (Cambridge, 1899), and The Petty Papers: Some Unpublished Papers by Sir William Petty, ed. H. W. E. Petty Fitzmaurice, Marquis of Lansdowne (2 vols, London, 1927). G. Keynes, Bibliography of Sir William Petty FRS and of Observations on the Bills of Mortality by John Graunt (Oxford, 1971), lists contemporary and modern editions of these works, with extracts and some commentary. ³¹ J. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick (Penguin edn, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1972), 402.

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the wealth-producing potential of territory: of land developed by labour; this required efforts to establish land area, population, and potential yields. To escape from problems associated with the use of monetary values, he also strove to find ways of representing the value of land in terms of labour, or vice versa. Impatient for results, he was inclined to conjecture and extrapolate on the slenderest of bases, though he also jotted down all kinds of raw data that came his way. Petty’s thinking was always framed by his consciousness of the competitive international environment in which England had to operate, and some of his estimates were designed to measure English resources against French and Dutch. Some of his writings were published during his lifetime, but others were written to advertise his skills and gain him influence in the state, and remained in manuscript. Some were published after his death, in the somewhat more open political climate following the Revolution—and once the decease of their author had cleared the way for the advancement of knowledge to take precedence over the advancement of Petty.³² Charles Davenant (1656–1714), a rather younger man, shaped his early career according to the opportunities presented by the Restoration state: he became a commissioner of the excise at the early age of twenty-two.³³ In consequence, he found himself awkwardly placed in the post-Revolutionary era, and spent the 1690s out of office, pamphleteering on economic and other policy issues, and cultivating political connections (he twice sat briefly in Parliament). He moved in the orbit of (among others) Robert Harley, the anti-Junto ‘country’ politician. His political friends did better in Queen Anne’s reign, and, in 1703, Davenant was appointed to the recently created post of ‘Inspector General of Imports and Exports’, charged with producing national abstracts of fiscal data, with a view to informing ministerial but also parliamentary fiscal and economic policy; he thus became responsible for overseeing the generation of official data which he among others analysed.³⁴ Davenant’s later career was played out against a background of almost continuous warfare: it is not surprising that one of his preoccupations was with England’s relative strength. His background in the revenue services helped to direct his attention especially to the interplay between economic activity and tax yields. He was interested among other things in the effects of tax burdens, ³² Possibly at the instigation of Peter Pett, another of the circle of early political arithmeticians: see M. Goldie, ‘Sir Peter Pett, Sceptical Toryism and the Science of Toleration in the 1680s’, in W. J. Sheils ed., Persecution and Toleration (Studies in Church History xxi, Oxford, 1984), 247–73. ³³ D. Waddell, ‘The Career and Writings of Charles Davenant’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1954); J. G. A. Pocock, Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), 436–46; K. Multamäki, Towards Great Britain: Commerce and Conquest in the Thought of Algernon Sydney and Charles Davenant (Helsinki, 1999). The standard edition of Davenant’s works remains The Political and Commercial Works of . . . Charles D’Avenant, ed. Sir Charles Whitworth (5 vols, London, 1771). ³⁴ For the office, see Clark, Guide, 3–40. Note that the Inspector collected English rather than British statistics, a practice not changed by Anglo-Scottish union; Scottish trade statistics were collected only from 1761 (Palmer, Economic Arithmetic, 6).

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and their uneven incidence in different regions. In that connection he tried also to estimate regional variation in expenditure on the poor.³⁵ Davenant mixed with a number of other men with similar interests, including Arthur Moore, who in the early eighteenth century became a commissioner of the Board of Trade; Moore seems to have supplied Davenant with some of his regional data.³⁶ Most famously, Davenant collaborated with, and published some of the findings and ideas of, Gregory King: it was chiefly through Davenant’s publications that King’s work became known to a wider public.³⁷ King (1648–1712), though Davenant’s senior by a few years, lacked wealth and connections comparable to those that gave Davenant a head start.³⁸ The son of a Staffordshire mathematician and surveyor, King took a post as clerk to one of the heralds when he left school, and gained a broad and deep knowledge of English society through heraldic surveys of the gentry, followed by work in descriptive cartography. He worked as a surveyor for John Ogilby’s Atlas, and helped collect and design forms for the collection of local information for Ogilby’s projects; he also worked on John Adams’ Index Villaris, a list of towns and villages which drew on hearth-tax data.³⁹ King’s skills earned him a variety of public posts: including that of Lancaster Herald, secretary to Queen Anne’s commissioners of public accounts, and to the comptroller of army accounts. He was also consulted by a wide variety of politicians and official bodies seeking quantitative data to inform various kinds of policy: his knowledge and skills, the empirical data he had amassed, and his familiarity with the problems involved in digesting and analysing it clearly all served to recommend him. What became his best known work, his ‘Natural and Political Observations upon the State and Condition of England, 1696’, remained unpublished during his lifetime (except inasmuch as it was excerpted by Davenant). It was probably compiled to aid Robert Harley’s anti-war arguments. King’s attempt to assess the impact of war on English society and economy was hampered by the fact that, as a pioneer ³⁵ Davenant, An Essay upon the Ways and Means of Supplying the War (London, 1695), 76–7, and table. His regional tax estimates are re-presented and analysed in Stone, Some British Empiricists, 56–68. ³⁶ P. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), 171. ³⁷ Chiefly through Discourses on the Public Revenues (London, 1698) and An Essay upon the Probable Methods of Making a People Gainers in the Ballance of Trade (London, 1699). ³⁸ King lacks a thorough modern study, though the ODNB entry provides a helpful overview. For a facsimile of the key work, including his notebook of rough workings, The Earliest Classics; for a modern edition, Two Tracts by Gregory King, ed. G. E. Barnett (Baltimore, 1936). The Visitation of London begun in 1687, ed. T. C. Wales et al. (Harleian Society n.s. xvi–xvii, London, 2004) recapitulates his last visitation; for studies and editions of other work he did as herald, ibid. vol. xvi, p. xxviii, n. 15. See also Stone, Some British Empiricists, 224–35; G. S. Holmes, ‘Gregory King and the Social Structure of Pre-Industrial England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. xxvii (1977), 41–68; J. A. Taylor, ‘Gregory King’s Analysis of Clerical Livings for John Chamberlayne and the Governors of Queen Anne’s Bounty’, Historical Journal, xxxix (1996), 241–8. ³⁹ K. S. van Eerde, John Ogilby and the Taste of his Times (Folkestone, 1976); E. Heawood, ‘John Adams and his Map of England’, Geographical Journal, lxxix (1932), 37–44.

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of political arithmetic, in an age of newly abundant data, he inevitably lacked good historic data upon which to found comparisons over time. He therefore fell back upon Bible-based demographic speculations, of a kind previously attempted by such Restoration literati as Sir Matthew Hale (1609–76) and Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82).⁴⁰ He extrapolated normal population growth rates from a set of assumptions about the time that had passed since the settling of England after the Flood; then set his guesses about recent population trends alongside. The adjective ‘heroic’ scarcely begins to capture the audacity of these speculations—but that was the best basis for calculation that contemporary resources afforded. The emergent ‘military-fiscal state’ clearly provided a crucial context for much of the work of these pioneers of political arithmetic. But that was not all there was to government at this time, nor was all empirical social enquiry dependent on or directed towards government. Another notable feature of the later seventeenth century was of course the growing power of Parliament; the Church too was an important and powerful organization, whose status and structures were changing and contested, and this was also a period notable for the burgeoning of voluntary associations. All these stimulated and supported their own forms of enquiry. The fruits of these efforts sometimes circulated in manuscript among interested parties, but often found their way into print, in formats ranging from the ornamental tome to the ephemeral broadsheet, for the edification of a variegated reading public. The economic and social basis of parliamentary representation attracted the attention of John Houghton (1645–1705)—a London pharmacist with mercantile and banking connections, and an active member of the Royal Society. From 1681 to 1683, and again from 1692 to 1703, Houghton published a weekly broadsheet, Collections for the Improvement of Agriculture and Trade, which coupled articles on new crops and production techniques with commodityprice and currency data, aiming at a readership not of policy makers but more generally of the enterprising and curious.⁴¹ Houghton presented his findings about the basis of representation to Parliament in 1693. He charted numbers of MPs per county against tax burdens, acreage, and numbers of houses (presumably ⁴⁰ Two Tracts, 24–7. T. Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (London, 1646, and numerous later editions). Sir Matthew Hale, The Primitive Origination of Mankind (London, 1677); similarly for the eighteenth century R. Cumberland, Origines Gentium Antiquissimae, or Attempts for Discovering the Times of the First Planting of Nations (London, 1724). There are brief discussions in J. H. Cassedy, ‘Medicine and the Rise of Statistics’, in A. G. Debus ed., Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1974), 292–4; Glass, Numbering, 37. George Chalmers (who is further discussed below), reprinted Hale’s work, under the title ‘An Essay on Population’, in his Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Britain (London, 1782). ⁴¹ N. Glaisyer, The Culture of Commerce in England 1660–1720 (London, 2006), ch. 4, for Houghton and the broader publishing context. C. Gravensteijn and J. J. McCusker, The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism (Amsterdam, 1991), sets out the broader history of such journalism, in Britain and elsewhere.

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estimated from tax data), and used ratios to highlight the uneven incidence of tax to acreage and representation to both.⁴² The Church of England, with its ancient hierarchical structure, had its own information-collecting routines, in the form of bishops’ visitation queries and articles.⁴³ The Church’s capabilities in relation to matters that fell within its purview were appreciated by ministers and public officials. In the 1670s, ministers asked the archbishops to conduct an enquiry into church attendance, to establish the extent of Catholic recusancy and Protestant dissent;⁴⁴ in 1696, the Board of Trade again used the Church’s information systems to obtain returns on parish poor-relief expenditure.⁴⁵ Efforts to enhance the power and pastoral efficacy of the Church—by the building of new churches in and around London, and the use of First Fruits and Tenths to build up a fund to enhance the value of poorer livings—required it to collect and digest information about its own structures and resources (Gregory King was among those consulted to advise on these efforts).⁴⁶ In the early eighteenth century, Bishop William Wake of Lincoln (1657–1737) extended the range of visitation enquiries to collect information relevant to the Church’s wider pastoral work: for example about the range of schools maintained in parishes; he carried these new practices to Canterbury when he became Archbishop, and, through his example, they spread and became standard.⁴⁷ From the early eighteenth century it also became common for ⁴² Houghton’s single sheet can be found in Bodley: Douce prints a49 f.185; the substance is reprinted in Cobbett, Parliamentary History, 5, ciii. For its use by later reformers, below nn. 243–4. Other instances are discussed by M. Knights, ‘John Locke and Post-Revolutionary Politics: Electoral Reform and the Franchise’, forthcoming in Past and Present. See also use of population estimates and tax data to fix Scottish representation in the Westminster Parliament: S. Matsuzono ‘ ‘‘Bare Faced Invasion upon Scottish Liberty’’? The Election of the Scottish Representative Peers in 1707 and 1708’, Parliamentary History, xxiii (2004), 156–7. ⁴³ For an explanation of the various forms of enquiry practised, and a list of printed editions of queries and responses, J. Gregory ed. The National Church in Local Perspective, (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2003), 9–10, 180–1. ⁴⁴ The Compton Census of 1676: a Critical Edition, ed. A. Whiteman (London, 1986). At lxxx–xxxi, she notes that the results circulated among political arithmeticians; Petty used them more than once; Peter Pett printed some parts after the Revolution: e.g. in T. Barlow, The Genuine Remains of the Learned Prelate Dr Thomas Barlow (London, 1693), 312–23; for Pett above n. 32. Though that exercise was not repeated during the eighteenth century, there were recurrent surveys of Catholics: for modern editions of two of these, The Return of the Papists for the Diocese of Chester, 1705 ed E. S. Worrall (Wigan, 1986), Return of Papists 1767, ed. A. J. Mitchinson (2 vols, Catholic Record Society, 1989). ⁴⁵ For the returns: Slack, Poverty and Policy, 170–1; TNA: CO 388/5/194–210; CO 389/14 f.109, 128–9. ⁴⁶ G. Best, Temporal Pillars (Cambridge, 1964), 80–2; Taylor, ‘Gregory King’s Analysis’. Ecton, an official in the ‘First Fruits’ office, published some of this data for the use of clerics planning their own careers in his Liber Valorum (London, 1711 and many later editions). ⁴⁷ S. Taylor, ‘Bishop Edmund Gibson’s Proposals for Church Reform’, in S. Taylor ed., From Cranmer to Davidson: A Church of England Miscellany (Church of England Record Society, vii; Bury St Edmunds, 1999), 177—drawing on an unpublished paper by W. J. Sheils. John Broad is currently preparing an edition of Wake’s visitation returns for publication in the British Academy’s Records in Social and Economic History series.

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parochial returns to include population estimates. No evidence has yet been found, however, to suggest that such visitation data was tabulated or analysed; if it was used at all, it seems to have been used ad hoc to shed light on particular local circumstances, or, impressionistically, to convey a general sense of patterns of practice. Voluntary societies, such as the reformation of manners societies of the 1690s and early eighteenth century, or, at national level, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), collected and published some information about their activities. The reformation societies published ‘black lists’ of people prosecuted for morals offences; the SPCK published surveys of charity schools and later of workhouses established with its encouragement or at least in parallel with its efforts.⁴⁸ No doubt one object was to encourage subscribers, on whose financial support such enterprises depended; such reporting must also have been intended to deter wrongdoing and encourage good practice. Totals were routinely calculated, and sometimes comparisons of totals were made across time, but in these cases too there is no evidence of more ambitious analysis: the data stand as testimony to the spread of the fact-gathering habit, but did not at this time attract more probing or evaluative scrutiny. A taste for the collection of information—sometimes aggregated, rarely tabulated, rarely more than lightly analysed, but nonetheless adding to the bulk of reference material—was also evident in a range of private-enterprise enquiries and publications. Three, sometimes overlapping, nexuses of activity might be identified. First, there were researchers and writers in the chorographical tradition—combining, in varying mixes, geographical, natural-historical, and antiquarian interests. Second, clerics and some laymen drew on the information resources of the Church for a variety of loosely related purposes. Third, medical men, recipients of the only kind of professional scientific education then available, were sometimes moved by their training and profession to take a special interest in factors affecting the social incidence of disease; sometimes they were more generally fired with enthusiasm for the potential of methods in which they had been educated. Classical geographies provided a model for the topographical ordering of a mass of empirical data. Among Bacon’s contemporaries, William Camden in his Britannia and John Stow in his Survey of London both produced classics in the genre, with antiquarian inflections. Some Baconians pushed the tradition more towards the cataloguing of natural resources and natural phenomena, ⁴⁸ For early record keeping, and publication of records, by London ‘hospitals’, see Cassedy, ‘Medicine and the Rise of Statistics’, 287–8; F. Dabhoiwala, ‘Summary Justice in Early Modern London’, English Historical Review, cxxi (2006), 796–822. A Help to National Reformation (London, 1700) n.p., gives a sample matrix for a ‘register of warrants’. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (estab. 1701) similarly supplied Anglican ministers to America with charts so that they could tabulate numbers and report back to the corporation (Cohen, Calculating People, 79–80).

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and developed a more ethnographic approach to human inhabitants of the landscape.⁴⁹ Formulaic questionnaires, which had long served to frame official enquiries, were adapted to collect information for such private ventures (first, it seems, in an Irish context) from the 1640s.⁵⁰ Welsh and Scottish natural historians and antiquaries zealously pursued nationwide enquiries on this basis in the later seventeenth century.⁵¹ In both Ireland and England, members of scientific societies and commercial atlas-producers combined in ambitious datacollection projects; these often overstretched their progenitors’ organizational and financial capacities, and accordingly foundered. Such projects nonetheless encouraged network building among enthusiasts, and shaped the knowledge and interests of participants (including Gregory King).⁵² Moreover, though numerous such projects aborted, or were chronicled only in manuscript, a sputtering trickle of atlases and descriptive regional surveys did emerge in print.⁵³ Some chorographers and antiquarians were also clerics. Sometimes the object of their enquiries was Church history set in a topographical frame, sometimes its thrust was more broadly antiquarian—as in the case of Edmund Gibson’s 1695 edition of Camden’s Britannia, to which a number of senior clerics made significant contributions.⁵⁴ Some clerics and laymen used Church among other records as a basis for more generally conceived surveys. One such was Richard Parsons, chancellor of the diocese of Gloucester, who issued a questionnaire to the parochial clergy of his diocese apparently with an eye both to improving diocesan administration and to furnishing data for a projected county history. He never completed the history, but his papers passed into the hands of the ⁴⁹ S. A. E. Mendyk, Speculum Britanniae: Regional Study, Antiquarianism and Science in Britain to 1700 ( Toronto, 1989). ⁵⁰ Webster, Great Instauration, 431, identifies Arnold Boate as the first to publish such a questionnaire, though the principle of using ‘interrogatories’ to structure investigations was known to Bacon. For other early users, F. V. Emery, ‘A Map of Edward Lhuyd’s Parochial Queries in order to a Geographical Dictionary &c of Wales (1696)’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1958), 41–53; Mendyk, Speculum, 163–5. ⁵¹ Emery, ‘A Map of Edward Lhuyd’s Parochial Queries’; and his ‘A Geographical Description of Scotland prior to the Statistical Accounts’, Scottish Studies, iii (1959), 1–16; Mendyk, Speculum, 206–21. ⁵² Mendyk, Speculum, 170–82, 192–7, 221. For network building in Scotland, R. L. Emerson, ‘Sir Roger Sibbald, Knight, the Royal Society of Scotland and the Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Annals of Science, xlv (1988), 41–72; C. W. J. Withers, Geography, Science and National Identity (Cambridge, 2001), 70–84. Hoppen, Common Scientist, 21–4 suggests that cooperation in a map-making project first brought together the founders of the Society; see also 187–9. ⁵³ For the broader context of antiquarian activity, D. C. Douglas, English Scholars, 1660–1730 (London, 1961); R. Sweet, Antiquaries: the Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 2004); also C. F. Mullett, ‘The ‘‘Better Reception, Preservation and More Convenient Use’’ of Public Records in Eighteenth-Century England’, American Archivist, xxvii (1964), 195–217, and M. M. Condon and E. M. Hallam, ‘Government Printing of the Public Records in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, vii (1984), 348–88. ⁵⁴ J. Levine, Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 327–36, for Britannia; Shapiro, Culture of Fact, 184–7 on empirical Church history as a product of the ‘culture of fact’.

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staunch local Tory Sir Robert Atkyns (1647–1711), who supplemented them with much research of his own, especially into county families. Atkyns’ 1712 History of Glostershire was relatively rich in modern data.⁵⁵ He supplied for each parish an estimate of its size, an account of its freeholders (the basis of the electorate) and of its houses, together with an estimate of its population, numbers of births, and burials (as reported to the Collector of Duties in 1695), and finally its contribution to public taxes. Atkyns suggested that this data might serve, among other purposes, to point up places where new churches or relief chapels were needed: in effect, he hoped to extend to the provinces the scheme for new church building recently set in train in London. Other churchmen built on John Graunt’s studies, developing the idea (already to be found in some late-seventeenth-century writings, and encouraged by the rise of ‘natural theology’) that to identify pattern in nature was to reveal the designing hand of God. The Boyle lectures, founded to showcase precisely such arguments, provided an ideal vehicle for the Reverend William Derham’s 1711 reflections on this theme.⁵⁶ Derham (1657–1735), a Fellow of the Royal Society, had studied the work of Graunt and of King, as reported by Davenant; he had read up on parallel European work in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions —but also drew on data from the registers of his own parish of Upminster, of data from Aynho, Northamptonshire, supplied by ‘the learned and ingenious Mr Wasse’, and on Yorkshire data supplied by the antiquarian Ralph Thoresby.⁵⁷ Medical men and medical issues provided another nexus of activity.⁵⁸ Dr John Arbuthnot (1667–1735), one of many medical members of the Royal Society, in a 1701 essay, celebrated the utility of numbers for all kinds of public and private purposes.⁵⁹ Arbuthnot himself was especially interested in population data, arguing that the near equality of male and female births evidenced God’s design. Other physicians interested in analysing mortality included John Locke (1632–1704)—who was one among several medical men to try to match mortality against climatic data.⁶⁰ ⁵⁵ Atkyns, The Ancient and Present State of Glostershire (London, 1712), Preface (unpaginated). For the context of Atkyns’ History, B. S. Smith’s introduction to the Wakefield, 1978 reprint. ⁵⁶ Physico-Theology, or a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from his Works of Creation—many editions. Daston, Classical Probability, 131–2, for interesting discussion. ⁵⁷ Book 4, ch. 10, notes. ⁵⁸ For general discussion, Cassedy, ‘Medicine and the Rise of Statistics’, and Peter Gibbons, ‘The Medical Projectors, 1640–1770’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, xxiv (1969), 247–71. Mendyk notes that several topographers, including Boate, Petty, and Sibbald, were medical men: Speculum, 155–62. ⁵⁹ A Letter from a Gentleman in the City to his Friend in the Country (Oxford, 1701), also reprinted in J. Arbuthnot, Life and Works, ed. G. A. Aitken (Oxford, 1892) as ‘An Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning’. Rusnock, Vital Accounts, 46–9; L. M. Beattie, John Arbuthnot, Mathematician and Satirist (Cambridge, MA, 1935). ⁶⁰ K. Dewhurst, ‘A Review of John Locke’s Research in Social and Preventive Medicine’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, xxxvi (1962), 317–40.

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The most mathematically sophisticated contributor to debate must have been the astronomer Edmond Halley (1656–1742), who in the 1690s pursued Graunt’s project of constructing a mortality table with the aid of real empirical data, relating to the city of Breslau.⁶¹ Graunt’s work had come to the attention of European mathematicians, who saw in it a basis for calculating life expectancy. How best to do this was a satisfyingly challenging problem for early workers in the mathematics of probability to get their teeth into. Such exercises also promised to have important practical applications, making it possible to calculate prices at which annuities should be bought and sold: Halley argued that his Breslau data would make fairer pricing possible. In fact, it would be decades before such statistical work would be fully incorporated into commercial practice.⁶² Still, the belief that mortality and morbidity normally followed predictable patterns encouraged the establishment of a number of life insurance companies in early eighteenth-century England and also, from the hands of Daniel Defoe (c.1660–1731), a sketch for a health-insurance programme.⁶³ Mutual-insurance sickness and injury clubs had begun to develop from the mid-seventeenth century, becoming (if we can believe William Maitland’s History of London) fairly common by the 1720s and 1730s. Though such local clubs seem to have served well enough to sustain popular loyalty for a couple of centuries, they were nonetheless rarely sufficiently broadly based or well designed to survive the ageing and consequently increasing ill-health of their members. Defoe’s vision of insurance-based institutional health-care remained a paper project.

D E C L I N E A N D R EV I VA L Following the deaths of King and Davenant, the tradition of empirically based enquiries into the sources of state power went into decline. The economic historian Phyllis Deane, when she searched for precedents for her own attempts to construct historical national-income estimates, found no such estimates between that offered by the British Merchant, in the context of debates over trade agreements proposed at the end of the Spanish Succession War, and Matthew Decker’s of 1744 (which was wholly derivative).⁶⁴ Early ⁶¹ Halley published his work in Philosophical Transactions, xvii (1693), 596–610, 654–6, reprinted in Degrees of Mortality of Mankind by Edmond Halley, ed. L. J. Reed (Baltimore, 1943). Stone, Some British Empiricists, ch. 8. ⁶² Daston, Classical Probability, ch. 3, and G. Clark, Betting on Lives: the Culture of Life Insurance in England 1695–1775 (Manchester, 1999), esp. Intro., ch. 3. ⁶³ An Essay on Projects (London, 1697); reprinted as Essays upon Several Projects (London, 1702), ‘Of Friendly Societies’. He cites Petty’s mortality calculations. ⁶⁴ [Matthew Decker], An Essay on the Causes of the Decline of the Foreign Trade . . . begun in the year 1739 (London, 1744 and numerous later edns). Deane, ‘Implications’. She suggests that Decker scaled up the British Merchant’s estimates, given price rises and what he assumed to be the growth of population. Robert Wallace, whose demographic interests and calculations are discussed

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and mid-eighteenth-century texts—such as Chambers’ Cyclopaedia—indeed continued to cite estimates by Petty and Davenant as if they were still current.⁶⁵ Knowledge of the political arithmetic tradition thus survived, but in ossified form. This is nicely illustrated by exchanges which took place in the early 1740s (when Britain was once more being drawn into continental war, and interest in such questions therefore once again being piqued) between customs officer Corbyn Morris (1710–79) and Jacobite historian Thomas Carte (c.1686–1754).⁶⁶ Morris, probably already acting under the Whig patronage which would thereafter advance his career, sought to show how much better public affairs had been managed since the Revolution, not by citing current data but by looking back to the estimates of Petty and Davenant, and contrasting these with what figures he could put together about the finances of the Restoration era.⁶⁷ This historical approach laid him open to a series of ripostes from Carte, grounded chiefly on Carte’s familiarity with Restoration documents. Several reasons might be adduced to explain declining engagement with political arithmetic. It has been suggested that, in the early eighteenth century, virtuoso culture more generally went into decline. This may be too hasty a judgement.⁶⁸ But ideas that had stirred excitement among generations maturing in the later seventeenth century seem to have lost some of their power to excite by the early Hanoverian era. Mathematical competence had become more widespread—but perhaps partly for that very reason had lost some of its allure.⁶⁹ Insofar as the labours of political arithmeticians had yielded knowledge, that below, disputed Decker’s arguments in his Characteristics of the Present Political State of Great Britain (London, 1758), 162 ff., but said that the computations needed to correct him would defeat even the most skilled merchant. ⁶⁵ See n. 76. ⁶⁶ The sequence of pamphlets began with Morris’ Letter from a Bystander to a Member of Parliament (London, 1741). ⁶⁷ The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that his early career is unknown, but Carte, in Full and Clear Vindication of the Full Answer to A Letter from a Bystander (London, 1743), 122, implies that he was then already in the Customs. Like many mathematical practitioners of the era, he would later write a treatise on insurance; for his other political-arithmetical endeavours: see nn. 116, 119, 127, 132. ⁶⁸ A classic exposition is W. J. Houghton, ‘The English Virtuoso in the Seventeenth Century: Part II’, Journal of the History of Ideas, iii (1942), 211–19. There is continuing debate about the vitality and centrality of the Royal Society in the eighteenth century, and the extent of its commitment to ‘useful’ knowledge: see the June 1999 special issue of the British Journal of the History of Science on this question. Mendyk, Speculum, 241–3, links waning of the chorographical tradition to this larger story of decline—but Sweet, Antiquaries, conceptualizes instead in terms of change, both in the focus of enquiries and in target audiences. ⁶⁹ E. G. R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Hanoverian England 1714–1840 (Cambridge, 1966); R. V. Wallis and P. J. Wallis, Bibliography of British Mathematics and its Applications. Part 2: 1701–60 (Newcastle, 1986); B. Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (London, 1979), esp. chs 7–8. For the role of numbers in eighteenth-century science T. Frängsmyr et al. eds, The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, 1990).

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knowledge had not proved to be of great practical significance.⁷⁰ Attempts to use the power of the state to amass information about the conditions of its own flourishing had run into various kinds of difficulty, apparent to all who took a serious interest in such matters. Thus, for instance, it had proved impossible in practice to collect reliable data about the value, as opposed to the quantity, of goods imported and exported, and in any case the utility of calculating a general ‘balance of trade’ on this basis had come to be questioned as appreciation of the complex dynamics of international exchange had grown.⁷¹ Changes in the government’s fiscal practices from the late seventeenth through the early eighteenth century reduced the range of information potentially available to researchers.⁷² Moreover, although early Hanoverian government departments routinely amassed, tabulated, and on request laid before Parliament volumes of data about fiscal and military resources that would have staggered Bacon’s contemporaries, only a little of this however passed into the broader public domain, chiefly through the medium of the Votes (a daily, formal record of Parliament’s proceedings).⁷³ When John Smith wanted access to data laid before Parliament in connection with his historical survey of the woollen industry, Memoirs of Wool, he was able to obtain it only through the good offices of a sympathetic MP.⁷⁴ Petty, Davenant, and King had depended on personal connections for the tax data on which they founded some of their calculations. Those who paid lip-service to their memory during the early Hanoverian decades had—to be fair to them—relatively little basis for assessing how things had or had not changed.⁷⁵ Finally, a vital spur to such enquiries was withdrawn when Britain withdrew from European war. Between 1713 and 1743 Britain was at least nominally at peace, bar a few naval conflicts with Spain (though, in practice, from 1740 ⁷⁰ Jonathan Swift, also in Harley’s orbit, though drawn to him later than Davenant, King, and Defoe, mercilessly satirized the utilitarian aspirations of the new science in general and political arithmetic in particular: see his Modest Proposal (1729). ⁷¹ Clark, Guide, 22. ⁷² C. Brooks, ‘Projecting, Political Arithmetic and the Act of 1695’, English Historical Review, xcvii (1982), 35, suggests that the success of Godolphin’s fiscal policies reduced government interest in collecting social data to ground money-making projects—robbing would-be political arithmeticians of a basis for proceeding. Clark, Guide, 15–16, notes that the abolition of a variety of export duties from 1700 through to the Walpolean era reduced the use of this data as a source of insight into trade. Walpole himself refocused tariff policy on simple industrial protection, abandoning the pursuit of ‘balance’ (Clark, ibid., 23). ⁷³ S. Lambert, in her introduction to House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Lambert (147 vols, Wilmington, DE, 1975–6), i, 48, points to a hiatus in the publication of revenue-related data from 1733 to the 1760s; as late as 1764 it was argued that reports relating to revenue should not be printed. ⁷⁴ J. Smith, Chronicon Rusticum Commerciale, or Memoirs of Wool (2nd edn, London, 1757), ii, 279. It was not impossible to access the ms. Commons Journal: Carte seems to have done so (A Full and Clear Vindication, various references to Journals from 1660s and 1689–99). ⁷⁵ Deane, ‘Implications’, 14–16, acknowledges problems both of access to data and with official data.

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onwards it became increasingly entangled in the continental conflict that followed Frederick II of Prussia’s assault on Austria). Though there was concern about Dutch and (still more) French commercial rivalry and military power in this period, so long as it proved possible to maintain peace there seems to have been no urgent sense of the importance of assessing and reassessing the relative populousness, wealth, and power of the rival states. Interest in empirical social enquiry nonetheless did not evaporate. It is probably better thought of as having survived as if in a subsurface water-table: ready to be tapped and channelled when the need arose. The phrase ‘political arithmetic’ remained in the lexicon; copies of Petty’s work survived in many gentlemen’s libraries; reference works enshrined political arithmeticians’ estimates, and mathematical textbooks introduced students to the basic techniques.⁷⁶ Indeed, the number of those competent to grasp the point of such enquiries probably grew, with the spread of numeracy and empirical habits of mind. There continued to take place, moreover, a certain amount of local or sectional data collection, mainly clustering around the nexuses that we have already described. Antiquarians and topographers continued to plug away, to exchange information with one another, and to inherit and preserve each other’s manuscripts. The project of amassing information about the current state of British regions may have excited fewer eager efforts at this time than it had in the later seventeenth century: booksellers continued to cater to this taste, but their repeated issues of what had once been cutting-edge works tended to the formulaic (that was the fate of the Chamberlayne family’s Angliae [later Magna Britanniae] Notitia, when it fell into the booksellers’ hands).⁷⁷ A few histories did however include at least scraps of recent data: William Maitland’s History of London, thus, included population and poor-relief data, as well as information culled from the general register of shipping; Maitland (c.1693–1757) worked conscientiously at these sources, attempting, for instance, to determine the extent of the shortfall in parish registers occasioned by the omission of some non-Anglicans.⁷⁸ Meanwhile, clerics up and down the country, following the ⁷⁶ Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (2 vols, London, 1728, and numerous later editions) drew on the writings of Petty and Davenant for its account of ‘Political Arithmetic’, in turn providing a source for other reference books; the economist Sir James Steuart, who was based in France, cited Chambers’ as the source for his knowledge of their works: An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (London, 1767), 41. A New and General Biographical Dictionary (11 vols, London, 1761–2), contained lives of Davenant, Graunt, and Petty (but not King), and celebrated the part they had played in developing political arithmetic. For the techniques, E. Hatton, An Intire System of Arithmetic (London, 1721), ch. 6, ‘Political Arithmetic’. ⁷⁷ Edward Chamberlayne had been a founder member of the Royal Society; his Angliae Notitia was modelled on a similar French survey; his son John was active in the SPCK. For this publication, Shapiro, Culture of Fact, 78. For interactions between Gregory King and the Chamberlaynes, Two Tracts, 67; Taylor, ‘Gregory King’s Analysis’. ⁷⁸ W. Maitland, The History of London (London, 1739). Maitland’s work was cited by the German demographer Süssmilch: J. C. Riley, Population Thought in the Age of the Demographic Revolution (Durham, NC, 1985), 21.

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dictates of their bishops, periodically supplied population estimates and other information about their parishes.⁷⁹ The most interesting new developments arose in connection with what would later be termed ‘medical arithmetic’, precipitated in the first instance by debate about the efficacy of smallpox inoculation.⁸⁰ John Arbuthnot followed in a well-worn path when he used the London bills of mortality to derive conclusions about the incidence of smallpox (though he lacked data on inoculation). James Jurin (1684–1750), secretary to the Royal Society, was more adventurous.⁸¹ Urged to generalize this effort by a Yorkshire physician who had himself collected data with a view to gauging the impact of inoculation, Jurin persuaded several inoculators to keep records of their patients’ personal characteristics and progress. He also sought, by personal enquiry, to supplement London with provincial mortality data. He published his findings and reflections both in the Philosophical Transactions and in several pamphlets. Jurin suggested that his findings should interest both individuals wondering whether to take the risk of having themselves and other family members inoculated, and parish and other authorities wondering whether to undertake more comprehensive inoculation programmes. Critics, however, probed the limitations of his research. They questioned the ways in which he had collected and manipulated data, and also argued that those inoculated to date did not constitute a representative sample of the population: one therefore could not reason confidently from their experience to the probable effects of more comprehensive programmes. Other of Jurin’s network-building efforts also seem to have drawn more physicians into exploring the relationship between climate and disease.⁸² Some doctors across the country independently collected such information: Thomas Short of Sheffield (c.1690–1772) and Clifton Wintringham of York (c.1689–1748) both later published data series beginning in the 1710s. Jurin tried to build a network to collect and exchange simple meteorological data. But John Huxham of Plymouth (c.1692–1768), who contributed to Jurin’s project, went on from 1727 also to collect further data to illuminate the relations between climate and disease. In the 1730s, another Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Clifton (d.1736), developed a pro forma for this purpose. Clifton also aired the possibility of collecting systematic medical data from hospitals—a timely suggestion, for in this decade a number of provincial towns and counties began to move to follow the example set by inhabitants of Westminster in 1720: setting up infirmaries financed by a mix of endowments and voluntary subscriptions.⁸³ ⁷⁹ Nn. 46 and 47 above. ⁸⁰ Rusnock, Vital Accounts, ch. 2. ⁸¹ See also The Correspondence of James Jurin (1684–1750): Physician and Secretary to the Royal Society, ed. A. A. Rusnock (Amsterdam, 1996). ⁸² Ibid., ch. 5. ⁸³ J. H. Woodward, ‘To do the Sick no Harm’: A Study of the British Voluntary Hospital System to 1875 (London, 1974).

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Revenue-derived commercial data continued routinely to be laid before Parliament through these decades. Production data was occasionally collected and used in lobbying.⁸⁴ A great many trade figures had been produced and bandied about in the context of debates over the hotly politically contested Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713.⁸⁵ Relatively little new data was cited in pamphlets about trade and manufactures in the following decades.⁸⁶ Arthur Dobbs (1689–1765), author of the 1728 Essay on the Trade and Improvement of Ireland, was exceptional in drawing on customs and hearth-tax records (though it had been abandoned in England, the hearth tax continued to be levied in Ireland), as also on some parochial surveys he had carried out himself.⁸⁷ Lively interest within Ireland in the prospects for and obstacles to Irish economic development provide some context for his efforts; the Dublin Society (1736) anticipated the English Society of Arts (1753) in setting itself the task of promoting improvements in agriculture, manufactures, trade, and in general the conveniences of life.⁸⁸ The long-standing idea that human life might be reckoned to have threshold economic value on the basis of the normal daily earning power of unskilled labour encouraged philanthropists and social-policy projectors to offer often wildly speculative assessments of the social savings that might result from their efforts. When their proposals attracted debate, such calculations sometimes underwent critical scrutiny. Thus, when SPCK member the Reverend Thomas Wilson (1703–84)—one of a little group of clerics, physicians, and concerned laymen agitating against government complicity in the gin trade—attempted such calculations in the 1730s, an anonymous respondent ridiculed his guesstimates as to the number of gin drinkers, and exploded his wage and price analysis.⁸⁹ ⁸⁴ Palmer, Economic Arithmetic, 139, 144, for some examples from pamphlets. ⁸⁵ Davenant and Defoe were the chief propagandists for the treaty; writings against, initially in periodicals, were later collected in [C. King ed.], The British Merchant (London, 1731, and two later edns). For the controversy, D. Coleman, ‘Politics and Economics in the Age of Anne: the Case of the Anglo-French Trade Treaty of 1713’, in D. C. Coleman and A. H. John eds, Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-Industrial England (London, 1976), 187–211, and P. Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society 1660–1720 (Oxford, 2001), ch. 6; Coleman has more on information aspects of the debate. ⁸⁶ Joshua Gee, a contributor to the British Merchant, wrote in 1729 The Trade and Navigation of Great Britain Considered, one of the more quantitative of such tracts—but, noting problems with the ‘custom house accounts’ (the Inspector General’s ledgers) (115), he confessed that his own estimates were speculative. The pamphlet went through seven edns; it is notable that the information base of the 1767 edn was significantly expanded. ⁸⁷ Dobbs, a landed gentleman with scientific interests, gained engineering experience in the army and later served as Engineer and Surveyor General of Ireland, and governor of North Carolina: D. Clarke, Arthur Dobbs Esq. 1689–1765 (London, 1958). He became friendly with Gee when in England, 1730 (Clarke, 35). ⁸⁸ J. Meenan and D. Clarke eds, The Royal Dublin Society: 1731–1981 (Dublin, 1981). ⁸⁹ An Impartial Enquiry into the Present State of the British Distillery . . . wherein . . . the Manifest Absurdities and Gross Impositions on the Publick contained in a Pamphlet Entitled, Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation, are fully Exposed (London, 1736). I owe this reference to Sarah Lloyd.

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During the middle years of the eighteenth century, these semi-visible currents became more manifest. These mid-century years represented an important moment of stress and change. Franco Venturi identifies them as having seen the take-off of the European Enlightenment. As he notes, they marked an interval between two major European wars.⁹⁰ This was an interval in which attention briefly shifted from the arts of war to the arts of peace—though it was generally expected that war would shortly resume. In Britain, this was the first interlude of peace since the fall of Walpole. Henry Pelham’s administration was less preoccupied than Walpole’s had been with the management of Whig supremacy (whose future could be supposed to have been secured by the crushing defeat of the Jacobite rising); Pelham and his supporters showed a novel degree of concern to find ways of improving economy and society.⁹¹ In this context, a number of interesting projects were floated in Parliament, including the repeal of the apprenticeship clause of the Statute of Artificers (which was not approved), and the reform of the calendar, to bring British dating systems into line with continental practice (which was).⁹² During these years, the device of parliamentary enquiry began to be deployed in new ways. Previously, parliamentary enquiries into general (rather than sectional or local) issues had often been inquisitorial, quasi-judicial in character. Now select committees were charged with the task of reviewing laws relating to trade, road maintenance, and the relief of the poor; out of this last enquiry also grew an enquiry into crime.⁹³ The new Society of ‘Arts, Manufactures and Commerce’ set itself the task of cultivating and diffusing useful knowledge, especially by the award of prizes.⁹⁴ Against this background of enthusiasm for improvement, some turned their minds to the diffusion and improvement of knowledge about economy ⁹⁰ F. Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971), 118–19. Hutchison, Before Adam Smith, ch. 10, on the boom in European economic writing at this time—encouraged by cross-fertilization between scholars in different countries via translations and visits, and ch. 13 on English developments. ⁹¹ B. Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1992), chs 6–7. ⁹² For the move to repeal the Statute of Artificers: LJ xxiii, 15, 25, 28; J. Hoppit ed., Failed Legislation: Compiled from the Commons and Lords Journals 1660–1800 (London, 1997): 91.023. The reform of the calendar was suggested by the Earl of Macclesfield when he was president of the Royal Society; the project was carried through with the aid of various skilled mathematicians. R. Poole, Time’s Alteration: Calendar Reform in Early Modern England (London, 1998), 113–19. Other mathematical/scientific projects pursued through Parliament at this time were the reform of weights and measures (J. Hoppit, ‘Reforming Britain’s Weights and Measures, 1600–1824’, English Historical Review, cviii (1993), 82–104) and the discovery of a reliable means of establishing longitude—though initial parliamentary attempts to encourage the latter dated back to 1714: D. Sobel, Longitude (London, 1996), 53. ⁹³ Lambert, House of Commons Sessional Papers, i, 39–40. ⁹⁴ H. T. Wood, A History of the Royal Society of Arts (London, 1913), and many articles by D. G. C. Allan. Allan, ‘The Society of Arts and Government’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vii (1974), 449, notes that the Society’s secretary was often asked to produce customs figures, to guide it in its aim of improving the balance of trade.

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and society. A considerable body of printed literature on economic and social topics had accumulated over the previous century. Some began trying to digest knowledge and information out of this mass of material. Joseph Massie (?–1784)—apparently a London businessman, though his life is obscure—accumulated an impressive library of books and pamphlets, which he intended to provide the basis for an academy of commerce.⁹⁵ He drew freely upon them in his own numerous publications, though the great history of trade that he projected never materialized. Massie was familiar with the writings of Graunt, Petty, and Davenant—though their works had, as I have observed, entered the canon.⁹⁶ More striking was his critical engagement with their accounts and estimates: clearly, they inspired in him some appetite for more accurate knowledge of his own time.⁹⁷ Petty and Davenant had made careers in public service; pamphleteering was a byproduct and occasional feature of their work. Massie was both differently placed and a child of a different era. Though his accounts and calculations drew upon his own experience, he was much more oriented to the printed word than the first generation of political arithmeticians had been; it is telling that his life’s ambition was a big publishing project. He probably came to the notice of government through his writings: it has been suggested that he was latterly retained by the elder Pitt, when he served as Secretary of State during the Seven Years War, to present economic arguments in the government interest. Perhaps as a result, Massie was able to gain access to official revenue and administrative papers, and to unpublished papers laid before the House of Commons, on which he drew in his later publications. In 1756, he published an updated version of King’s social table (which he had encountered in Davenant’s version), estimating income accruing annually to people in different social classes, to ground an examination of the incidence of tax burdens. Massie believed that population had grown somewhat since King’s day; national income rather more (about 8 per cent and 36 per cent respectively). He hypothesized growth in numbers living off trade and manufactures, partly offset by a decline in those making a living from agriculture.⁹⁸ Among contemporaries of Massie who were also significant consumers of and contributors to published information, Malachi Postlethwayt (c.1707–67) ⁹⁵ Bibliography of the Collection of Books and Tracts on Currency, Commerce and the Poor Law (1557–1763): Formed by Joseph Massie, ed. W. A. Shaw (London, 1937). (Contrary to what the title suggests, this list appears to combine the 1,500 plus books Massie owned with others he knew about.) ⁹⁶ A 1755 reprint of some of Petty’s writings—Several Essays in Political Arithmetic (4th edn, London)—was justified in terms of his writings being ‘very scarce and much sought after’ (vi). ⁹⁷ See, for example, Massie, A Plan for the Establishment of Charity Houses (London, 1758), 91–5. ⁹⁸ Calculations of Taxes for a Family of each Rank, Degree or Class (1756). Massie wrote in response to Bourchier Cleeve’s Scheme for Preventing a Further Increase of the National Debt (London, 1756), producing more persuasive estimates: P. Mathias, ‘The Social Structure in the Eighteenth Century: a Calculation by Joseph Massie’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., x (1957), 30–45.

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also merits notice. From the 1730s onwards, Postlethwayt laboured to adapt and extend for English use the Frenchman Jacques Savary’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (he also plagiarized the work of Irish-born Richard Cantillon, an ardent disciple of Petty).⁹⁹ Postlethwayt himself both noted the work of Petty and attempted new counting exercises of his own: for example, using charity-school reports to estimate (at one in twenty) the proportion of children receiving an education in such schools.¹⁰⁰ James Postlethwayt, a merchant who may have been Malachi’s brother, put official data into the public domain, publishing a collection of revenue statistics.¹⁰¹ George Gordon—very possibly also the author of an introduction to geography, astronomy, and ‘dialling’ (as in sundials), who acknowledged Walpole as a patron, published a multi-volume compendium of the ‘History of our national debts and taxes’ since the Revolution, on the basis of a ‘large number of authentic Accounts’ relating to such matters which had ‘lately, by accident, fallen into my Hands’.¹⁰² Population issues provided probably the most important focus for new thinking.¹⁰³ The topic attracted interest for a number of reasons. As the political arithmeticians had always appreciated, the size of a nation’s population had implications for its wealth and for both its fiscal and its military strength. To study patterns of birth and death among human beings was to study humanity as a part of nature: the topic therefore also appealed to natural scientists, and to natural theologians. Studies in the determinants of life and death potentially carried lessons for individuals, concerned about their own prospects. The subject had implications for individual and public finance (because of its bearing on the value of annuities) and for the economics of life insurance; as these devices became increasingly popular, so the practical importance of the topic grew. National and local population data potentially had implications for many kinds of public and institutional planning (as both Robert Atkyns and Daniel Defoe had appreciated). Finally, data about population size and trends mattered for the interpretation of many other forms of social and economic data. ⁹⁹ Savary was inspector of customs in Paris; his survey, first published in 1723, was subsidized by the French government (J. R. McCulloch, The Literature of Political Economy (London, 1845), 61). Postlethwayt’s version went through four editions, from 1751 to 1774. For Cantillon, Hutchison, Before Adam Smith, 163–4, 241–2. ¹⁰⁰ Under heading ‘Poor’. ¹⁰¹ James, but apparently not Malachi, was a Fellow of the Royal Society from 1753. Palmer, Economic Arithmetic, 157, 162–3, says James gives expenditure figures 1728–31, but no revenue data; he was however the first to print figures on debt redemption. He was also unusual in supplying some data on the Bank. ¹⁰² G. Gordon, The History of our National Debts and Taxes, from the Year MDCLXXXVIII to the Present Year MDCCLI (4 vols, London, 1751–3); G. Gordon, An Introduction to Geography, Astronomy and Dialling (3 edns, London, 1726–42). ¹⁰³ General accounts include Glass, Numbering, chs 1–2; Rusnock, Vital Accounts, ch. 7. The mid-century reprint of a selection of Petty’s writings, cited n. 96 above, prioritized his writings on population. For the European context, Riley, Population Thought.

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These were all—by the mid-eighteenth century—well established, and enduring reasons for taking an interest in the topic. One further consideration assumed new importance at this time. Debates about population trends came to play a central part in debates about the relationship between the ancient and the modern world, and more generally in arguments about the nature and tendencies of modern society, and thus in the social theorizing of the Enlightenment.¹⁰⁴ A number of scholars had previously argued that modern populations were much smaller than ancient ones; in the second quarter of the century, Montesquieu lent his support to this view.¹⁰⁵ That hypothesis became the subject of an exchange between two Scots, the cleric Robert Wallace (1697–1771) and the philosopher David Hume (1711–76), Hume being inclined to a more favourable assessment of modern society.¹⁰⁶ Several English and French writers joined in the debate.¹⁰⁷ In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) was moved to try to ascertain and reflect upon trends in American population.¹⁰⁸ His suggestion that the natural increase of population in the colonies was much faster—both illustrating what was naturally possible in favourable circumstances and implying that America was on trend to become more populous than Britain in the longer run—made a great impression, and was repeatedly cited in the following decades, characterized as they were by Anglo-American tension and, ultimately, armed conflict. Empirical efforts to ascertain population sizes and movements in this period drew upon a variety of traditions, and used a variety of techniques. The immediate purposes for which they were undertaken varied, but there were clearly a variety of forms of interplay between philosophical, political, and pragmatic concerns. Probably the highest quality work was that undertaken by Alexander Webster in Scotland. Webster (1707–84), a Church of Scotland minister, proposed to the Church in the 1740s to develop an empirical basis for the establishment of a pension fund for the benefit of the widows and orphans of the clergy, an exercise in which he was assisted by the more technically expert Robert ¹⁰⁴ J. Bonar, Theories of Population from Raleigh to Young (London, 1931), esp. 154–92; Rusnock, Vital Accounts, ch. 7. ¹⁰⁵ Rusnock, Vital Accounts, 179, suggests he helped to shift interest from population size to dynamics. ¹⁰⁶ R. Wallace, A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind in Antient and Modern Times (Edinburgh, 1753); D. Hume, ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’, in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (4 vols, Edinburgh, 1754), iv. See E. C. Mossner, Life of Hume (2nd edn, Oxford, 1980), 262–8, for relations between the two men. For Wallace, R. B. Luehrs, ‘Population and Utopia in the Thought of Robert Wallace’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, xx (1987), 313–35. ¹⁰⁷ Thus, W. Bell, A Dissertation on the Following Subject: What Causes Principally Contribute to Render a Nation Populous, and What Effect has Populousness on its Trade (Cambridge, 1756)—prize winning answer to a Cambridge competition, and a response to this: ‘JB’ [William Temple], A Vindication of Commerce and the Arts (London, 1758). ¹⁰⁸ ‘Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries’, composed 1751, first published in Boston in 1755, in England in his Interest of Great Britain Considered, 1760; extracts appeared in the London Chronicle in the same year. See N. G. Himes, ‘Benjamin Franklin on Population’, Economic History, iii (1937), 388–98, and for context, J. H. Cassedy, Demography in Early America: Beginnings of the Statistical Mind (Cambridge, MA, 1961), 157–70.

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Wallace (thus no doubt helping to focus Wallace’s interest in such issues).¹⁰⁹ In the mid-1750s, on the basis of some form of official request, Webster also undertook, by means of a questionnaire, the first empirically founded estimate of Scottish population—still relied on by historians. This included estimates not only of population totals, but also of age structure, numbers of Roman Catholics, and of potential fighting men. A notable feature of Webster’s work was his use of life tables to compensate for deficiencies in the data.¹¹⁰ In the absence of any readily available source of historic data, Webster was unable to say much about population trends.¹¹¹ In England, the situation was different. The political arithmeticians’ late seventeenth-century estimates were still in circulation. The obvious questions were therefore: what was the population now? Was it larger or smaller than had previously been estimated? Was it possible to demonstrate trends? And what did all this suggest about the ways in which broader social developments affected population? In the wake of the exchange between Wallace and Hume, the Reverend William Brakenridge, Rector of a City parish and a Fellow of the Royal Society, began trying to use window-tax data to answer some of these questions (he was apparently able to obtain both current and some historic national data from the tax office), publishing his conclusions in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. His conclusions were however challenged by a Bedfordshire clergyman, the Reverend Richard Forster, whose careful local studies convinced him that tax data was too deficient to ground such conclusions.¹¹² Not only was tax data arguably imperfect, but it could not directly illuminate population dynamics. To probe fertility and mortality more directly, one needed other sources. Probably the difficulties of working with unaggregated data in widely dispersed parish registers goes far to explain why it was only occasionally exploited at this time. Rather more attention was paid to bills of mortality, which had the further advantage of promising insight into causes of death. The uses and limits of bills of mortality as sources for the study of population had, since Graunt’s pioneering work, and the development of life tables, been the subject of debate across continental Europe. During the first half of the eighteenth century, indeed, the most thoughtful and painstaking work on this material was carried ¹⁰⁹ For the scheme, Clark, Betting on Lives, 144–6. ¹¹⁰ Webster’s analysis is reprinted in Scottish Population Statistics, ed. J. G. Kyd (Edinburgh, 1952). (Webster’s own introduction, 7 in this edition, for the use of life tables.) For discussion, M. W. Flinn ed., Scottish Population History (Cambridge, 1977), part IV; A. J. Youngson, ‘Alexander Webster and his Account of the Number of People in Scotland in the Year 1755’, Population Studies, xv (1961), 198–200. The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. I. S. Ross and E. C. Mossner (Oxford, 1987), 291, reports that North in 1779 asked Webster to update his estimate—presumably in the context of plans for military recruitment. ¹¹¹ Wallace, indeed, continued the seventeenth-century tradition of trying to estimate growth rates by reference to putative developments since the Flood: A Dissertation, 3–11. ¹¹² For the controversy, Glass, Numbering, 47–51, 67–70, 78–89. Massie, Plan for the Establishment of Charity Houses, 93, found it remarkable that King had relied on speculation about the very long run rather than empirical enquiry to establish trends.

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out on the Continent—ideas and findings being shared across international scientific communication networks.¹¹³ In England there had been one or two attempts to improve the usefulness of the London bills for scientific purposes: in 1728, it had been agreed that they should incorporate information on age at death; in the 1730s, the Company of Parish Clerks tried but failed to obtain permission to record deaths, rather than burials. In the 1730s and 1740s, similar and more radical changes were made in other European cities.¹¹⁴ In the early 1750s, there were several exchanges about the inadequacy of the London bills in both the Philosophical Transactions and the more widely circulated Gentleman’s Magazine. Against this background, a group of London doctors and other scientifically minded men got together to plan two linked improvements: first, there should be changes in the medical categories employed in the bills; second, the registration of baptisms and burials should give way to that of births and deaths.¹¹⁵ To their chagrin, this relatively modest proposal was subsumed by its presenter, the MP Thomas Potter, into a much more ambitious scheme: for a national census and a nationwide system for the registration of births and deaths, both to be conducted by parish overseers, under the general supervision of the Board of Trade; this obtained some support from ministers.¹¹⁶ A pro-census article in the Gentleman’s Magazine suggested that such a census would illuminate several issues of current concern. It would make it easier to determine what size of army could be raised from national resources; it would provide a context for discussions of the wisdom of permitting the naturalization of foreigners on the one hand, emigration to the colonies on the other; it would also assist those responsible for administering poor relief.¹¹⁷ The Tory opposition managed to whip up antagonism to this however as to some other ‘improving’ projects of the day, encouraging clerics especially to complain that ‘numbering the people’ was the sin of David, and an invitation to God’s wrath—a somewhat quaint and surely partisan complaint from a body of men many of whom routinely returned population estimates to their bishops! ¹¹³ Koren, ‘History of Statistics’, 430–1, 537–47; Westergaard, Contributions, 25–37, 53–9, 68–73; Riley, Population Thought, chs 2, 3; J. Dupâquier, L’invention de la table de mortalité, de Graunt a` Wargentin (Paris, 1996). ¹¹⁴ Rusnock, Vital Accounts, 158, reports that after 1750 a growing number of parish clerks across Europe began to include age at death in parish registers. ¹¹⁵ For John Fothergill’s account, ‘A Society of Physicians in London’, Medical Observations and Inquiries (6 vols, London, 1757–84), iv, 214–19, also in The Works of John Fothergill MD, ed. J. Lettsom (London, 1784), 385–8, and for his continuing interest in the project, letter to James Pemberton Feb. 1771 in Chain of Friendship: Selected Letters of Dr. John Fothergill of London, 1735–80, ed. B. C. Corner and C. C. Booth (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 331. ¹¹⁶ A. Murdoch, ‘Morris, Corbyn (1710–1779)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004; ) identifies Corbyn Morris, previously encountered as a protagonist in the debate with Carte, now a client of the Pelhamite ministry, as having drafted the bill; the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State and brother of the Prime Minister, is said to have had ‘immediate direction’ over it when it came to the Lords. ¹¹⁷ Cited Glass, Numbering, 19.

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Though it passed the Commons, the census and registration proposal lapsed in the Lords, and the doctors’ scheme for the improvement of London bills of mortality foundered with it.¹¹⁸ Yet the bills themselves continued to command attention. In 1758, the physician William Heberden (1710–1801) organized a reprint of Graunt’s by now classic study together with a collection of more recent bills of mortality, and a number of other works: including one of Petty’s essays, some calculations by merchant statistician James Postlethwayt on life chances; reflections on London’s population, and a life table based on London data by Corbyn Morris (last encountered as a historical political arithmetician, now elevated to a post on the Scottish customs commission); and a study by Yorkshire clergyman Thomas Short (last encountered as an early collector of meteorological data), based on evidence from more than 100 rural parishes—probably supplied by local clerics in response to a request from Short.¹¹⁹ Heberden’s publication was clearly both made possible by and directed towards a significant body of local enthusiasts for such exercises, testifying to the diffusion of interest in such matters, which recent debate can only have enhanced. Awareness that men and money constituted the sinews of power clearly ran through these mid-century investigations. Nonetheless, society and its patterns of development, and the welfare of the nation’s inhabitants provided an at least equally important focus of attention in their own right. Conceptions of the moral health of societies that were increasingly disjoined from any particular understanding of Christian doctrine (though not therefore straightforwardly irreligious) played a part in encouraging this emphasis, as did the related understanding of ‘patriotism’ as a disinterested zeal to promote the well-being of the national community. Those with interests in the field often suggested that their enquiries might indirectly illuminate the moral state of the nation: this theme threaded through the population debate. When in 1759 the Society of Arts offered a prize for a historical treatise on the arts of peace, documenting progress in agriculture, manufactures, and industry, it is, in this context, unsurprising to find them suggesting that it should also trace the effect of these improvements on the manners and morals of the people. The mid-century was marked by many initiatives to discourage vice and crime, and to nurture virtue and physical well-being; through new penal legislation; ¹¹⁸ Samuel Martin, secretary to the Treasury, introduced a second bill for registering births, deaths, and marriages in England and Wales in 1758; this failed in the Commons. For the two bills, Hoppit ed., Failed Legislation, 91.018, 97.033. ¹¹⁹ A Collection of the Yearly Bills of Mortality . . . (London, 1759). L. Vaughan, ‘ ‘‘Improvements in the Art of Healing’’: William Heberden (1750–1801) and the Emergence of Modern Medicine in Eighteenth-Century England’, (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Oxford, 2004) esp. chs 5–6, explores the social and intellectual context; Heberden was a member of the ‘society of physicians’ which had pushed the plan to improve the bills; he knew James Postlethwayt and Corbyn Morris through the Royal Society and associated scientific networks. See also n. 162. Vaughan makes interesting suggestions about the reasons for the rise of medical interest in statistics at this time, which I have not attempted to develop here.

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experiments in police; plans for the building of new prisons and workhouses; and the foundation of such philanthropic institutions as the Marine Society (to rear up poor boys for the navy) and the Magdalen Hospital (for penitent prostitutes).¹²⁰ Joseph Massie was among those to take an interest in such projects.¹²¹ He was not alone in trying to assess their advantages from the perspective of a political arithmetician. The sense that the costs and benefits of such initiatives were of a kind that political arithmetic should, in some way, be able to capture, ran through the thinking and writing of many active in this field—including the magistrate brothers Henry and Sir John Fielding (1707–54, 1721–80) and the philanthropist Jonas Hanway (c.1712–86).¹²² Of course, all these ventures consumed resources, proceeds of local rates or charitable donations; it is not hard to understand why their promoters should have felt compelled to try to show that spending created social value. Of all public welfare projects, the biggest consumer of resources must have been the statutory poor-relief system. In 1751, the Commons select committee on the poor laws set in motion a survey of parish expenditure and workhouse provision.¹²³ The similar Board of Trade enquiry of the 1690s had worked through the Church’s visitation machinery; the mid-century committee directed its queries entirely through civil authorities: through clerks of the peace and high constables to parish overseers. The 1690s enquiry obtained returns from only about half of all parishes before it was wound up; mid-century returns, though not complete, were much more comprehensive. They were collated by Commons clerks—but there is no indication that the results were reported. They did not enter the public arena until the early nineteenth century, when expenditure data was corrected by John Rickman (who had overseen the first census), and printed together with the reports of a successor committee on the poor laws.¹²⁴ Several general points emerge from this survey of the mid-eighteenth-century scene. It seems clear that interest in empirical social enquiry, often though not invariably in quantitative form, had survived, and was beginning to be prosecuted with new energy. Because they were the inheritors, rather than the initiators, of this kind of study, mid-eighteenth-century Englishmen were beginning to be able to grapple with the task of empirically studying and quantifying change. The arena of debate had broadened since the age of the pioneers. Some businessmen had become interested in trying to build up a more systematic body of economic knowledge; enquiries with both a scientific and a moral ¹²⁰ D. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1989). ¹²¹ See, for example, Massie, Plan for . . . Charity Houses. ¹²² See H. Fielding, Proposal for Making Effectual Provision for Poor (London, 1757), 68. For Hanway, J. S. Taylor, Jonas Hanway: Founder of the Marine Society (London, 1985). Note also S. Johnson, ‘The Idler’, essay 38 (Jan. 1759): announcing that ‘we live in an age of commerce and computation’, Johnson enquired into the ‘sum of evil’ entailed by the practice of imprisonment for debt. (Originally published in the Universal Chronicle; collected in 2 vols, London, 1767.) ¹²³ CJ xxvi, 140. ¹²⁴ PP (1818) v, 3–10.

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dimension had the potential to engage attention from doctors and clerics scattered throughout the country. Developments in print culture, especially in systems for the dissemination of books and periodicals, must have helped to make this possible—even if London remained a specially important focus: as the seat of government, and the site of most associative learned life. Interest in empirical social enquiry was not, by and large, state-led—though government records clearly had special attraction as information sources, and labourers in the field might live in hope of, and sometimes obtain, ministerial patronage and reward. If anything, Parliament was emerging as a more important arena of activity than executive government. Executive departments prepared accounts and reports for Parliament, and in this way such accounts entered an at least semi-public domain. Since ministers tended to leave initiative on issues of domestic governance to Parliament, enquiries relating to this were at least as likely to be started there. At mid-century, Parliament rather than the executive was the institution generating new proposals for social surveys—in the instance of poor relief, actually carrying one out. Britain’s renewed engagement in European war at mid-century probably played some part in reawakening interest in the study of national resources: population, taxable capacity. But even debates about national health and vigour had shifted somewhat in focus: from the material to the moral. Most enquirers in any case had access to only local data. Insofar as they could aspire to illuminate national trends, that usually had to be through local studies. P OW E R A N D H A P PI N E S S From the 1760s, interest in the political arithmetic of power revived, and found expression in a number of substantial publications, distinguished from previous exercises of the same general kind by the bulk of information they contained, and by their historical perspective. The possibility of advancing beyond the work of the original political arithmeticians, which mid-century writers had discerned, was now clearly realizable—not least because of the quantity of information in the public domain: some of it official, some of it the fruit of private research. Late-seventeenth-century reference points established by the political arithmeticians’ speculations, and the existence of long runs of official data generated by the fiscal and military institutions put into place after the Glorious Revolution (extended in places by the fruits of research into the more distant past) combined to make it possible to trace a story of Britain’s rise in wealth and power. That story seemed to need telling because it was hard to dispute that, for better or worse, Britain’s wealth and power had grown. By the end of the Seven Years War, Britain was clearly a global power, though, as such, also exposed and anxious: soon to be tested by the revolt of most of her North American colonies, followed by the entry of France and Spain into that war,

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then again by the outbreak of the French Revolution and French revolutionary expansionism. The growth of tax revenues suggested a story of growing state power; these tax revenues derived especially from commerce and domestic production, which were also generally agreed to have grown. Beyond that though—once attention turned to the broader social context, to the ways in which growth had been achieved, and to its effects—there was much scope for debate, and continuing enquiry. There was renewed debate about population, and whether or not it had grown: most enquirers thought it had, but the evidence was not conclusive, and there were powerful dissenting voices. Rises in the price of provisions from the 1760s helped to direct attention to agricultural production and the rural economy, neither of which had thitherto attracted much systematic empirical study. Wars always caused disruption to commerce and manufactures: there was continuing debate about their effects, and increasingly pertinacious attempts to specify them. A loosely articulated community of enquirers explored and debated these issues, read and scrutinized each others’ conclusions, tried to add to the pool of available data, to improve its quality, and their understanding of its implications. This community was probably growing; it was certainly producing more people prepared to set out their findings and ideas in print. Enquiry and debate developed a more dynamic character, as people responded (more or less constructively) to each others’ criticisms and suggestions. The work of the original political arithmeticians continued to be cited, respected, and republished. Yet increasingly its appeal became historical: it was seen as embodying pioneering efforts to understand a past state of society. Now society was changing, and debate was moving on. A relatively novel feature of later eighteenth-century social enquiry was the extent of interest in social problems and policies. This had only lightly been adumbrated by earlier attempts to determine the level of national spending on the poor, and to estimate the social costs of idleness. Later eighteenth-century parliamentary enquiries put into the public domain much new data about the official record of dealing with poverty, vagrancy, crime, and imprisonment for debt. There were also various parallel enquiries by local officials and other interested parties. Independent enquirers also argued about how to interpret data arising from parliamentary enquiries, and were prompted by them to open fresh lines of investigation. Office-holders in the main departments of state oversaw the production of fiscal and military information, and controlled access to that (except inasmuch as they had to account to Parliament). They had an interest in the ways in which British power and wealth were represented, and sometimes took steps to encourage and reward those who made the kind of case they wanted to see made in the public sphere. By the later eighteenth century, they clearly accepted that they operated in a world in which not only Parliament but also the public needed to have a well-documented case made to them. Beyond these bounds, however, their

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ambition barely extended. Some commercial information was collected by the Board of Trade, but that body had come to be mainly preoccupied with colonial affairs, and in 1782 was abolished in a cost-cutting exercise—though it is true that a successor was instituted within a few years, alongside the new East Indian Board of Control. From 1782, when two Secretaries of State were distinguished as Foreign and Home Secretaries, the Home Secretary’s Office began to build up certain stocks of information about the operations of the criminal justice system. This apart, central government was largely content to leave it to parliamentary committees, local authorities, and private enquirers to survey, measure, and assess developments in economy and society—no doubt assuming, to be sure, that it could tap that expertise if the need arose. Only in the 1790s did governmentdirected information-gathering become more wide ranging and intrusive: in the form first of crop censuses, later, of a legislatively sanctioned and co-ordinated population census. The Board of Agriculture undertook more broadly conceived surveys—but that was a non-standard public body: a hybrid between an official board and a voluntary society. Developments in social and economic enquiry began to shift expectations of government, but initiative continued for the most part to lie outside government. Within this evolving matrix—of official and unofficial information-gathering and interpretation, both building upon and refining previously established lines of enquiry—new forms of investigation began to take shape. Richly detailed, locally focused, and combining verbal description with quantification, these sought to contribute to an understanding of national trends and processes through the close study of local instances—but at the same time to illuminate variation in experience, and the ways in which such variation was shaped by particular constellations of circumstance. This way of modelling the nation—as a concatenation of local communities which, aggregated, constituted the nation, but which were at the same time each particular, presenting their inhabitants with their own special mix of peril and opportunity—provided a rich and interesting basis for understanding the many forms of fit and misfit that might exist between national power and wealth and individual happiness. To enlarge on this sketch, let us consider, first, the development of new information resources, upon which the compilers of a new generation of surveys of national power and wealth were able to draw. First in time came the work of what might be termed the ‘economic antiquarians’. In the early 1760s, a number of important works of what were in effect economic history came into print. One such was Timothy Cunningham’s (fl. 1759–d.1789) History of our Customs, Aids, National Debts and Taxes (1761)—building on George Gordon’s mid-century compilation of similar name.¹²⁵ More wide-ranging, and probably longer in the making, was Adam Anderson’s massive Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin ¹²⁵ McCulloch, Literature, 330, judges the earlier work to have been fuller and better.

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of Commerce (1764), possibly inspired in some part by the Society of Arts’ 1759 prize offer (Anderson dedicated the work to the Society). In effect, the Deduction presented the economic annals of Great Britain, drawing especially on the work of early eighteenth-century legal antiquarians in relation to the more distant past (notably Rymer’s Foedera), and, for more recent decades, on the author’s own collection of pamphlets, probably including printed official papers.¹²⁶ Anderson (c.1692–1765) had long served as a clerk to the South Sea Company; essentially a member of Massie’s generation and perhaps of his circle, he said that he had hoped his pamphlet collection would help lay the foundations for a mercantile library. Concurrently with these appeared the first of a series of publications of official statistics laid before Parliament since the Revolution, compiled by Sir Charles Whitworth (1721–78), an MP of long standing, an early supporter (indeed, an early Vice President) of the Society of Arts.¹²⁷ Whitworth was made chairman of the committee of ways and means, the key Commons financial committee, in 1768. His broader interest in the traditions of political arithmetic and allied economic argument is suggested by the fact that, in 1771, he published a multi-volume edition of the works of Charles Davenant. By the 1780s, the volume of published data was such that Scottish landowner and MP Sir John Sinclair (1754–1835) was able to draw entirely on published sources for his History of the Public Revenue (as first published, in its modern component offering only an account of national debts).¹²⁸ From about the same period, unprecedented quantities of official data entered the public domain more directly. A key change here was the resumption of a parliamentary publishing programme. After the fall of Walpole, the Commons had agreed to a programme of printing its ‘Journals’, a formulaic daily record of their business. Some accounts and papers laid before Parliament and some reports of committees were incorporated into the printed volumes. The earliest volumes published reached to the early 1740s and were not kept current, but in the 1760s (following a further, this time royally inspired onslaught on Whig oligarchy) the series was brought up to date and thereafter maintained as nearly as possible current. At the same time, the numbers of accounts, papers, and reports inserted in the Journals increased, while some bulkier reports were printed separately in a new series of Reports from Committees of the House of Commons. A particular ¹²⁶ For Rymer and his Foedera, Douglas, English Scholars, esp. ch. 11. ¹²⁷ Palmer, Economic Arithmetic, 157, says Whitworth’s Collection (1763) was the first publication to give figures for public income as well as public expenditure. His State of Trade was a transcription of the Inspector General’s ledger (commonly referred to by contemporaries as the ‘Customs House register’, because held there.) As Corbyn Morris would shortly point out, Whitworth confused the picture by listing bullion among other exports, an error perpetuated by Chalmers (Palmer, Economic Arithmetic, 14): more abundant information did not necessarily mean reliable information! ¹²⁸ He later said that he had left the project incomplete because the information he was able to obtain was so defective: Sinclair, Statistical Account, xx, p. xii.

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inhibition on printing reports concerning the revenue, maintained since the 1730s, was set aside.¹²⁹ The transformative effects of these developments must not be overstated. The printed Journals were bulky and unwieldy—and accessible in only a few public libraries (though numerous accounts and reports continued to be printed as separates). Though some compilers may have drawn directly from this source—thus perhaps William Combe (1742–1823), continuator of Anderson’s Origins, Sinclair, in his History, and some editors of routine reference books and periodicals—few members of the public are likely ever to have had sight of them. Yet through such information brokers as Whitworth, Combe, and Sinclair, and through other reference sources, some of this official data did enter the public domain.¹³⁰ What could be culled from libraries was supplemented by some enquirers with other research into the contemporary scene—which again reached a broader public through their publications. A first source of supplementary information was archival research, especially in official papers. Good contacts with men in office, or men who had recently held office, helped in this regard. Associates of former prime ministers Grenville and Rockingham were able to compose densely informed tracts on finance and commerce in the late 1760s—which were extensively reviewed and excerpted in magazines and literary reviews.¹³¹ Politicians out of office might still have personal contacts on the inside that they could exploit: Richard Price (1723–91) (a dissenting minister and writer on a variety of mathematical and political topics) obtained some official data via his patron, Lord Shelburne, who reminded him not to betray his source (no less than Corbyn Morris, several times previously encountered, now risen to the height of the English Customs Commission).¹³² ¹²⁹ Sessional Papers, ed. Lambert, i, 3–71, and for revenue reports more particularly, 47–8. See also my ‘Legislation and Public Participation: Aspects of a Changing Relationship 1760–1830’ in D. Lemmings ed., The British and their Laws (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2005), 102–32, and references there. ¹³⁰ Combe also made data scattered throughout Anderson’s text more usable by collecting and tabulating it: Palmer, Economic Arithmetic, 16. ¹³¹ T. Whately, Considerations on the Trade and Finances of this Kingdom (London, 1766); [William Knox], The Present State of the Nation, Particularly with Respect to its Trade, Finances etc (London, 1768); [Edmund Burke], Observations on a Late State of the Nation (London, 1769). Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. P. Langford (9 vols in progress, Oxford, 1981– ), ii, 102–219, for various observations on Burke’s sources (esp. 106, 108, 119n., 143n., 197n.); 107 for periodical coverage. ¹³² The Correspondence of Richard Price, ed. B. Peach and D. O. Thomas (3 vols, Cardiff, 1983–94), i, 236. See also W. Morgan, Memoirs of the Life of the Rev. Richard Price (London, 1815), 82, for Price’s dependence on members of Shelburne’s coterie for his access to parliamentary documents. For difficulties of accessing data: Smith to Chalmers, Correspondence of Adam Smith, 287; Rose to Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, ed. R. I. and S. Wilberforce (5 vols, London, 1838), i, 154. For contrasting views about the wisdom of placing national statistics in the public domain, C. Morris (presumably writing on behalf of government): Remarks upon Mr Mills’ Proposals for Publishing a Survey of the Trade of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Colonies (London, [1771]) and A. Young, Proposals to the Legislature for Numbering the People (London, 1771), 33–4, 39–43.

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Official records chiefly illuminated public revenue, and the commercial and manufacturing activity from which customs and excise revenues arose; commerce could also be illuminated by registers of shipping. There was no such easy access to data bearing on the agricultural economy—though Parliament and pamphleteers began to collect some data bearing on the grain trade against the background of a price crisis in 1756–7, and a more general price rise from the 1760s; a statute of 1772 ordered the regular collection and return of price data from market towns throughout the kingdom.¹³³ This information gap was more ambitiously filled by enquiries on the ground. Arthur Young’s series of regional ‘Farmer’s Tours’, from 1767, drew primarily on his own observations, breaking new ground with a mass of data on the English rural economy, including crop, stock, employment, wage, and price data—data of sufficient quality for modern economic historians to have judged it usable as a basis for their own studies.¹³⁴ Young’s data also grounded the first reasonably well-founded estimate of national income since King’s, and the first innovatively conceived estimate, based on estimates of value added through various activities.¹³⁵ Young (1741–1820) had some early experience of farming, which he had followed by a spell as a parliamentary reporter for a London newspaper; he sought to represent and defend agricultural interests to the reading public, as well as to encourage improvements in farming practice.¹³⁶ Young stood at the cutting edge of a new wave of interest in developing English agriculture, undoubtedly prompted in part by rising food prices, paralleling continental efforts, which responded to similar stimuli.¹³⁷ Some of the English regional agricultural societies set on foot in these decades—thus the Bath and Western Agricultural Society, and the Odiham (Hampshire) Agricultural Society—circulated their own questionnaires.¹³⁸ In the 1790s, the new Board of Agriculture—a curious body, combining a government-appointed ‘President’ with subscribing members—invited public-spirited gentlemen to procure answers to a set of questions which the Board printed and distributed through ¹³³ For a general overview, G. E. Fussell, ‘The Collection of Agricultural Statistics in the Eighteenth Century’, Agricultural Historical Review, xviii (1944), 161–7. ¹³⁴ R. C. Allen and C. O Grada, ‘On the Road Again with Arthur Young: English, Irish and French Agriculture during the Agricultural Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, xlviii (1988), 93–116. ¹³⁵ Deane, ‘Implications’, 18–22; Stone, Some British Empiricists, ch. 5. ¹³⁶ The Autobiography of Arthur Young, ed. M. Betham-Edwards (London, 1898), and J. G. Gazley, The Life of Arthur Young 1741–1820 (Philadelphia, 1973). ¹³⁷ Young’s first writings on the subject appeared in the first specialist journal devoted to this topic: the Museum Rusticum et Commerciale, launched 1763, which began with a nod towards the French example. For French developments, Koren, History of Statistics, 270–1; Westergaard, Contributions, 97–9; J.-C. Perrot, Une histoire intellectuelle de l’économie politique: xvii e —xviiie siècles (Paris, 1992). ¹³⁸ K. Hudson, Patriotism with Profit: British Agricultural Societies in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London, 1972), 13–14; T. F. Plowman, Edmund Rack: the Society he Founded and the Company he Kept (Bath, 1914), 24, and see also 34–5; Annals of Agriculture, iii (1785), 309 ff.

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county magistrates; draft reports elicited in this way were also circulated among magistrates for comment.¹³⁹ Only slowly, and then under pressure of war, and in the context of other information-gathering efforts prompted by military exigency, did more traditional central government agencies seek information about the nation’s food-producing capacity. In 1798, a form of questionnaire originally designed in the county of Dorset to assist preparations to ward off invasion was adopted by government as the basis for more general enquiries into crops; in 1800, the government sought further information on this front; in 1801, on acreage under cultivation, through revenue officers and the information-gathering systems of the Church (which proved to yield the fullest results). None of the information gathered by these means was published, though information collected by a House of Lords Committee on the Dearth of Provisions in 1800 was printed in their report.¹⁴⁰ Scots had consciously addressed the project of improving Scottish agriculture from the start of the century, though in the Highlands, effort had taken off only after (and in response to) the ’45.¹⁴¹ Those efforts produced a series of semiofficial reports on progress, giving rise in turn to such publications as Andrew Wight’s Present State of Husbandry in Scotland (1778) and James Anderson’s Account of the Present State of the Hebrides (1785).¹⁴² Alongside these, thematically focused publications, county and urban ‘histories’ and surveys appeared in growing numbers; some of these included local population estimates, and accounts of past and present economic activity.¹⁴³ ¹³⁹ R. Mitchison, ‘The Old Board of Agriculture (1793–1822)’, English Historical Review, cxxiv (1959), 41–69. For an example of Sinclair’s correspondence with counties: Essex Record Office Q/SBb 356/27. ¹⁴⁰ W. E. Minchinton, ‘Agricultural Returns and the Government during the Napoleonic Wars’, Agricultural History Review, i (1953), 29–43; D. Thomas, Agriculture in Wales during the Napoleonic Wars: A Study in the Geographical Interpretation of Historical Sources (Cardiff, 1963). For the 1801 returns, Home Office Acreage Returns (HO 67): List and Analysis (List and Index Society, 4 vols, 1982–3). For the broader social context, see R. A. E. Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England 1793–1801 (Gloucester, 1988); for military context, J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997), and The Bucks Posse Comitatus 1798, I. F. W. Beckett ed. (Buckinghamshire Record Society, xxii, 1985). ¹⁴¹ A. J. Youngson, After the Forty-Five (Edinburgh, 1973), esp. 40, 43. For natural-history driven enquiry, C. W. J. Withers, ‘Geography, Natural History and the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment: Putting the World in Place’, History Workshop Journal, xxxix (1995), 137–63. ¹⁴² Andrew Wight (c.1719–92), who began as an improving farmer, wrote first for the commissioners of annexed estates; Anderson (1739–1808), who already had a solid record as an agricultural writer, for the Treasury. Note also David Loch’s survey of trade and industry, undertaken for the Board of Fisheries, published as A Tour through most of the Trading Towns and Villages (Edinburgh, 1778). Loch tried to put a monetary value on the trade and industry of each region, so as to make possible an estimate of the value of national production. Macpherson’s Annals of Commerce (1803), compiled with assistance from George Chalmers, was the first survey to integrate Scottish with English trade data (Palmer, Economic Arithmetic, 17). ¹⁴³ R. Gough, British Topography (London, 1780), provided a contemporary overview of such studies. W. Boys, Collections for a History of Sandwich (Canterbury, 1792), included parish register

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In these various publications lay an unprecedented wealth of data for any would-be surveyor of national resources. The most famous writer to have drawn on at least some parts of this abundance was Adam Smith (c.1723–90), in his 1776 Wealth of Nations.¹⁴⁴ Smith sought not simply to describe, but instead to explain the means by which nations became more or less wealthy. He was dismissive of much of the work of political arithmeticians, disdaining their insufficiently critical amassing of material which, as he observed, was often laden with error. Nonetheless, he presented and analysed much historical and contemporary data in the course of his reasonings. Increasing interest in taking a long time-perspective on economic development impelled—sometimes required—attention to problems associated with comparing prices over time.¹⁴⁵ In this connection, another early eighteenthcentury antiquarian publication came into its own, being used by Smith among others. This was the Chronicon Preciosum of Reverend William Fleetwood (subsequently Bishop of Ely), 1706.¹⁴⁶ Fleetwood (1656–1723) had sought to determine changes in the value of money over the centuries. He had initially undertaken that task to meet a particular need: a fellow of an Oxford college, who was required to resign his stipend if he came into possession of an income of £5 a year, but hoping to retain both his fellowship and a small inheritance, argued that he could claim to be conforming to the spirit of the condition if only he could establish what the sum of £5 in the late fifteenth century might equate to in current money; Fleetwood was intrigued by the problem and set about exploring it. With the late eighteenth-century flowering of interest in historical economic data, Fleetwood’s researches attained new significance.¹⁴⁷

data reflecting his interest ‘in the doctrine of annuities and political arithmetic’, 282, 425–31, 521. Some local historians collected fresh information to inform their works: thus, the editors of Hutchinson’s History of Cumberland had the population of Carlisle enumerated in 1796 (Henry Lonsdale, The Life of John Heysham M. D. (London, 1870), 50). Emery, ‘Map of Edward Lhuyd’s Parochial Queries’, 47, reports that the topographer John Nichols, when drafting ‘Queries’ for national circulation 1780, added to a skeleton derived from Lhuyd’s 1696 queries new questions arising from current concerns, relating to manufacture, prices, rents, and wages. See also n. 224 below. ¹⁴⁴ L. R. Klein, ‘Smith’s Use of Data’, in M. Fry ed., Adam Smith’s Legacy (London, 1992), 15–28. ¹⁴⁵ See the brewer Michael Combrune’s Enquiry into the Prices of Wheat, Malt, and occasionally of Other Provisions . . . as Sold in England, from the Year 1000 to the Year 1765 . . . Computed according to the Winchester Measure and to the Present Standard of English Coin (London, 1768). We might also set in this context the work of John Brand, who in Observations on the Probable Effects of Mr Gilbert’s Bill (London, 1776) responded to Price’s account of the growing burden imposed by the national debt by trying to estimate the changing real cost of taxes. ¹⁴⁶ For Fleetwood, see Stone, Some British Empiricists, ch. 4. Palmer, Economic Arithmetic, 53, notes that Arthur Young largely relied on Fleetwood’s data. ¹⁴⁷ Growing interest in price data also alerted contemporaries to the problems posed to analysis by regionally variable weights and measures. Annals of Agriculture, x (1788), 558; G. Shuckburgh, ‘An Account of Some Endeavours to Ascertain a Standard of Weight and Measure’, Philosophical Transactions, cxiii (1798), 132–76.

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In the later eighteenth century, the first work successfully to pull together a picture of national wealth and power using chiefly central sources was George Chalmers’ Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great Britain, during the present and four preceding reigns . . ., which first appeared in 1782, at the conclusion of the American War, but thereafter was several times updated and reissued, down to 1812. George Chalmers (1742–1825) was Scottish born and legally trained.¹⁴⁸ Emigrating to Maryland, he had embarked on a promising legal career, but was increasingly marginalized by his pro-British sympathies, and returned to Britain in 1775, becoming a loyalist lobbyist and pamphleteer. He immersed himself in the printed and manuscript record of British social and economic thought: in the 1780s he published Hale’s late-seventeenth-century essay on population; he also discovered (and later published) Gregory King’s papers among the Harleian manuscripts of the British Museum.¹⁴⁹ The fact that Chalmers drew extensively on unpublished official data in the first edition of the estimate suggests that he must have been writing with official encouragement even at that date.¹⁵⁰ In 1786, he won appointment as secretary to the refounded Board of Trade; which gave him still better access, and allowed him to produce a revised and expanded edition of his work. At the same time, he followed a secondary career as a man of letters, publishing works of biography and of Scottish history and topography. Similarly oriented but differently presented was the work of the Edinburgh engineer and draughtsman William Playfair (1759–1823). He pioneered a range of graphic techniques, including the bar graph and pie chart, which he used to display information about English trade and the comparative resources of different European states.¹⁵¹ Ministers characteristically wished to present an upbeat picture of Britain’s state and prospects. Surveys of British revenue and commerce in historical perspective lent themselves to this purpose, because they made it plain that revenue, mostly deriving from taxes on commerce and manufactures, had greatly increased over time, markedly so in the course of the eighteenth century.¹⁵² Of course, even were it true that both state and nation had prospered, this trend would not necessarily continue. Furthermore, it could be assumed that the wealth ¹⁴⁸ G. Cockcroft, The Public Life of George Chalmers (New York, 1939). ¹⁴⁹ In both cases, he published within the text of his Estimate. A. Whiteman, ‘The Census that Never Was’, in A. Whiteman ed., Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants (Oxford, 1973), 2–3, for Chalmers’ work on ecclesiastical surveys. ¹⁵⁰ Crowley, ‘Neo-Mercantilism and The Wealth of Nations: British Commercial Policy after the American Revolution’, Historical Journal, xxxiii (1990), 342 n. 10, says Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for the American department, got him access to the Old Paper Office to aid his anti-American pamphleteering; his own account (Estimate, 1782 edn, 98) praises the antiquary John Topham (1746–1803), then employed there, as ‘a good and communicative researcher’. ¹⁵¹ H. M. Walker and H. G. Funkhauser, ‘Playfair and his Charts’, Economic History, iii (1934–7), 103–8; also E. R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, CT, 1983), passim. ¹⁵² See Whitworth, preface to State of Trade of Great Britain (London, 1776). Also W. Playfair, A Real Statement of the Finances and Resources of Great Britain (London, 1796).

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and power of other states had also grown; at best, Britain’s success had reduced the disadvantage she was under compared with still significantly more populous France. Such attempts to place Britain in European perspective as there were at this time made it plain that, even granted Britain was doing well, she was only one among many, and not in most respects the best endowed of European states.¹⁵³ Still, on the whole, the historical record did suggest rising economic activity, and taxable capacity, and insofar as Britain continued to be able to secure and extend her global position, her people could expect to prosper further. We should not be surprised to find the dyspeptic traveller John Byng (1743–1814)—a man disposed to lament the passing of older ways—lamenting: ‘It has been of late years my misfortune to have met with mathematical (unobservant of life) calculators, who seem to take pleasure in arraying themselves against every idea of mine’.¹⁵⁴ If not all ‘mathematical calculators’ were optimists, this was certainly a common mode. Those who wanted to develop a pessimistic case in this context tended to focus on the debt burden; the vulnerability of an economy so dependent on foreign trade; the debatable resilience of the population; worries associated with rising food prices; and, last but not least, the destructive impact of war upon the very economic activity on which the nation’s war-waging capacity depended. Let us briefly consider the kinds of debate and enquiry associated with the last three of these. At the time, as for us now, they provide a bridge between enquiries into power and wealth and somewhat differently angled enquiries into welfare. We have already surveyed mid-century debates about population trends. These continued into the early years of the Seven Years War, lapsed in its final years, but resumed towards the end of the 1760s.¹⁵⁵ The stimulus to debate was probably both literary and practical. On the literary front, Richard Price emerged as the leading proponent of pessimism, initially in a paper communicated by Benjamin Franklin to the Royal Society in 1769. Price’s interest in the subject seems to have derived partly from his mathematical interests, but also from his radical political stance, which inclined him to view the state of both government and society ¹⁵³ Data from other countries was also accessible in print. German work was publicized by E. A. W. Zimmerman, A Political Survey of the Present State of Europe in Sixteen Tables (London, 1787), Political Geography (London, 1789). See also T. Brooke Clarke, A Statistical View of Germany (London, 1790). For German traditions, see n. 221 below. Playfair, whose initial work was well received in France, in 1793 published a General View of the Actual Force and Resources of France; by then he was in receipt of government subsidies. In 1800, he translated Jacob Boetticher’s statistical account of Europe as ‘Statistical Tables’ (Palmer, Economic Arithmetic, 39–43). ¹⁵⁴ Torrington Diaries, ed. C. B. Andrews and John Beresford (4 vols, London, 1934–8), i, 263. ¹⁵⁵ Bonar, Theories of Population, 192–225; Glass, Numbering, ch. 2. A more theoretical body of writing, focusing on the determinants of population, continued through such writers as W. Eden, A Fifth Letter to the Earl of Carlisle . . . on Population (London, 1780); W. Ogilvie, An Essay on the Right of Property in Land (London, 1781); J. McFarlan, Tracts on Subjects of National Importance (London, 1786); [J. Townsend], A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, by a Well Wisher to Mankind (London, 1786) and of course Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population first appeared in 1798. For European context, Riley, Population Thought, ch. 7.

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with a jaded eye.¹⁵⁶ The contrast between the buoyancy of American population, as portrayed by Franklin, and what Price took to be Britain’s trajectory helped to give the issue special resonance in a period of deteriorating Anglo-American relations.¹⁵⁷ Price enlarged on his arguments in his 1771 and 1772 Observations on Reversionary Payments (in which his main concern was to argue that annuities, private and public, should be placed on an actuarially sounder footing), also in a pamphlet on the national debt (in which he argued that the burden of debt had contributed to population decline). These precipitated a series of responses from other writers, and then a body of exchanges both between Price and others, and among others. By the later stages of this debate, rising trends both in food prices and in poor-relief expenditure were also pressing on public consciousness, and stimulating interest in how these might relate to population trends. Price’s argument for population decline—by as much as 25 per cent in eighty years—rested in part on the estimates of early political arithmeticians, which he took to establish a reference point, partly on his interpretation of London bills of mortality and partly on tax data. He accepted that London was growing as he wrote, and that some provincial towns had grown massively, but thought that this was being achieved by shifts of population from countryside to towns. Previous debate had already established that all these forms of evidence were problematic: Price’s conclusions were therefore at the very least debatable. Arthur Young, who pointed to holes in Price’s argument, observed in 1771 that there remained a strong case for a national census to settle the issue; however, no MP cared to take up the cause.¹⁵⁸ Price’s arguments prompted two writers to undertake substantial new empirical work.¹⁵⁹ William Wales (c.1734–98), who taught mathematics at Christ’s Hospital and served as astronomer on two of Cook’s voyages, conducted his research by means of questionnaires to provincial correspondents, seeking information on the relationship between window tax returns and the real number of houses, and also on trends revealed in parish registers. John Howlett ¹⁵⁶ D. O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford, 1977), esp. chs 7, 9, for his interests in population and insurance; Glass, Numbering, 53–64, has however more to say about Price’s ideas specifically on population. Mathematical aptitude: Price had studied alongside Thomas Bayes with John Eames, a friend of Newton’s, at the Tenter Alley London Dissenting Academy. Bayes did interesting work in the developing field of mathematical probability (and remains a name to conjure with), but died young; Price published his friend’s work posthumously (1763–4), and built upon it; he sent a copy of this early work to Franklin, and in this way first forged a link with him. Price’s reputation in this sphere secured him appointment as mathematical advisor to the Equitable Insurance Company, the first insurance company to base its finances on mortality data, from 1768. ¹⁵⁷ For Franklin on this theme, see above, n. 108. For this context see also, T. Short, A Comparative History of the Increase and Decrease of Mankind, in England and in Several Countries Abroad (London, 1767). ¹⁵⁸ For Young, Bonar, Theories of Population, 225–35. Young believed that employment was the chief determinant of population; employment opportunities had increased, so population was unlikely to have declined. ¹⁵⁹ For an overview of exchanges between Price and his interlocutors, Glass, Numbering, 53–64.

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(1731–1804), a clergyman who served a number of parishes in the south-east of England, used tax and militia returns as a basis for population estimates, and parish register data he had collected through correspondents, together with similar material supplied to him by Wales, as a basis for his analysis. Though not in agreement with each other in all respects, Wales and Howlett both thought that Price was wrong, and that population had increased. Price, for his part, rejoined that early parish registers had probably been defective, and that apparent growth was therefore illusory. Price was prepared to concede that his own case was unproven, but did not think that evidence for the other side was any better. The ways and means of the population debate—the social relationships and communication systems on which it depended—had something in common with those which sustained ‘economic antiquarianism’ and studies of national revenue and its sources—but the somewhat different evidential base of this debate helped to open it up to other kinds of participant. Print was clearly an important medium for drawing issues to wider attention (and, by this time, some contributions were appearing in newspapers).¹⁶⁰ Enquiry and debate were also sustained through networks of acquaintanceship and correspondence. The Royal Society remained important as an arena in which certain connections were forged, and ideas exchanged and publicized (at least when the topic was one with a ‘natural’ as well as a social dimension); the Society of Antiquaries may similarly have helped to forge links between those of antiquarian bent;¹⁶¹ but these were only particular nexuses within a wider web. Correspondence networks were employed to collect and exchange data, and to exchange views about it. They brought together enquirers with overlapping if not identical interests: William Wales’ correspondents, for example, included John Heysham (1753–1834), a Carlisle physician, who collected a great deal of information for him, but whose own interest in population had a more medical turn. From the 1770s, local societies, ‘Lit and Phils’, and agricultural societies also emerged as communication hubs, and Young’s Annals of Agriculture, as a locus for the exchange of ideas and information about rural society, population, and welfare.¹⁶² ¹⁶⁰ See, for example, London Chronicle, 2–4 and 9–11 Apr. 1765 (the second by Joseph Massie). Young took issue with Price in a letter to the St James Chronicle (Bonar, Theories of Population, 232). ¹⁶¹ Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries included William Heberden (who had republished Graunt), Timothy Cunningham, and George Chalmers, among names already mentioned; also Thomas Ruggles, who will appear later, and, unsurprisingly, county historians such as Cullum and Hasted. Andrew Wight was a member of the Scottish Society. ¹⁶² Thomas Percival, a friend of Heysham’s, who is discussed below, was founding president of the Manchester Lit and Phil. In Bath, improver Edmund Rack helped launch both an Agricultural Society and a Literary and Philosophical Society: Haygarth, another medical quantifier discussed below, in his later years in Bath attended the Lit and Phil. (For Percival and Haygarth, n. 167 below; for Rack, Plowman, Edmund Rack, 17, 47). More or less formal medical societies, which proliferated in the provinces in the later eighteenth century, also facilitated networking: Percival, Haygarth,

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Characteristically in eighteenth-century Britain the people who published were not from the highest social ranks. But people of high rank might figure in correspondence networks, and play a role as patrons and intermediaries.¹⁶³ It is not always apparent how links were initially made. John Howlett was quite obscurely situated, but his correspondents and supporters seem to have included Bishop Porteus of Chester (1731–1809) and the government lawyer (later Lord Chancellor) Alexander Wedderburn (1733–1805), who may have hoped to open doors for him.¹⁶⁴ Wedderburn is said to have developed an interest in such matters during his Scottish university years. In the case of Bishop Porteus, there are plenty of other indications of his interest. For example, during debates in the House of Lords on returns to a census of Catholics, recently ordered against the background of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots, Porteus argued that the apparent increase in numbers of Catholics since the last (1767) enumeration of Catholics needed to be set against estimates of more general population increase over the same period.¹⁶⁵ In the population debates of the late eighteenth century, evidence about trends was commonly set in the context of speculation about causes and effects; sometimes these were independently investigated. Already in the 1750s the population debate had been in part a debate about the health of cities; for Price, this continued to be an important focus of argument. The ready availability of London bills of mortality had long helped to focus attention on London. In the later eighteenth century, more information was collected about provincial towns—to serve administrative, demographic, actuarial, and medical ends. This sometimes took the form of local censuses, undertaken for a variety of reasons.¹⁶⁶ Some provincial towns published their own bills of mortality: Price constructed a ‘life table’ from Northampton bills. Several provincial doctors studied population and health in towns: thus John Haygarth (1740–1827) in Chester, Thomas Percival (1740–1804) in Manchester, and and other medical men of the northwest met regularly for many years at Warrington: U. Tröhler, ‘Quantification’, 134–5 (and ‘To Improve’, 9, 51). ¹⁶³ Thus, Young, Political Arithmetic, 88–9, notes that the Marquis of Rockingham ordered surveys in a variety of parishes around his Yorkshire mansion to establish the reliability of house tax returns as a basis for population estimates. Rockingham was a Fellow of the Royal Society with active scientific interests, possibly the context for this exercise. ¹⁶⁴ Young, Autobiography, 97–8, reports that Porteus helped collect data for Howlett’s work on population, soliciting Young among others to help. ¹⁶⁵ R. A. Soloway, Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England, 1783–1852 (London, 1969), 283–4. Porteus notebooks, Lambeth Palace mss. 2099, ff.4–10, citing ‘my friend Mr Howlett’ on population trends. See also D. T. Mitchell, ‘The Library of Bishop Porteus’, Library Association Record, lxi (1959), 157. ¹⁶⁶ C. Chapman, Pre-1841 Census and Population Listings (5th edn, Dursley, 1991); J. Gibson and M. Medlycott, Local Census Listings 1522–1930: Holdings in the British Isles (3rd edn, Birmingham, 1997). Cumberland and Westmorland were unique in being subject to a county census: Vital Statistics: The Westmorland Census of 1787, ed. L. Ashcroft (Berwick, 1992).

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John Heysham (1753–1834) in Carlisle. Percival (who published his findings and reflections, and helped to inspire the efforts of Heysham) suggested that not merely urbanization but manufacturing linked to high infant death rates.¹⁶⁷ For Arthur Young, by way of contrast, a reason to seek population data was to improve understanding of the performance and potential of the rural economy. Whereas proponents of a national census in the 1750s had argued chiefly that it would serve administrative ends, Young argued that population data, in conjunction with data on values, rentals, and taxes, would help statesmen to understand the social bases of prosperity.¹⁶⁸ The impact of enclosures attracted broader concern (the first peak in parliamentary enclosure bills fell between the end of the Seven Years War and the onset of the American War). Richard Price believed that enclosure was a cause of rural depopulation. Howlett tried to explore that issue empirically, writing to clerics in a sample of enclosed parishes and asking them to send him parish register data so that he could compare it with data from unenclosed parishes.¹⁶⁹ The 1760s saw sharp hikes in the prices of some foodstuffs, prompting much general and parliamentary debate—a second element in the diversification of debate, from issues of national power and wealth to broader concerns about society.¹⁷⁰ We have already noted new efforts in data collection prompted by this. In fact in recent decades the Privy Council had developed elaborate monitoring systems in response to outbreaks of ‘cattle plague’, suggesting that further official data collection might have been within its grasp.¹⁷¹ But the main conclusion that ministers and Parliament reached was that it was important not to interfere too much with the agricultural economy. Arthur Young, as well as being one of the more enterprising data collectors to emerge in this context, took a wide-ranging interest in rural phenomena. As editor of Annals of Agriculture, for example, he sought to illuminate the impact of ¹⁶⁷ Two of Percival’s tracts have been reprinted, in Population and Disease in Early Industrial England, ed. B. Benjamin (n.p., 1973). For Percival and his friends—including Richard Price, another FRS—Rusnock, Vital Accounts, 102, and Tröhler, ‘Quantification’, 103–5, 132–43; Lonsdale, Life of John Heysham, and C. Booth, John Haygarth, FRS (1740–1827): a Physician of the Enlightenment (Philadelphia, 2005). For reflections on urban mortality by various commentators—some pessimistic, some optimistic—Rusnock, ibid, 159–75; Ashton, Economic and Social Investigations, 34–5. The Hume/Wallace exchange helped to encourage interest in the health of cities in the context of moral philosophy/philosophical history: see Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man (3 vols, Dublin, 1774–5), iii, Sketch XI; J. McFarlan, Tracts on Subjects of National Importance (London, 1786), Tract I. For cities and children, see also work of Hanway, esp. An Earnest Appeal for Mercy to the Children of the Poor (London, 1766), which includes reflections on data from registers. ¹⁶⁸ [Young], Proposals, 10–32. ¹⁶⁹ See discussion in Young, Political Arithmetic, 122–55. J. Howlett, Enquiry into Influence which Enclosures have had upon Population (2nd edn, London, 1786). ¹⁷⁰ See for general discussion R. Sheldon, ‘The Politics of Bread in Eighteenth-Century England, c.1709–1802’, (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Birmingham, 2000). ¹⁷¹ J. Broad, ‘Cattle Plague in Eighteenth-Century England’, Agricultural History Review, xxxi (1983), 104–15.

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the very hard winter of 1788–9 on the rural economy.¹⁷² But he always had one eye on policy issues. One of the initial spurs to his writing seems to have been the urge to defend agricultural producers against the charge that rising prices, and a recent food rioting, implied failure on their part. As Young saw it, the chief problem was in fact manufacturers’ efforts to keep wages low. He stressed that grain rioters had mainly been artisans.¹⁷³ Scope for debate about the nature and effects of the interplay between manufacturing and agricultural economies was here indicated. Reflection on the state and prospects of the agricultural economy in this period raised for contemporaries several troubling questions. If, as rising prices suggested, production was too low to meet demand, how could it be improved? If enclosure was needed to improve productivity, what were the social effects of enclosure? What—other than hoping for radical increases in production—could be done about the gradually increasing gap between wages and the price of foodstuffs? And finally how were the profits of commercial agriculture in practice being divided up between different members of the rural community? Young had worried about low wages paid in rural industry; later there was concern also about the stickiness of agricultural labourers’ wages, in the face of rising prices.¹⁷⁴ Alongside population, and the state of the agricultural—and more generally the rural—economy, a third topic attracting ramifying debate was the domestic impact of war. Wars were unquestionably economically disruptive: they entailed heavy taxation; drove up borrowing rates; interfered with overseas trade; for this and other reasons, disrupted the balance of exchange; caused shifts in patterns of demand; and removed temporarily (and of course in some cases permanently) a component of the workforce. This entailed suffering even for civilians: businesses went bankrupt; families were left without breadwinners. Economic dislocation potentially made it harder to borrow or raise the taxes on which the nation’s ability to sustain war depended; a swelling national debt might be expected to impose a longer-term penalty. Every war brought debate about economic costs, not least because of protests from those most directly affected.¹⁷⁵ During the French revolutionary wars, debate about costs took newly ambitious and systematic form.¹⁷⁶ One influential writer was Dr James Currie of Liverpool ¹⁷² He circulated a request for information in January 1790; responses were scattered through Annals in the following months. ¹⁷³ See, for example, [Young], The Farmer’s Tour through the East of England (4 vols, London, 1771), iv, 318–65; also his comments in Political Arithmetic, 30–53. ¹⁷⁴ N. Kent, Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property (London, 1775), 259–63; J. Howlett, The Insufficiency of the Causes to which the Increase of the Poor, and of the Poor’s Rate, has been Commonly Ascribed (London, 1788); debate on Whitbread’s wage regulation bill, Parliamentary History, xxxii, 700–15. ¹⁷⁵ For a modern overview, H. Bowen, War and British Society 1688–1815 (Cambridge, 1998). ¹⁷⁶ J. E. Cookson, ‘Political Arithmetic and War in Britain, 1793–1815’, War and Society, i (1983), 37–60; J. Mori, ‘The Languages of Loyalism: Patriotism, Nationhood and the State

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(1756–1805), who was first drawn into the field when William Wilberforce, always an anxious supporter of Pitt’s, asked Currie to draw on his local knowledge to illuminate the probable impact of a possible war with revolutionary France on trade and manufactures.¹⁷⁷ Currie’s extended reflections were published under the pseudonym of ‘Jasper Wilson’. When Chalmers produced a new edition of his Estimate in 1794 one of his avowed objects was to combat Currie’s case.¹⁷⁸ Richard Price’s nephew, William Morgan (1750–1833), actuary to the Equitable Insurance Company, was another influential analyst. He sought to establish the precise costs of the war, arguing that it dwarfed the costs of earlier conflicts. He also looked for indicators of economic strain: in interest rates, movements in the price of government stock, changes in pre-existing revenue streams, and changes in the scale of commerce. In 1798, Pitt set out an account of national income in his budget speech to the House of Commons, to support the view that the nation could bear the burdens being placed upon it; Pitt set his own efforts in the context of the political–arithmetic tradition. From about this time, a number of enquirers began to work with new tax data to refine previously available estimates. Thomas Irving (1738?–1800), current occupant of Davenant’s erstwhile post—Inspector General of Imports and Exports—used data obtained under the Convoy Act to arrive at estimates of the real value of externally traded goods;¹⁷⁹ Henry Beeke, cleric and Oxford don (1751–1837—the man McCulloch later cited as a regenerator of the political arithmetic)—in his later work used both Irving’s calculations and income tax data to improve on Pitt’s national income estimates.¹⁸⁰ Around these central exchanges blossomed a much more wide-ranging debate, in which not only were the pros and cons of particular elements of war finance probed and analysed, but also competing visions of society and its patterns of development set out. By the later 1790s (the historian John Cookson suggests), government apologists had in effect won the argument as first joined: indicators of the underlying health of the economy seemed plainly to tell a positive story (though the abandonment of the gold standard, from 1797, did make the meaning of monetary data in the 1790s’, English Historical Review, cviii (2003), esp. 46–55; E. Vincent McLeod, A War of Ideas: British Attitudes to the Wars against Revolutionary France (Aldershot, 1998), esp. chs 4–5. ¹⁷⁷ W. W. Currie ed., Memoir of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of James Currie of Liverpool (2 vols, London, 1831), i, 194. Currie had previously employed counting in his medical work; he was friendly with other medical quantifiers, such as Percival, frequented the Warrington medical meetings, and was a member of the Medical Society of London: Tröhler, ‘Quantification’, 138 (and ‘To Improve’, 51). ¹⁷⁸ The edition was indeed dedicated to Currie. Chalmers says that he was impelled to produce it because Currie cited him so much. ¹⁷⁹ J. McCusker, ‘Colonial Civil Servant and Counterrevolutionary: Thomas Irving (1738?– 1800) in Boston, Charleston and London’, Perspectives in American History, xii (1979), 315–50. ¹⁸⁰ Observations on the Produce of the Income Tax (2nd edn, London, 1800).

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hard to assess). In that context, the critics of war shifted focus, and concentrated their fire on the war’s impact on the distribution of wealth, arguing that it widened inequality. Cookson suggests that the decision to undertake a national census in 1801 was not primarily motivated by the desire to establish the total size or even the distribution of population—by this point, the government had some confidence in available population estimates, and a sufficient knowledge of population distribution for its main administrative purposes. Rather, what was sought was a basis for improving estimates of national income and wealth. To this end, families were asked to report whether they drew their income primarily from agriculture, industry, or other sources.¹⁸¹ Alongside these broadly conceived debates about economy and society, the late eighteenth century also saw the development of enquiry into—and associated debate about—social problems and policies: including both problems that were targeted by legislation (such as poverty, vagrancy, crime, and imprisonment for debt) and others that, in this period, were chiefly tackled by other means: disease, ignorance, religious apathy. There was a great burgeoning of interest in the possibility of getting some kind of empirical grip on these problems through the systematic study of data generated by ordinary administrative processes, or collected in order to answer specific questions. The further development of parliamentary enquiry, from small beginnings in the middle years of the century, provided one important context for this interest (of course, it also itself evidenced the growth of these interests). We have noted that information on poor-relief expenditure was sought from parishes in the 1750s, though not apparently analysed at that time. In the 1770s, in the context of renewed debate about the merits and limitations of the poor laws, parliamentary select committees drafted and sent out standardized forms to collect information on county spending on vagrant removal; numbers of vagrants punished with imprisonment; parish expenditure on relief, and on settlement litigation; and numbers of parish workhouses. Similar information on spending on the poor was sought again in the early 1780s. On all these occasions, returns were collated and analysed; the results were tabulated, and printed both as separates and subsequently in the series Reports of Select Committees.¹⁸² National expenditure totals, and totals by county, were reported in magazines and newspapers; totals from the 1780s returns were set alongside totals for the 1770s. In the later 1780s, Parliament also set on foot a parish-by-parish enquiry into charitable endowments (the returns to which were not printed at the time).¹⁸³ Parliament also collected and publicized some information about criminal justice. In the 1770s, in connection with enquiries about what ¹⁸¹ Cookson, ‘Political Arithmetic’, 45. See also Glass, Numbering, 96–8. ¹⁸² Reports from Committees of the House of Commons (16 vols, London, 1803), ix. ¹⁸³ PP (1816) iv, 329–41 (reprinted from 1787 original).

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to do when transportation was suspended by the outbreak of the American War, returns on numbers of felons ordered for transportation were sought: the first such return ordered by a public body.¹⁸⁴ As early as the 1760s, Parliament had sought some information about numbers of prisoners for debt (though it is not clear what became of the results). In the early 1790s, a select committee on the law relating to imprisonment for debt collected and published information about the implementation of legal processes in London and Middlesex.¹⁸⁵ As far as one can see from surviving evidence, Parliament’s growing appetite for information of this kind outstripped its ability to interpret the results. Significant growth in expenditure on the poor between the mid-1770s and early 1780s was apparently documented by the returns, but there is no sign that Parliament itself tested the reliability of this finding, nor that it made any reflective effort to determine its meaning; nor yet were patterns within voluminous quantities of parish data explored.¹⁸⁶ The man mainly responsible for the setting up of the several committees on the poor laws, Thomas Gilbert, himself made next to no reference to these enquiries in his pamphlets. The same applies to information collected on the operation of criminal justice and civil process: at best, it seems to have served to clarify MPs’ impressions as to the scale of operations. Parliamentary enquiries both co-existed and interacted with local and private enquiries, some of which were somewhat more reflective. One contributor to Annals of Agriculture wrote that, by laying ‘a considerable mass of information before the public’, Gilbert’s returns had ‘raised a helpful spirit of enquiry’—and, indeed, that journal carried some interesting exchanges about the interpretation and implications of parliamentary data.¹⁸⁷ This is not to say that local and private collectors of data always had (any more than Parliament did) any very clear idea what to do with information when they had it. Methodical empiricism seems, in some instances, to have been adopted (if unconsciously) primarily for its legitimating effect: to lend the aura of science to an investigation, and therefore, transitively, to any recommendations the enquirer might make. Sometimes it may even have functioned chiefly to legitimate the enquirer, who in this way established himself as a man both of science and of good will. Participants in this genre of enquiry were often the same people who participated in other debates. But the fact that these enquiries revolved around local administrative issues helped to ensure that sheriffs and former sheriffs, magistrates, and sometimes ¹⁸⁴ CJ xxxvi, 13. ¹⁸⁵ CJ xxx, 414; CJ xlvii, 640–73. ¹⁸⁶ F. M. Eden, State of the Poor (3 vols, London, 1797), i, 482, n. 2, was surely right to doubt whether the Privy Council would have been able to make much of annual returns from parishes, proposed by Pitt as an element of his poor bill of 1796. ¹⁸⁷ Annals of Agriculture, x (1788), 419, for the quoted comment; for the exchanges (between Howlett and an initially anonymous contributor, apparently a W. Erskine); ix (1788) 223–9; xi (1789), 1–7; xiii (1790), 490–7; xiv (1790), 174–6.

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parish officers also figured. Of course, this entailed some overlap with traditional patterns: especially in the later years of the century, some active magistrates were also clerics; some were physicians.¹⁸⁸ In relation to poor relief, one possible use of parliamentary data was to ground comparisons of systems of management—especially in relation to the larger, local-act workhouses which one of Gilbert’s committees made the object of special enquiry. Commentators took an interest both in comparative costs and in comparative mortality.¹⁸⁹ In the late 1790s, when he was busy brewing up Panopticon and related schemes, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) asked Young to solicit for him returns to an elaborate questionnaire, which would allow him more fully to compare different schemes of ‘pauper management’.¹⁹⁰ Perhaps the most common effect of Gilbert’s enquiries was, however, to rivet attention on something ratepayers were widely experiencing locally, but which the returns suggested to be a more national phenomenon: a steep rise in relief expenditure. Though Parliament did not interrogate the meaning of this, pamphleteers and (as we have noted) Young’s correspondents did.¹⁹¹ Commentators often lacked confidence in the comprehensiveness of the returns. Many thought the total returned to the 1770s enquiry too low, and supposed this to reflect a high non-return rate. Higher totals in the 1780s catered better to pessimistic expectations; the rising trend indicated was widely accepted as genuine. The simple conclusion was that the figures demonstrated an increase in poverty, often attributed to increased idleness. Anyone who followed wider debates about the course of social and economic change must however have seen the need to consider the possibility that rising expenditure was a function of population growth and the rising cost of living. Following the publication of the 1780s returns, Howlett tried to assess these interrelations. He was among those who were confident that population was rising. He calculated that population growth and the rising cost of necessities between them might have been expected to raise spending to higher levels than it had in fact reached. Relief, as he saw ¹⁸⁸ For example, Heysham. ¹⁸⁹ T. Gilbert, Observations upon the Orders and Resolutions of the House of Commons . . . (London, 1775), 32, suggested that the effect of gathering information on workhouses should be to inspire the less well managed to emulate others. T. Gilbert, Considerations on the Bills for the Better Relief and Employment of the Poor (London, 1787), 18–21, for Gilbert’s use of his own data to provide ‘experimental testimony’ to the effect of workhouses on costs. For workhouse deaths, Reports from Committees, ix, 252–71, and Howlett, Insufficiency, 86–108. ¹⁹⁰ M. Dean, The Constitution of Poverty (London, 1991), 177–81. The Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, founded 1796, vowed to make ‘inquiry into all that concerns the poor, and promotes their happiness, a SCIENCE’, and accordingly adopted an experience-based approach: members submitted reports on their initiatives. They did not however attempt to devise any measures to gauge their impact. See Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor (7 vols, London, 1798–1817), i, p. xii. ¹⁹¹ For example, Smith, Memoirs of Wool, 279; Kent, Hints, 260–1; ‘Old Country Justice’, Considerations on the Late Increase of the Poor Rate (Norwich, 1786), 2–3; T. Ruggles, The History of the Poor (2 vols, London, 1793–4), i, 168–71, 267–74; ii, 8, 32, 43, 122.

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it, was not keeping pace with rising need. Relief not supplied had instead been taken ‘from the flesh, and blood, and bones of the poor’.¹⁹² Another cleric, the Reverend David Davies of Berkshire (1742–1819), later reported that he had been moved by the experience of filling in his parochial return to Parliament to wonder just how the poor coped: what did they spend their meagre incomes on? How did their spending divide up under different heads? Davies talked to poor people in his own parish in order to draw up some sample budgets for poor families; he also circulated other clerics of his acquaintance in other parts of the country, asking them to undertake a similar exercise (though he was disappointed by the low rate of returns to his solicitation). Davies published his findings a few years later, against the background of the poor harvest and rocketing prices of 1795.¹⁹³ If the ‘economic antiquarians’ of the 1760s might be seen as pioneers of economic history, some of those who built upon enquiries into poverty might be described as pioneers of social-scientific social history. ‘History’ at this time, in this intellectual milieu, still often had its Baconian meaning: it connoted the collection of empirical data. This was the primary significance of the title that Thomas Ruggles (1745–1813), an East Anglian landowner and magistrate, gave to his book of 1794, the History of the Poor; in substance a rather meandering account of researches and reflections Ruggles had undertaken from the 1780s.¹⁹⁴ But the identification of a trend in expenditure on the poor, perhaps associated with changes in population and prices, and indeed employment patterns, also suggested the possibility of constructing a ‘history’ of the poor in another sense: an account of changes in income and purchasing power, and of the role of parish poor-relief in relation to that.¹⁹⁵ A few years later, Frederick Morton Eden (1766–1809, later founder of the Globe Insurance Company), developed that project further, and somewhat more systematically, in the long introduction to his survey The State of the Poor in England and Wales, subtitled ‘A history of the working classes’. Eden made use of Fleetwood’s Chronicon Preciosum as a source of, and aid to understanding, historical price data.¹⁹⁶ ¹⁹² Howlett, Insufficiency, 75. These concerns could of course prompt reflections on the impact of taxes on poverty—as they did most famously in the case of Thomas Paine. See also Rev. J. Acland, An Answer to a Pamphlet by Edward King (Exeter and London, n.d. [1796?]). (Acland was and is best known for advocating the formation of a national network of officially sponsored friendly societies.) ¹⁹³ D. Davies, Case of the Labourers in Husbandry (Bath, 1795). ¹⁹⁴ This began as letters to Annals of Agriculture, from xi (1789). Ruggles wrote (from Clare, Suffolk) that he had first been prompted to undertake his enquiries by conditions in the hard winter of 1788. ¹⁹⁵ See Malthus’ call for histories of the common people, Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), 32–3. ¹⁹⁶ (3 vols, London, 1797). For Eden, Stone, Some British Empiricists, ch. 10; F. G. Pyatt and M. Ward eds, Identifying the Poor. Papers on Measuring Poverty to Celebrate the Bicentenary of the Publication in 1797 of ‘The State of the Poor’ (Amsterdam, 1999). For Eden’s historical narrative, G. Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty: A Historical Debate (London, 2004), 78. For his original

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A few years later, in connection with his own insurance project, Eden attempted to survey the role played by friendly societies in the support of the poorer classes. An act of 1793 had offered certain guarantees to societies which registered with county clerks of the peace; Eden circulated the clerks for information about the number of societies enrolled, then drew on the fruits of his own previous research to reason from this data to the probable total range of registered and unregistered societies.¹⁹⁷ Empirical study of crime and criminal justice had two main focuses. On the one hand, there was interest in determining patterns of criminal conduct, and their causes; on the other hand, interest in measuring and assessing the administration of penal systems. Throughout the eighteenth century, prosecutions for serious crime had tended to fall in times of war, and rise steeply with the return of peace, and demobilization of the armed forces. This pattern had been widely observed, and such shifts were anticipated. In 1772, the East India Company director Stephen Theodore Janssen (1705–77), alderman and former sheriff of the City of London, published in a broadsheet his attempt to demonstrate these patterns empirically. Janssen used the published accounts of trials at the Old Bailey, the Whole Proceedings, as a basis for determining death sentences imposed by calendar year. He listed these totals in sequence, labelling each year a year of war or peace.¹⁹⁸ More elaborate, pertinacious, and influential enquiries were undertaken by John Howard (c.1726–90), a Bedfordshire landowner who was also a Fellow of the Royal Society, and who demonstrated his interest in scientific measurement when, on a trip to Italy, he took temperature readings on Mount Vesuvius. Appointed sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1773, Howard thereby became responsible for the safekeeping of prisoners in the county gaol. Horrified to learn that some of those imprisoned had been acquitted, and were being held by the keeper in an attempt to coerce them to settle their debts to him, Howard proposed that such prisoners’ remaining charges should be paid from county funds. Asked by the county magistrates to establish what was done about this in other counties, Howard embarked on a series of visits to prisons which so caught his imagination that surveying prison conditions became his life’s work. He first published his work on historical data, Palmer, Economic Arithmetic, 50–7. Palmer notes that Eden was unusual for this period in meticulously citing his sources. ¹⁹⁷ Sir Frederick Morton Eden, Observations on Friendly Societies (London, 1801); M. Stone, ‘Policies for Poverty from an Analytical Aristocrat’, in Pyatt and Ward, Identifying the Poor, 99. Edmund Rack of Bath had surveyed some fifty country friendly societies as early as 1783—to help the Bath and Western Agricultural Society to decide whether or not to attempt to promote these organizations: Plowman, Edmund Rack, 30. ¹⁹⁸ A copy of the original can be found in the Guildhall Library, London. It was reprinted by J. Howard: State of the Prisons (1777), Appendix, Table IV. The length of Assize calendars had long been noted in newspapers in general and impressionistic terms, as suggesting levels of crime. Gilbert, Observations, 36, suggested that improved care of the infant poor might be expected to show effects in future Assize calendars.

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initial findings in 1777, in a volume entitled State of the Prisons in England and Wales, which also included some account of his visits to continental prisons.¹⁹⁹ (The term ‘State’, it might be noted—employed in a number of economic surveys, and later by Eden—was, alongside ‘History’, a name that had since the late seventeenth century often been employed by enquirers in the Baconian tradition.²⁰⁰) In terms of our present concerns, the most interesting feature of Howard’s writings was their doggedly empirical character. Previous accounts of prisons had tended to stress ‘the miseries of gaols and the cruelties of gaolers’, to quote the title of a late seventeenth-century pamphlet. Howard by contrast concentrated on documenting material aspects of prison conditions to ground a recommendation that they be ameliorated. He tried to visit every county and significant borough prison; in each case, he noted its physical dimensions and layout, and collected information about fees and allowances. He noted numbers of prisoners in different categories present on each of his visits, and tabulated these figures in an appendix (though, since prisoners’ totals varied periodically, and Howard’s figures were collected at widely varying dates, his sum of these totals is meaningless). He also reproduced in his appendices quantitative information about punishments (including some perhaps supplied to him by clerks of assize). Howard emphasized the support he had received from Richard Price in undertaking his project. His enquiries were praised by Bentham as ‘a model for method’.²⁰¹ His reporting model was both widely and long influential: it was closely followed in Britain by the Proclamation Society (though it is unclear how they gathered their information), and later by James Neild (1744–1814), founder and treasurer of the Society for the Relief of Persons Imprisoned for Small Debts, who, like Howard, travelled the country to collect information and report.²⁰² Howard’s reports from Ireland prompted a similar enquiry by an Irish parliamentary select committee; like Howard, they considered not only Irish prisons, but also hospitals and ‘charter schools’ designed to bring up Irish Catholic children in the Protestant faith. Howard’s model was also followed by continental visitors to both prisons and hospitals.²⁰³ ¹⁹⁹ The best general account is R. Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture 1750–1840 (Cambridge, 1982). ²⁰⁰ Shapiro, Culture of Fact, 77. ²⁰¹ For the Howard–Price link, Morgan, Memoirs, 140–4; Correspondence of Richard Price, i, p. xvii. Howard’s network also included Dr Haygarth of Chester, and the Swedish demographer Wargentin; Howard provided Price with an introduction to Wargentin: Thomas, Honest Mind, 227. For Bentham’s comment, The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham (12 vols, in progress, London, 1968– ), ii, ed. J. H. Burns, 106. ²⁰² Account of Persons Confined for Debt (London, 1800); State of the Prisons (London, 1812). ²⁰³ O. Macdonagh, The Inspector-General: Sir Jeremiah Fitzpatrick and the Politics of Social Reform, 1783–1802 (London, 1981), 49–69; for ‘philanthropic tourism’ see J. Dekker, ‘Transforming the Nation and the Child’, in H. Cunningham and J. Innes eds, Charity, Philanthropy and Reform from the 1690s to 1850 (Basingstoke, 1998), 137–9.

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Concern about crime rates; the disruption of long-standing patterns of penal practice as a result of the breakaway of the thirteen colonies; uncertainty about the relative merits of alternative penal options; a reformist climate which Howard’s work did much to foster; and, finally, the establishment of the Home Office as a distinct government department, in a context in which careful data collection was all the rage, inspired several new departures in official criminal recordkeeping in the 1780s. Perhaps most notable among these were new statutory regulations for the format of ‘prison calendars’, the lists which prison keepers compiled and presented, at each meeting of Quarter Sessions and Assizes, of prisoners in their care. Traditionally, these records had simply underpinned legal process: they had listed prisoners by name, and specified on what basis they had been committed, and by whom. In 1782 it was ordered that information about each prisoner’s sex, age, and conduct should also be recorded.²⁰⁴ The intention in the first instance was probably to aid sentencing, but (perhaps with the same intention) other detail began to be added too: for instance, indications of prisoners’ literacy.²⁰⁵ If initially intended to inform judicial processes, the collection and reporting of this information could also serve other evaluative purposes. Manchester’s leading magistrate, Thomas Butterworth Bayley (1744–1802), in the late 1780s cited Oxford prison data as being designed to show, and showing, the efficacy of the reformative regime followed there.²⁰⁶ In Ireland, the Howard model of enquiry was institutionalized in the 1780s with the appointment of an Inspector-General of Prisons. The first holder of this post, Sir Jeremiah Fitzpatrick (c.1740–1810), an avid tabulator, suggested to the Home Secretary in 1796 that a series of annual ‘criminal charts’ that he planned to compile would enable a statesman ‘To know the partial or general disposition to oppose the Laws . . .; to discover the locality of such criminalty [sic] in the first instant, and further in a Moment to see whether a Country is getting more depraved’; in 1802, the Home Office ordered such returns with just such ends in view.²⁰⁷ In 1795, former Glasgow merchant Patrick Colquhoun (1745–1820), now a London police magistrate, published a Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis.²⁰⁸ Colquhoun’s mercantile background may have encouraged him to look for statistical data whenever that was available—and he was notably ready to speculate ²⁰⁴ 22 Geo III c.64. ²⁰⁵ For estimates of illiteracy among London prisoners, see T. Simons, A Letter to Every Housekeeper in London, on Behalf of Parochial Industry Schools (2nd edn, London, 1792), 5 and App. ²⁰⁶ See his letter to the London Chronicle, 24–7 March, 1787. ²⁰⁷ MacDonagh, Inspector-General, 79, and for other of his data-gathering exercises, 73, 96–7, 108, 123–4, 136, 142, 203–5, 271; S. Devereaux, ‘Convicts and the State: the Administration of Criminal Justice in Britain during the Reign of George III’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Toronto, 1997), 432–3. ²⁰⁸ First published London, 1796, numerous later editions. Stone, Some British Empiricists, 294–8.

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wildly when it was not.²⁰⁹ Nonetheless, a comparison between Colquhoun’s Treatise and the Fielding brothers’ writings of half a century before immediately suggests (given the Fieldings’ evident interest in this approach) how much more empirical data was available to bulk out a survey at the end of the century than there had been four or five decades earlier.²¹⁰ Relatively slender empirical foundations underpinned a series of attempts, in the 1780s and 1790s, to estimate the extent of English educational provision, the relationship between provision and need, and the cost of filling the gap. Need was estimated on the basis of assumptions about population and (even more speculatively) age structure. David Davies thought that there were perhaps 400,000 poor children not otherwise provided for; he estimated that they could be provided with a rate-financed Sunday school education for some £200,000; Thomas Paine suggested 630,000 needy children, whose education in day schools he expected to cost £2.5 million.²¹¹ These initial speculations sketched out a line of enquiry which nineteenth-century schooling enthusiasts would develop, with the assistance of various forms of survey data.²¹² Among those collecting, or encouraging the collecting of, social data were voluntary philanthropic societies. More descriptive elements in their reports may conceivably have been among Howard’s models: the SPCK’s Account of the Several Workhouses springs to mind in this context. First published in 1725 and again in 1732, it was reissued in a new edition in 1786. The need to be able to document achievement, both in order to retain existing subscribers and to attract new ones, constantly supplied subscription societies with a motive both to keep records and to find ways of conveying something of their content. Practices which served these functions were, however, also very consonant with Baconian empiricism and the burgeoning culture of enquiry. Both official and voluntary organizations provided a supportive context for enquiries into the health experience, not of scattered individuals but of larger populations.²¹³ One significant such context was offered by the army and ²⁰⁹ McCulloch described his 1815 Treatise as ‘a tissue of extravagant hypotheses and exaggeration’, observing sardonically: ‘Nothing was too difficult for this intrepid calculator’ (Literature, 218). ²¹⁰ For early French enquiry into patterns of criminality, by a man who was also a notable contributor to population debate: J. Lecuir, ‘Criminalité et moralité: Montyon, statisticien du Parlement de Paris’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, xix (1974), 445–93. ²¹¹ Davies, Case of the Labourers, 95–6; T. Paine, The Rights of Man, Part 2 (London, 1792), ch. 5. For a local estimate undertaken by John Haygarth on the basis of his studies of Chester’s population, Booth, Haygarth, 74–5. ²¹² Draft pro formas to record information about Sunday schools at parish and county level were supplied in W. Morton Pitt, A Plan for the Extension and Regulation of Sunday Schools (London, 1789), App. Nothing in England remotely compared with the surveys undertaken in Ireland: C. McElroy, ‘Thomas Orde and Educational Innovation 1786/87’, Irish Educational Studies, xv (1996), 152–63. ²¹³ Tröhler, ‘Quantification’ provides a stimulating account. His book, ‘To Improve’ similarly emphasizes the role of hospitals and dispensaries, but has less to say about the military context. Rusnock, Vital Accounts, chs 4, 6, also surveys later eighteenth-century British medical enquiries.

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navy: the health of soldiers and sailors was clearly a national and not just an individual concern; the institutional context encouraged the development of systematic caring and treatment regimes, and of record keeping.²¹⁴ But a second, operating to similar effect, was provided by the diffusion, through the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century, of charitable medical institutions: first (as already noted) hospitals or infirmaries, later also purely outpatient-oriented dispensaries. Physicians active in these settings seem to have been especially prominent in the development of what by the 1780s one of its advocates was terming ‘medical arithmetic’—mainly entailing the systematic collection of data on the effects of particular treatments on patients, themselves distinguished into categories on the basis of age or other characteristics (building on the kinds of study undertaken earlier in connection with smallpox).²¹⁵ Another example of systematic data collection under the auspices of a voluntary society which blossomed into something more is provided by the case of Matthew Martin, whose private initiative quickly attracted the support of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor.²¹⁶ Martin and his associates gave to beggars who approached them on the streets of London tickets, which they could redeem at an office for money, but only after submitting to an interview. In effect, this was an experiment with case-work, of a kind also attempted by a number of parish authorities at this time. But the combination of a systematic process, a significant stream of applicants, and careful record keeping also made this a potential basis for a social survey. Martin commenced his survey in 1796. In 1802, the support of the Bettering Society helped him to obtain a Home Office grant, on the basis of which, over a seven-month period, his ‘office’ interviewed some 2,000 mendicants. By analysing these records, he sought to determine the characteristics of the begging population that he dealt with. Reflecting on this research to a parliamentary select committee in 1815, Martin reported his findings in terms of average human beings. In a manner I have not seen in eighteenth-century sources, he estimated the ‘floating mass’ from whom his interviewees had been drawn at ‘about 6000 principals, with about one child and a half each’. We have noted previously that the Church of England had its own longstanding routines of enquiry, and have seen that clerics were among the promoters of various other forms of social enquiry, chiefly in connection with population ²¹⁴ E. Charters, ‘Disease, War, and the Imperial State: The Health of the British Armed Forces during the Seven Years War, 1756–63’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Oxford, 2007) surveys the experience, reporting, and managing of sickness. ²¹⁵ Tröhler, ‘Quantification’, 116–21, notes that William Black, most vocal advocate of medical arithmetic, developed a good knowledge of the history of enquiry, back to the days of Jurin. ²¹⁶ Reports of the Society for Bettering . . ., i, 122 ff., drawing on interviews with 120 people; PP (1814–15) iii, 235–40, for Martin’s evidence; 320–5 for his 1803 report on a survey of 2,000 people, recorded in twenty volumes of registers. Martin received further funding to develop his research in 1811: in 1815, he reported that his interviewees now totalled 4,500.

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and poverty.²¹⁷ In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, in a climate of growing concern about the pastoral effectiveness of the Church, in the face both of ‘vice and immorality’ and the challenge of populist, itinerant preachers, churchmen increasingly critically scrutinized themselves. Existing Church records were sometimes used to diagnose weakness. Thomas Secker (1693–1768), as Archbishop of Canterbury, used them to study trends in clerical residence.²¹⁸ John Butler (1717–1802), when appointed Bishop of Hereford, compared attendance records with those reported from forty years before—and was dismayed at the extent of decline.²¹⁹ Clerics in the diocese of Lincoln conducted a special survey, in 1800, to determine patterns of church attendance in a group of seventy-nine parishes. They sent questionnaires to local clergy to determine the number of adults in the local population, the numbers of churchgoers, and of communicants. The results allowed them to claim to have demonstrated that vigorous remedial action was needed: less than a third of local adults were reckoned to be churchgoers, less than one-eighth communicants.²²⁰ The various forms of social problem-related enquiry that we have surveyed were clearly diverse, not merely in subject matter but also in design and intention. Objectives included: characterizing the features of provision, or of a particular population; determining the shape of a time series; exploring patterns in the takeup of provision by plotting it against population; and, finally, testing ideas about causes of change over time or variation over space, or the effects of a particular mode of treatment, by exploring relationships between bodies of data (using such basic arithmetical procedures as subtraction and division). Sometimes the object was to obtain information about society through the use of institutional records or ad hoc data collection; sometimes, the focus was essentially on institutions and official practices; sometimes, on the relation between the two. In no cases were the mathematical procedures involved at all sophisticated: none of them compared in sophistication with the construction of life tables (probably still, at the end of the eighteenth century, the most sophisticated form of statistical exercise being undertaken, though the basic method had been invented decades before). Enquirers often gave insufficient critical attention to distortions arising from processes of data collection; the fitness of sources to answer the questions asked of them was most fully probed in the context of the population ²¹⁷ Inter alia as reporters to the Board of Agriculture: see the Revd Joseph Plymley’s explanation and apology, in J. Plymley, General View of the Agriculture of Shropshire (London, 1803). ²¹⁸ J. Gregory, ‘Archbishops of Canterbury, their Diocese and the Shaping of the National Church’, in Gregory, National Church in Local Perspective, 32–3, 41–2. ²¹⁹ Soloway, Prelates and People, 50–1. ²²⁰ Report from the Clergy of a District in the Diocese of Lincoln . . . (London, 1800). John Wesley, whose evangelical endeavours were an important source of anxiety for churchmen, was also a keen enumerator of his adherents: see A. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England (London, 1976), 30. For interest, variously motivated, in assessing the social effects of different forms of religious establishment, Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, iii, 180; Eden, State of the Poor, i, p. ix and n.

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controversy. Nonetheless, in their different ways these exercises were all products of an empirical, would-be ‘scientific’ mind-set—and many enquirers were quite self-conscious about this. In the kinds of material they treated, and the kinds of question to which they tried to give empirically grounded, systematic answers, many of these enquiries moreover broke new ground. In this last selection of examples, I have focused on forms of enquiry in which numbers loomed large. But some of the most interesting developments in investigation in the later eighteenth century, though characteristically making use of numbers, at the same time entailed setting numbers firmly in the context of verbal description. The forms of investigation I have in mind might be termed ‘ecological’. Their objective was to give a systematic, multi-faceted account of a particular locale or set of locales. A modern analyst would probably see data-collection exercises of this kind as providing a basis for a multipleregression analysis—to lay bare the interrelationships between the different elements described. Eighteenth-century enquirers had no such techniques at their disposal. They did not even do all that they might have done to explore the patterns that might have been revealed by simple tabulation. Instead, characteristically, they presented, on the one hand, local case studies, on the other hand, numerical totals or general, impressionistic conclusions. It may be that the traditions of topography, chorography, and antiquarian study suggested the approach. Recent German developments of that tradition, especially under the influence of the Göttingen academic Achenwall, may have played a part in encouraging its flourishing at this time.²²¹ Nonetheless, also informing some such exercises seems to have been a gut-feeling that some data needed to be set within larger, systematically collected datasets for its meaning to emerge. At a more philosophical level, discussion about what happiness consisted in, and how it could be measured, which had some of its roots in mid-century Hume–Wallace debates, perhaps also operated to encourage the construction of a broader matrix of enquiry.²²² ²²¹ The German tradition was described in the writings of Bielfeld, translated into English as The Elements of Universal Erudition (3 vols, London, 1770); or see his French Institutions Politiques ( The Hague, 1760); both went through numerous editions and translations. It focused on politico-national comparisons, not least of constitutional arrangements; political arithmetic was just one technique that ‘statisticians’ in this sense could employ. In politically fragmented Germany, this approach was more compelling than in the ‘United Kingdom’, where other concerns came to the fore. For German developments: Westergaard, Contributions, ch. 1; P. Lazarsfeld, ‘Notes on the History of Quantification in Sociology—Trends, Sources and Problems’, in H. Woolf ed., Quantification (Indianapolis, 1961); H.-G. Herrlitz and H. Kern eds, Anfänge Göttinger Sozialwissenschaft. Methoden, Inhalte und soziale Prozesse im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1987); D. F. Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1997), chs 1–2. For a turn-of-the-century French experiment in multidimensional descriptive statistics: M.-N. Bourguet, Déchiffrer la France: La statistique départmentale a` l’époque napoléonienne (Paris, 1988), esp. 83–91, 211–53, 413–49. ²²² For the Hume–Wallace debate, n. 106. Discussion was carried forward in this period by the Marquis de Chastellux, An Essay on Public Happiness (2 vols, London, 1774; first French edn,

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The idea that certain elements of human experience vary according to the broader characteristics of a community or region was at one level common sense, a long-standing feature of the ways in which societies were understood. Clearly, the local terrain and its economic potential varied from place to place; local customs varied; and it was often supposed that dispositions also varied. Patterns of landownership varied. Some regions had lots of gentry, some had few; some were resident, some not. Some parishes were compact, with a church close to hand; some large and straggling; some clergy were resident, some not. Dissenters and Catholics were more numerous in some regions than others. There was climatic variation; it was recognized that prices and wages, and the rental value of land, as well as tax burdens varied by region. Some places were taken to be healthier than others. Enquirers sometimes sought to illuminate the significance of such differences by comparing two or more datasets. In the 1660s, Graunt had sought to compare urban and rural experience of mortality. One difficulty impeding such exercises was the absence of a systematic basis for comparison, in the absence of general population-census data. Davenant could show that poor-relief expenditure varied by county; he noted that counties that were the site of woollen manufacture paid more than the average county, and suggested that less was spent on the poor in the north.²²³ Yet he lacked reliable population data, on which to erect a comparison of per capita spending: he had to make do with tax-derived totals of houses (as a basis for estimating population) and hearths (as a basis for estimating wealth)—which did not help him to get a grip on change over time. After the abolition of the hearth tax, calculators had even less to go on. Variations in poor rates were commonly noted in the eighteenth century—but rates related to official land values; since these bore no consistent relationship to the market value of land, this was not a good basis for comparison. Parliamentary surveys of relief expenditure in the later eighteenth century generated huge volumes of data about expenditure by parish—but without population data, how could this be interpreted? Much population data was hidden away in visitation returns. By the late eighteenth century, some were beginning to emerge in county histories, for example Rudder’s Gloucestershire, Pilkington’s Derbyshire, and Collinson’s Somerset.²²⁴ Hasted’s History of Kent printed relief expenditure totals for every 1772)—who is said to have learnt English in order to read Hume in the original; by W. Ogilvie, Essay on the Right of Property in Land ; and by W. Paley, Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London, 1785, and many subsequent edns.), Bk 6, ch. 9. See also references in n. 8 above. ²²³ n. 35 above. ²²⁴ S. Rudder, A New History of Gloucestershire (Cirencester, 1779)—Rudder had the advantage of building on Atkyns’ work; he attempted to use his data both to shed light on local population trends and to explore the relative healthiness of different environments: see D. Gowing, ‘The Population History of Samuel Rudder’s Gloucestershire’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, ci (1984), 147–9. J. Pilkington, A View of the Present State of Derbyshire (2 vols, Derby, 1789); J. Collinson, The History and Antiquities of the County of Somerset (3 vols, Bath, 1791)—for the survey work on which Collinson drew, Plowman, Edmund Rack, 46.

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parish (but no population data).²²⁵ But by and large those who wanted to map expenditure (or anything else) against population had to gather information for themselves. By the later eighteenth century, some enquirers were attempting this. Howlett and other contributors to Annals of Agriculture, thus argued about the per capita burdens of urban as against rural poverty.²²⁶ Nonetheless, plotting dataseries against one another would only get the enquirer so far. Prosperity and well-being—‘happiness’—were most plausibly imagined as being determined by a combination of factors: by the natural endowments of a locality; its inhabitants’ enterprise; population and social structure; wage levels; employment opportunities; opportunities for self-provisioning; and the practices of local authorities, clerics, and the local elite or ‘better sort’. The first person to champion multifaceted parish surveys seems to have been Arthur Young. In the mid-1780s, Young published in Annals of Agriculture details of the parish of Hawstead, Suffolk, recently the subject of a historical and contemporary study by Sir John Cullum (1733–85).²²⁷ Impressed by what he saw as the potential of this kind of case study, Young offered to publish any similar accounts that correspondents might care to send him—and did receive and publish a steady trickle of such accounts over the following few years. A more energetic proponent of a similar approach (which he apparently conceived of independently, from European models) was the improving Sutherland laird and diligent Pittite MP Sir John Sinclair.²²⁸ Following a German trip, in which he for the first time encountered the term ‘statistics’, Sinclair projected a parochial survey, or ‘Statistical Account’ of Scotland, and in 1790 succeeded in talking the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland into endorsing it. Though the Church of Scotland did not routinely commission ‘visitation’ reports on the English model, it did have a long history of periodically agreeing to support one or another form of survey.²²⁹ Sinclair’s projected survey, built around no less than sixty-seven queries, was less historical and more economic and social in character than some other enquiries had been. Sinclair’s pertinacity helped him to secure markedly high levels of co-operation from Scottish clergy; the results were published in twenty volumes at the end of the decade. Sinclair had hoped to persuade the Church of England to assist him in undertaking a similar survey of England—but the bishops demurred and Pitt, who may have wanted to reserve their goodwill for forms of enquiry he regarded ²²⁵ E. Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent (12 vols, Canterbury, 1797–1801). ²²⁶ Annals of Agriculture, xvii (1792), 573–81. ²²⁷ Annals of Agriculture, ii (1784), 332–8. ²²⁸ For Sinclair, R. Mitchison, Agricultural Sir John: the Life of Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster 1754–1835 (London, 1962), and Sinclair, Statistical Account, xx, pp. xi–lxvii, and for a brief history of European statistical enterprise: Statistical Account, xx, pp. lxix–lxxiv. The increasing availability of European data facilitated comparisons: Malthus drew on various European sources for the expanded 1803 edition of his Enquiry (surveyed by Poovey, History, 290–1). ²²⁹ Emery, ‘A Geographical Description of Scotland’.

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as more urgent, was not prepared to back Sinclair. Sinclair’s example, however, was apparently one source of inspiration for the parish case-study approach adopted by Frederick Morton Eden, in his survey of ‘The State of the Poor in England and Wales’. Eden cited Cullum’s Hawstead study as another model. He began by making his own enquiries, supplementing them by correspondence with clerics; then employed someone to gather material for him. Ultimately, his survey covered 186 parishes, bringing together information about population, work, and wages with relief expenditure data.²³⁰ Young’s ‘Farmer’s Tours’ had themselves offered a model for topographical surveys of the rural economy. His example was followed by William Marshall (c.1745–1818), who undertook a set of county-based agricultural surveys.²³¹ When Sinclair persuaded Pitt to establish a Board of Agriculture in 1794, Young and Marshall were rivals for the secretaryship, Young emerging as the victor. Given both Sinclair and Young’s involvement with the Board, it was predictable that that body would seek to build up a picture of the rural economy by region. As we have noted, its tactic was to solicit magistrates to volunteer to establish answers to lists of questions circulated to them.²³² Magistrates’ exposure to the initial questionnaire shortly preceded the poor harvest and rocketing prices of 1795. The dearth crisis was considered in numerous county and divisional meetings. Most famous of these was the meeting in the Speen division of Berkshire at which magistrates agreed to promulgate the ‘Speenhamland’ scale, linking relief payments to family size and bread prices. But this was not the only response. Magistrates in both Berkshire and Hampshire commissioned reports from one among their number, exploring more generally, with the aid of a mix of verbal and quantitative information, the condition of agricultural labouring families.²³³ The poet William Blake railed against those who thought it appropriate to ‘bring out number weight and measure in a year of dearth’.²³⁴ It bears emphasis that, if anything, this decade saw a shift away from a narrowly quantitative approach, in favour of more eclectic attempts to imagine, assess, and promote whatever might really bring ‘happiness’ to the poor.²³⁵ Although Eden did include some smaller towns in his survey, characteristically the most rounded and ambitious enquiries focused upon small, rural parishes. ²³⁰ i, Preface identifies the ‘queries’ posed, and explains the choice of topics for investigation. ²³¹ Thus of Norfolk 1787, Yorkshire 1788, and Gloucestershire 1789. ²³² n. 139 above. ²³³ Rev. Edward Wilson, Observations on the Present State of the Poor, and the Measures proposed for its Improvement (Reading, 1795); [Edmund Poulter], Address and Report on the Enquiry into the General State of the Poor, instituted by the . . . General Quarter Session for the County of Hampshire (Winchester, 1795). ( The same concerns informed reports from—to give it its full title—the Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement: see, for example, Plymley, General View, vii–viii, xvii.) ²³⁴ Quoted E. P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge, 1993), 220. He may have had in mind attempts to regulate the size of the bushel. ²³⁵ 33 Geo III c.54 (An Act of the Encouragement of Friendly Societies) and 36 Geo III c.23 (An Act [relating to] Distributing Occasional Relief to Poor Persons in their Own Houses) are highly unusual among eighteenth-century statutes, and unique among statutes relating to the poor, in professing to aim at ‘happiness’ in their preambles.

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There were some detailed enquiries into larger towns, but these were usually limited in range: focusing on population, on health experience, or on poor-relief recipients. Health and charitable visiting were beginning to draw the propertied and professional classes into the neighbourhoods and homes of the poor. In the early nineteenth century, attempts to ensure that poor children attended school provided a further motive for detailed enquiry; concern to monitor and nurture religious observance came relatively late in the sequence.²³⁶ James Whitelaw’s survey of Dublin, undertaken in the wake of the 1798 rebellion, had in the eighteenth century no precise English equivalent.²³⁷ It is worth noting ways in which understandings of urban and rural society and information-gathering strategies interacted. Rural enquiries of this period were commonly firmly located within the material reality of the rural economy; urban enquiries, by contrast, rarely made much of occupational, income, or price data. The problems of the rural poor were conceptualized primarily as material problems; the problems of the urban poor, as moral ones—a contrast that would continue to shape early and mid-nineteenth-century enquiry, even as some convergence took place. I have suggested that Parliament’s growing appetite for social information operated, alongside other stimuli, to encourage the extension of systematic empirical enquiry to new fields during the later eighteenth century. By the end of the century, the expectation that Parliament would proceed in relation to social issues—as for many decades it had in relation to economic issues—by the collection of data was sufficiently well established for those who wished to present a case to Parliament to have begun to take on the task of data collection for themselves. It may not be coincidence that two early examples of this straddled the boundary between the economic and the social: this surely helped to encourage the approach. I have in mind, first, the way in which anti-slavery campaigners presented their case: Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) travelled widely, collecting facts and figures, and interviewing people involved in the trade, as well as putting together a collection of material evidence to lay before the 1791 select committee. One-third of the Abolition Society’s initial budget went to support his efforts.²³⁸ A second example: in 1802, cotton-mill owners were indignant ²³⁶ For examples of these practical concerns giving rise to statistical enquiry, A. Prochaska, ‘The Practice of Radicalism: Educational Reform in Westminster’, in J. Stevenson ed., London in the Age of Reform (Oxford, 1977), 108–9; Ashton, Economic and Social Investigations, 4–5; G. Robson, Dark Satanic Mills: Religion and Irreligion in Birmingham and the Black Country (Carlisle, 2002), 175. ²³⁷ Rev. James Whitelaw, An Essay on the Population of Dublin, being the Result of an Actual Survey taken in 1798 . . . (Dublin, 1805). ²³⁸ J. Jennings, The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade 1783–1807 (London, 1997), 38, 48. In The Abolitionist Struggle: Opponents of the Slave Trade, ed. J. Oldfield (London, 2003), Oldfield selects his documents to illustrate the growing significance of empirical evidence in abolitionist argument. F. C. Mather, High-Church Prophet: Bishop Samuel Horsley (1733–1806) (Oxford, 1992), 242–3, says Horsley used actuarial data to set deaths on slave ships in horrific perspective.

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when Parliament legislated to regulate the condition of factory workers without giving them a chance to present evidence. To support a campaign for repeal of the act, a well-attended meeting of mill owners in Manchester agreed that they, and their correspondents, should attempt to procure information under a number of headings, to lay before Parliament. It was stated that ‘evidence must be specific as to particular mills’, and should illuminate the prevalence or absence of infectious disorders; treatment of the sick; hours of labour; food, clothing, and lodging; education; and the care of morality.²³⁹

OV E RV I EW The notion that there was a fall-off of interest in empirical enquiry into economy and society for the length of the eighteenth century clearly cannot be sustained. Although there was indeed something of a dip in interest from the 1720s to the 1740s—as the pioneers of political arithmetic died, and no significant body of successors immediately emerged to continue their work—there was a recovery of interest in such endeavours thereafter. Indeed, even during the decades of lessened interest, knowledge of the project survived, and some scattered enthusiasts continued and extended certain forms of enquiry. Memory of the political arithmeticians’ project was largely preserved by the printed word. From the mid-eighteenth century, print became an increasingly important medium in constructing and supporting the functioning of an enquiring community. The social, and perhaps especially geographical, range of participants widened (from the start, political arithmeticians had been, in terms of their social origins, quite a diverse bunch). In terms of the focus of enquiry: from the 1760s, and especially in the 1780s and 1790s, there was a revival of interest in the project of assessing national power and wealth, a topic that had engaged the efforts of most of the pioneers in the field. Restrictions on access to national-level data, however, made this a field in which most enquirers could not hope to achieve much. Moreover, even the pioneers had not been concerned only with national power and wealth. That had certainly not been Graunt’s concern, and Petty, King, and Davenant all had broader interests in wealth creation and distribution. Indeed, they conceived national wealth and power to be important conditions of individual ‘happiness’—a word much in use in their circle. I have, however, sought to show that society increasingly featured as the focus of enquiry in its own right through the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century. The society that was then studied ²³⁹ Lancs RO DDK 1741/10, f.206. Proponents of factory regulation—including Dr Thomas Percival, student of Manchester mortality statistics—had long since circulated their own questionnaire, reproduced in I. Donnachie and G. Hewitt, Historic New Lanark (Edinburgh, 1993), 43–6.

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was not conceived primarily as an aggregate: as something whose overall size and shape, and general characteristics, needed to be determined. Instead, the research methods adopted by locally based enquirers encouraged the conceptualization of society as a concatenation of local communities, with varying characteristics. The nation and its fortunes set the scene, but the happiness of individuals was also understood to be determined locally, by local social structures and economic relationships, and patterns of economic and social enterprise. Not that anyone would ever have supposed otherwise. But only in the later eighteenth century did the local community begin to emerge as a focus for multi-stranded, systematic enquiry, devoted to determining its particular features as well as its place within the broader pattern of national experience. In the later eighteenth century, the primary focus of such enquiries was rural, not urban—as it would shift towards being in the next few decades. Nonetheless, the trajectory we have traced helps to account for the emergence, in the early nineteenth century, of the pursuit of ‘moral statistics’—an enterprise differing significantly, in terms of its objects, methods, and social base, from late seventeenth century ‘political arithmetic’. We have also watched these enquiries acquire an increasingly important historical dimension, and in those developments have seen the germ of both economic and social history. In Britain, the officers of executive government were not to the fore in commissioning enquiries of this kind, though they saw use in some of them and sometimes rewarded those who undertook them. Parliament (usually operating, of course, with at least the tacit, if sometimes grudging, approval of ministers) was more of a player, MPs both being keen to inform themselves and possessing, in the form of parliamentary clerks, a body of office-holders who could be employed to direct and process the results of nationwide surveys. Insofar as Parliament was the body in which most projects to improve domestic governance at this time originated, it was appropriate that Parliament should also serve as the chief information-gathering organ in this connection. Parliament’s endorsement of particular information-gathering exercises also of course helped to legitimate them, and thus probably increased compliance. At mid-century, the proposal that there should be a national census lapsed in the House of Lords, but, fifty years on, the project revived. Parliamentary staff, aided by interested MPs, collated and analysed the returns.²⁴⁰ Parliament’s centrality within the British system of government also made it in its own right an object of enquiry. To conclude, I should like to set against the background of the foregoing discussion a topic not normally set there, though I suggest that it should be: that is, enquiry into the basis of parliamentary representation. The idea that the distribution of MPs, as that had developed from the middle ages through to the seventeenth century, did not adequately reflect the structure of the population was certainly abroad by the early seventeenth century; ²⁴⁰ Glass, Numbering, ch. 3.

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the Cromwellian era saw a radical remodelling of Parliament with due attention to improving the fit.²⁴¹ The project of ‘restoration’ however entailed, among other things, restoration of the old form of Parliament, and with it numerous features which, to the eye of any political arithmetician, were likely to appear anomalous. For, as John Houghton demonstrated in the 1690s, there was no consistent fit between representation, population, acreage, and tax burdens.²⁴² So long as the institution worked, arguably these discrepancies did not matter. Through the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, impatience with the existing system of representation was usually associated with the perception that it was in one or another way failing to work. From the mid-eighteenth century, however, alongside the revival of interest in political arithmetic, one increasingly finds a rigourist insistence (usually maintained, it is true, by those who had other motives for advancing the argument) that the representative system was deficient because it was unsystematic: because it did not represent either population or wealth consistently. Of course, demonstrating that depended on having access to a body of economic and social data. The readiest source for this was tax data (an important reason why early arguments for changing the representation tended to focus on anomalies in the representation of property). Even those data were, however, neither as accessible nor as amenable for these purposes as reformers might have wished. Reflecting what, as we have seen, was a characteristic dependence on the work of the pioneering generation, Malachi Postlethwayt, in his mid-century Universal Dictionary, reproduced Houghton’s 1696 estimates. The dissenting minister James Burgh (1714–75) followed Postlethwayt (acknowledging, but seeing no way to remedy the datedness of his information base) in his treatment of the topic in his 1774 Political Disquisitions.²⁴³ When John Wilkes (1725–97, a Fellow of the Royal Society) proposed the amendment of representation to Parliament in 1776, he cited Postlethwayt, Burgh, and also Richard Price as analysts, without himself going into specifics.²⁴⁴ In 1783, supporters of Wyvill’s parliamentary reform movement at last supplied new data, drawing on house tax returns as a basis for determining the relation between population and representation in a pamphlet boldly entitled ‘Facts’.²⁴⁵ ²⁴¹ J. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1642–1832 (Cambridge, 1973), 108–9, notes that it was intended that the distribution of seats should mirror that of tax burdens. ²⁴² n. 42. ²⁴³ (3 vols, London, 1774), i, 38–50; Postlethwayt is invoked at 49. At 39, he is given as the source of an estimate of the number of taxpayers—though in fact in the work cited (Great Britain’s True System (London, 1757), 321 [not 313 as Burgh has it]) Postlethwayt draws, without explicit acknowledgement, on King via Davenant. ²⁴⁴ Parliamentary Register, iii, 432–41, also Parliamentary History, xviii, 1287–98. ²⁴⁵ Facts, or a Comparative View of the Population and Representation of England and Wales (Doncaster, 1783). Price was a founder member of the Society, and possibly had a hand in the supply of information: it is suggestive that the population of England and Wales was estimated at the low total of 4,763,670.

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The revival of interest in systematic social enquiry which took place from the middle years of the eighteenth century helped to make this way of challenging representative arrangements attractive, inasmuch as the appeal to ‘Fact’ could be expected to resonate with important sections of the political nation. Frustration with the limitations of existing data meanwhile prompted reformers to seek new evidence. The Society for Constitutional Information encouraged new data collection, especially in the form of a survey of what were on average clearly the least populous constituencies, the boroughs. In the 1790s, this bore fruit, in Thomas Oldfield’s History of the Boroughs. Though this was in large part an antiquarian work, its title also has Baconian resonances.²⁴⁶ The reconceptualization of parliamentary representation, as a matter of finding the right fit between social ‘facts’ and political arrangements, eventuated in the 1830s in the use of census data to underpin ministers’ first attempts to determine how representation should be adjusted.²⁴⁷ Revival of interest in that approach during the later eighteenth century represents not the least interesting indication of fresh thinking about the relationship between power and happiness. ²⁴⁶ Focusing on boroughs effectively highlighted disproportionality, even in the absence of wealth or population data. See for similar indirection, The State of the Representation of England and Wales, delivered to the Society, The Friends of the People . . ., on . . . the 9th of February, 1793 (reprinted, London, 1795). ²⁴⁷ M. Brock, The Great Reform Act (London, 1973), 137, 157, 202, 265.


PART I I I CASE STUDIES


5 Politics and morals: the reformation of manners movement in later eighteenth-century England The 1780s were in England a decade of crisis and hope. Among the many fruits of this decade was a revival of interest in ‘the reformation of manners’: in a comprehensive programme of moral reform, a project which had last engaged significant official and unofficial enthusiasm in similarly trying and invigorating circumstances just under a century before. The reformation of manners movement, which flourished in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, has received extended attention from historians.¹ Its later counterpart has been much less carefully studied.² Yet the First published in E. Hellmuth ed., Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late-Eighteenth Century (Studies of the German Historical Institute London) (Oxford, 1990), 57–118. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. ¹ For example, G. V. Portus, Caritas Anglicana, or an Enquiry into those Religious etc. Societies that flourished in England 1678–1790 (London, 1912); D. Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven, 1968); A. G. Craig, ‘The Movement for the Reformation of Manners 1688–1715’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Edinburgh, 1980); T. Isaacs, ‘Moral Crime, Moral Reform and the State in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Study of Piety and Politics’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Rochester, 1980), and ibid., ‘The Anglican Hierarchy and the Reformation of Manners’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xxxiii (1982), 391–411. ² The later movement is briefly described in S. and B. Webb, The History of Liquor Licensing in England (London, 1903), app.; Craig, ‘The Movement for the Reformation of Manners’; Portus, Caritas Anglicana; M. Quinlan, Victorian Prelude: A History of English Manners 1700–1830 (New York, 1941); M. Jaeger, Before Victoria: Changing Standards and Behaviour 1787–1837 (London, 1956); E. J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain since 1700 (Dublin, 1977), and F. K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge, 1961). Sabbatarianism is discussed by W. B. Whitaker, The Eighteenth-Century English Sunday: A Study of Sunday Observance from 1677 to 1837 (London, 1940); the campaign against disorderly sports and entertainments by R. W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700–1850 (London, 1973) chs 6–7; that against licentious books by D. Thomas, A Long Time Burning: The History of Literary Censorship in England (London, 1969), chs 7, 9. D. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1989), contains much of interest. The fullest account of organized reforming effort and its impact on law and government is L. Radzinowicz, The History of English Criminal Law and its Administration since 1750 (5 vols, London, 1948–86), iii, 141–207. Michael Roberts compares late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century developments in two recent articles on the nineteenth-century Vice Society: M. J. D. Roberts, ‘The Society for the Suppression of Vice and its Early Critics, 1802–12’, Historical Journal, xxvi (1983), 159–76, and ‘Making Victorian

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later movement deserves attention. To study its origins is to gain new insights into the hopes and fears of the 1780s, an understudied decade, all too often hurried over by historians eager to get to grips with the tensions and dramas of the postFrench Revolution years. The Proclamation Society, founded in 1787 to sustain and direct moral reforming enthusiasm, provides a complex and interesting study in its own right. The men who founded the Proclamation Society devoted much care and thought to devising modes of action that would be maximally effective, given the institutional framework and cultural climate they had to operate in. A study of their proceedings can teach us much about that framework and that climate: about the opportunities the circumstances of the time afforded to the would-be entrepreneur of reform, on the one hand, and about the obstacles and pitfalls they laid in his way, on the other. The Proclamation Society was, to a remarkable extent, an association of the well placed and well connected. To focus on the Society’s organization and operations is to explore the character and significance of the reformation of manners movement at the highest social level. In a concluding section we will attempt to set the movement in a broader social context: to assess the nature and limits of its appeal; the extent to which it was identified with particular social groups, and the logic and significance of its social profile. O R I G I N S O F M O R A L R EV I VA L Concern about the corrupt state of contemporary morals formed a persistent theme in English thought, engaging the attention of people at many different social levels throughout the eighteenth century. In different minds, different themes were combined and inflected in very different ways. Schematically we might distinguish three main traditions of thought upon which people drew. First, a distinctively religious tradition, in which sexual offences and offences of impiety were among the moral failings—the ‘sins’—most reprobated, and God’s wrathful judgements (which might be directed either against individual sinners or against entire sinful nations) the consequences most feared. Second, a tradition in which attention focused on moral failings with more immediate and concrete social consequences—idleness, improvidence, intemperance, dishonesty, and their putative fruits: poverty, vagrancy, crime, and national economic decline. Third, a tradition in which moral themes were given a primarily political inflection: in which the loss of ‘virtue’ was taken to mean primarily the withering of public spirit, a general decline in willingness to sacrifice immediate private advantage to the public good. Political corruption, a loss of national power, and extinction of the nation’s liberties Morals? The Society for the Suppression of Vice and its Critics, 1802–86’, Historical Studies, (1981), 157–73.

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were the ill consequences supposed to follow upon moral decline, conceived in these terms.³ These three traditions of thought co-existed throughout the eighteenth century. The extent to which, and the ways in which, they were integrated with one another probably varied over time (a subject which would bear more examination). What is clear is that elements of these different traditions were frequently synthesized, and that there was considerable variation in the syntheses arrived at by different individuals.⁴ In the later eighteenth century, for example, different people entertained very different ideas about the relationship between moral depravity and the shortcomings of the political system. Some argued that the corruption of political life was a prime cause of the nation’s depravity. Constitutional reform, in this analysis, was a pre-condition for, or would at least advance the cause of, general moral reform. Others argued, however, that, given the corrupt state of popular morals, it would be unprofitable at best, at worst a recipe for disaster, to attempt to ‘purify’ institutions.⁵ Although concern about the nation’s morals persisted throughout the century, moral anxieties flared up more luridly and insistently at some times than at others. The 1780s represent one of the decades in which such themes were most prominent. Among the circumstances which helped to shape opinion in this decade, the complex effects of the disastrous American War must surely be assigned an important place. The origins, course, and outcome of the war all provided grounds for anxiety. The war highlighted a host of pre-existing problems and tensions in polity, economy, and society. It also exacerbated certain long-standing problems, and suggested alarming possibilities that the future might hold in store. Earlier eighteenth-century wars had usually enhanced Britain’s power and extended the bounds of her empire. In the 1780s it was possible to believe that British power had already passed its zenith. The American War saw Britain isolated and humiliated, and concluded with her having to accept the loss of ³ Of these, the third is the only one which has attracted much recent historical attention, chiefly as a result of the work of J. G. A. Pocock. See, for example, his The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975). ⁴ Accounts of various forms of synthesis can be found in T. A. Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville: Virtue and Commerce in Early Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1978); J. Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, from Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, 1977); and R. B. Sher, ‘Paradigms and Politics: Manners, Morals and the Rise of Henry Dundas, 1770–1784’, in J. Dwyer, R. A. Mason and A. Murdoch eds, New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982). See also G. Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (London, 1987), who, however, portrays (I think unconvincingly) one form of synthesis as dominant. ⁵ For someone who came to see parliamentary reform as a pre-condition for more general moral reform, see C. Hay, ‘The Making of a Radical: The Case of James Burgh’, Journal of British Studies, xviii (1979), 90–117. For arguments that moral reform must take precedence, the Earl of Buchan in C. Wyvill, Political Papers (London, 1794), i, 327; and ‘On the Practice of Virtue among the Friends of Freedom’, in [London Corresponding Society], Moral and Political Magazine, 124–5, 156–8.

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most of her former mainland American colonies. Surely God had visited his wrath upon a sinful nation—or, alternatively, the nation had brought down upon itself the inevitable consequences of luxury, pride, and folly. Some thought that the loss of America might bring about the collapse of a crucial sector of British commerce, and hence undermine the very basis of prosperity. Britain’s vaunted wealth, it was feared, might all too soon be revealed to have rested upon very fragile foundations. Nor could it be taken for granted that Britain would retain her hold on her other dependencies: relations with both Ireland and India showed signs of severe strain in the early 1780s.⁶ The war aggravated pre-existing political and religious tensions. It stirred up first a very broadly based ‘economical reform’ movement, and, second, a more narrowly based but nonetheless unprecedentedly vigorous parliamentary reform movement. It toppled Lord North from his long tenure of office.⁷ Supporters of the erstwhile opposition may have hoped that, with North’s fall, political virtue would at last come into its own. However, such hopes were rapidly disappointed. Soon members of the new ministry had fallen out among themselves: in a squabble over place, it was widely believed. The suggestion that, among North’s former opponents, Charles James Fox in particular, for all his pretensions, was in fact both limitlessly ambitious and devoid of moral scruple seemed to find confirmation when, immediately after resigning from office, Fox joined forces with his old antagonist North and stormed his way back into power—ignoring the King’s evident lack of appetite for his services. The story industriously propagated by supporters of the King and his new-found political henchman, William Pitt, at the 1784 election—that the Coalition’s supposedly reforming India bill was in fact a cold-blooded plan to turn all the wealth of the Indies into a fund for political corruption—found as ready a reception as it did only because Fox’s reputation was already so badly tarnished. The extent to which the Coalition had been prepared to go to retain its hold on power, reaching even to ⁶ I. R. Christie, Wars and Revolutions: Britain 1760–1815 (London, 1982) provides a convenient overview of the history of Britain in this period, with especial emphasis on the effects of war and imperial crises. A much more detailed survey of imperial developments is V. T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–93 (2 vols, London, 1952–64). See the essay by P. Langford, ‘The English Clergy and the American Revolution’, in Hellmuth ed., Transformation of Political Culture, 247–307, for sometimes doom-laden clerical responses to crisis. Imperial crisis figures as a symptom of more general decay in several contemporary pamphlets chiefly devoted to domestic topics: e.g. H. Luson, Inferior Politics, or Considerations on the Wretchedness and Profligacy of the Poor . . . on the Defects in the Present System of Parochial and Penal Laws; on the Consequent Increase in Robbery and Other Crimes, and on the Means of Redressing these Public Grievances (London, 1786), 1–40; J. Berington, An Essay on the Depravity of the Nation, with a View to the Promotion of Sunday Schools (Birmingham, 1788), 1–16. Annals of Agriculture ed. A. Young (London, 1784), i, 7, argues that war has revealed the precariousness of Britain’s prosperity. ⁷ H. Butterfield, George III, Lord North and the People 1779–80 (London, 1949), stresses the imperial context of domestic political crisis. See also I. R. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform: The Parliamentary Reform Movement in British Politics 1760–85 (London, 1962), and ibid., The Fall of North’s Ministry 1780–2 (London, 1958).

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the defeat of essential measures, was regarded by some as marking a new moral low point in English politics.⁸ On the religious front, tensions between the Established Church and certain forms of Dissent sharpened during the war, as some prominent (and theologically radical) Dissenters allied themselves with the American cause. Some conservative Anglicans made much of this conjunction of political and religious nonconformity, claiming that the natural affinity between Dissent and disloyalty, demonstrated in Britain in the previous century, was here once again in evidence.⁹ Catholic relief legislation in 1778—designed to facilitate the recruitment of Catholic soldiers—unleashed a storm of anti-Catholic bigotry which found its most frightening expression in the Gordon Riots. Concessions to Catholics encouraged Dissenters to chafe against remaining legal constraints on their activities.¹⁰ The war also intensified certain social problems. Poor-relief expenditure had already been rising even before the war. Parliamentary enquiries of the early 1780s revealed how much it had risen within less than a decade. Wartime depression appears to have created acute short-term problems in certain industrial regions. No one worried about Britain’s economic future could regard existing troubles with equanimity.¹¹ Post-war demobilizations were habitually associated with ⁸ J. Cannon, The Fox–North Coalition: Crisis of the Constitution 1782–4 (Cambridge, 1969), is a standard account. J. Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Years of Acclaim (London, 1969), is more sympathetic to Pitt. For the 1784 election: D. George, ‘Fox’s Martyrs: The General Election of 1784’, TRHS, 4th ser. xxi. (1939), 133–68; P. Kelly, ‘Radicalism and Public Opinion in the General Election of 1784’, BIHR, 44 (1972), 73–88; N. C. Phillips, Yorkshire and English National Politics 1783–4 (Christchurch, 1961). Newman, Rise of English Nationalism, 213–18, stresses, I think rightly, Fox’s blemished reputation. ⁹ For radical politics and Dissent, see A. Lincoln, Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent 1763–1800 (Cambridge, 1938); C. Bonwick, British Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 1977); J. Seed, ‘Gentlemen Dissenters: The Social and Political Meanings of Rational Dissent in the 1770s and 80s’, Historical Journal, xxviii (1985), 299–325; J. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution (Macon, GA, 1986). For the radicalism of certain dissident Anglicans, J. Gascoigne, ‘Anglican Latitudinarianism and Political Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century’, History, xxi (1986), 22–38. For hostile Anglican reactions, J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985), 337. For John Wesley’s somewhat similar response, B. Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (London, 1974), 77ff. ¹⁰ R. K. Donovan, ‘The Military Origins of the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1778’, Historical Journal, xxviii (1985), 79–102. For the Gordon Riots, see N. Rogers, ‘Crowd and People in the Gordon Riots’ in Hellmuth, ed., Transformation of Political Culture and references there. For the effect of concessions on the position and attitudes of Dissenters, see R. B. Barlow, Citizenship and Conscience: A Study in the Theory and Practice of Religious Toleration in England during the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1962), 207ff. ¹¹ Reports of Committees of the House of Commons, ix (London, 1803), 543–731. The returns related to the years 1783–5, but were reported to the Commons only in May 1787. Summary results were widely reported in the press, e.g. London Chronicle, 28–30 June 1787. Similar returns had been made in 1777. For wartime problems in, for example, the West Country textile district, see J.de L. Mann, The Cloth Industry in the West of England from 1640–1880 (Oxford, 1971), 56–7; D. Gowing, ‘Migration in Gloucestershire 1662–1865: A Geographical Evaluation of the Documentary Evidence related to the Law of Settlement and Removal’ (unpublished Ph.D.

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sharp rises in prosecutions for vagrancy and crime. Records of expenditure on vagrancy removal suggest that the vagrancy peak of the early 1780s was both unusually pronounced and unusually protracted. Worries about crime were intensified by the knowledge that the granting of independence to America had destroyed the usual means of disposing of convicted criminals: by transportation to the colonies. Now they were left to accumulate in county gaols or the newly established ‘hulks’, prey to epidemic disease and prone to mutiny.¹² A remarkable feature of this decade was that multi-faceted crisis evoked a notably vigorous response from beyond the ranks of statesmen and professional politicians. Fiscal and constitutional anxieties had found voice during the war in the ‘Association movement’.¹³ Worries about Britain’s economic future engendered a determination to strengthen what many believed to be the economy’s most solid foundation: agriculture.¹⁴ Religious anxieties fuelled religious revival: the evangelical revival entered upon a new phase of growth in the course of the war, as the more vigorously evangelical of the Dissenting denominations began to harvest a rich crop of recruits, and as evangelical attitudes and tactics began to find favour among a growing minority of Anglican clergy. Indeed, the movement for renewal within the Church did not manifest itself only in the guise of Anglican evangelicalism. Contemporary press comment suggests that there was both widespread concern about the Church’s pastoral inadequacies and considerable interest in finding out ways of enabling it to discharge its responsibilities more effectively.¹⁵ thesis, Southampton, 1979), 193 and app. 8; F. M. Eden, State of the Poor (3 vols, London, 1797) iii, 783–4. Yorkshire textile districts may well have experienced similar problems. John Howlett argued—in The Insufficiency of the Causes to which the Increase in the Poor and the Poor’s Rate are usually ascribed (London, 1787), 58–62—that the early 1780s had been exceptionally bad years, and that expenditure on the poor had subsequently decreased in most places, but, although this does seem to have been true of certain regions, in others spending continued to rise. ¹² For vagrancy see, for example, R. P. Hastings, Essays in North Riding History 1780–1850 (Northallerton, 1981), ch. 10; for the penal crisis precipitated by the American War, M. Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1978), chs 3–5; for the effect of post-war crime wave and penal crisis together on execution rates, J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), 582–92. ¹³ For the Association movement generally see Butterfield, George III, Lord North and the People; Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform; E. C. Black, The Association: British Extraparliamentary Political Organization 1769–93 (Cambridge, MA, 1963). Two studies of the movement in a local context are I. R. Christie. ‘The Yorkshire Association 1780–4: A Study in Political Organization’, in ibid., Myth and Reality in Late Eighteenth-Century British Politics (London, 1970) and E. Moir, ‘The Gloucestershire Association for Parliamentary Reform’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, xxv (1956), 171–91. ¹⁴ Arthur Young was the most energetic of the agricultural publicists. His writing career began in the 1760s. In the aftermath of the war he floated a new agricultural periodical, Annals of Agriculture. For other attempts to stimulate agricultural advance see K. Hudson, Patriotism without Profit: British Agricultural Societies in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London, 1972), and R. Mitchison, Agricultural Sir John: The Life of Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster 1754–1835 (London, 1962). ¹⁵ For the evangelical revival and Dissent, see M. R. Watts, The Dissenters from the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978), ch. 5, and for the impact of the American War in particular, E. A. Payne, The Prayer Call of 1784 (London, 1941), 3–4. Denominational membership trends

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Men in a position to influence the operation of local government or to launch unofficial initiatives meanwhile addressed themselves zealously to the task of resolving or alleviating the most pressing social problems of the day.¹⁶ Justices of the Peace tightened licensing laws, inaugurated anti-vagrancy campaigns, and commissioned the building of new prisons.¹⁷ Gentlemen, farmers, tradesmen, and industrial employers reorganized parish poor-relief administration, established new workhouses, served in volunteer forces to facilitate the policing of towns, set up societies for the prosecution of felons, and promoted the establishment of Sunday schools.¹⁸

are surveyed and discussed in A. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England; Church, Chapel and Social Change 1740–1914 (London, 1976). The effect of the American War on the growth of Anglican evangelicalism will be explored by John Walsh in a forthcoming essay on eighteenthcentury Calvinism. For Anglican evangelicalism generally see J. Walsh, ‘Anglican Evangelicals ´ in the Eighteenth Century’, in Centre d’Etudes Supérieures Specialisé d‘Histoire des Religions, Aspects de l’Anglicanisme (Paris, 1974), and also his ‘Religious Societies: Methodist and Evangelical, 1738–1800’, in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood eds, Voluntary Religion (Oxford, 1986). For other concerns about the state of the Established Church, and attempts to strengthen it, G. F. A. Best, Temporal Pillars: Queen Anne’s Bounty, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and the Church of England (Cambridge, 1964), chs 4–5. For comment in newspapers, see the letter from ‘A Freeholder’ in the York Courant, 7 November 1786, or that from ‘An Old Magistrate’ in the Chelmsford Chronicle, 10 August 1787. See also J. Hanway, A Sentimental History of Chimney Sweepers (London, 1785), 135–89, for emphasis on the deficiencies of the Established Church in the context of an argument for establishment of Sunday schools. ¹⁶ A first attempt to encourage such activity from the centre seems to have been made in 1781, see TNA, SP 37/15, f. 482r : ‘Matters proposed to be given in Charge to the Judges now going on Circuit’. ¹⁷ The Webbs first noted widespread efforts to tighten alehouse regulation in the 1780s: see their Liquor Licensing, 58–9. These developments have been described more recently by P. Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200–1830 (London, 1983), 254–60. For campaigns against vagrants, S. and B. Webb, The Old Poor Law (London, 1927), 364–5; Hastings, Essays in North Riding History, 152–4. According to C. N. Howard (‘The Justices of the Peace and County Government in Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire and the West Riding 1730–95’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Johns Hopkins, 1976), 229), in 1786 all county benches were ordered to undertake privy searches for vagrants: an order that must have helped to focus the attention of local magistrates on this problem, though their own concern certainly antedated the order. For prison building: Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain, ch. 4; R. Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture 1750–1840 (Cambridge, 1982), ch. 4. R. Cooper, ‘Ideas and their Execution: English Prison Reform’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, x (1976), 90–117, emphasizes the crucial role of the Justice of the Peace. ¹⁸ In general a new wave of workhouse foundations seems to have got under way in the late 1760s, which continued and in some areas gathered steam into the 1780s. In North Yorkshire, for instance, the 1780s were a decade of special activity: see R. P. Hastings, More Essays in North Riding History (Northallerton, 1984), 22. For the creation in East Anglia during the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s of pioneering rural poor-law incorporations, associated with massive new workhouses, see A. Digby, Pauper Palaces (London, 1978), ch. 3. For voluntary policing, see Rogers, ‘Crowd and People in the Gordon Riots’, 39–55, on responses to the Gordon Riots. W. Blizard, Desultory Reflections on Police (London, 1785), describes the London Military Foot Association’s continuing activities after the conclusion of the war. The Gloucestershire magistrates observed in 1787 that in ‘many’ large towns there existed not merely a ‘pecuniary’ but also a ‘personal association, in aid of the civil power’ (Essex RO, Q/SBb 340/61). For prosecution societies, see the essays by D. Philips and P. King in D. Hay and F. Snyder eds, Policing and Prosecution in Britain 1750–1850

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Some of the initiatives of this decade testify to the diffusion of new fashions in social policy. Thus, the benefits that might flow from the establishment of prosecution societies had been much trumpeted in the 1770s. Volunteer police forces commonly had their origins in home defence associations formed during the American War. Prison reform too was very much a cause of the moment, having recently found an effective publicist in the Bedfordshire landowner John Howard, then rapidly acquiring celebrity status. Friendly societies—institutions which provided the poor with an opportunity to subscribe for their own relief—had been the subject of much recent discussion, both in and out of Parliament; several of the new relief schemes of the 1780s drew on the friendly society model.¹⁹ Sunday schools were the very latest fashion. Their object was to impart simple skills—reading and perhaps writing—to the children of the poor, but even more to endow them with a basic moral and religious education. The Sunday school idea was spread in the first instance, in 1783–4, through the medium of the press. In 1785 an interdenominational Sunday School Society was established in London with the object of encouraging further new foundations, if necessary by providing material support. Many thousands of new schools were started up in the space of a few years in all regions of the country.²⁰ Certain common elements can be found in many of the new initiatives of this decade. First, many were conceived by their proponents as ‘patriotic’ ventures, as demonstrations of public spirit, or civic virtue. Those who participated in such movements were said to be not only exhibiting and reinforcing their own virtue in this fashion, but also helping to create the social and institutional framework within which a more virtuous society might henceforth take shape. The reformation of manners movement grew most immediately out of efforts made to combat social problems. But the spirit of these efforts is best grasped when they are set within a broader context of patriotic, improving, moralizing activity. Also different reforming causes were often pursued by similar means (not surprisingly, given that the same people were often involved in a variety of campaigns). Reforming activists of the 1780s commonly showed themselves to be well aware, on the one hand, of the value of publicity, especially of the sort of (Oxford, 1989). For Sunday schools: T. Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working-Class Culture 1780–1850 (New Haven, 1976). ¹⁹ For interest in friendly societies and contributory relief schemes generally, see J. R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism: English Ideas on Poor Relief 1795–1834 (London, 1969), 35–9; and for particular projects of this kind, D. O. Thomas, ‘Francis Maseres, Richard Price and the Industrious Poor’, Enlightenment and Dissent, iv (1985), 65–82, and W. S. Steer, ‘The Origins of Social Insurance’, Transactions of the Devon Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art, xlvi (1964), 303–17. ²⁰ Laqueur, Religion and Respectability, provides the most comprehensive account of the Sunday school movement.

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publicity obtainable through the newspaper press, and, on the other hand, of the power of the project-oriented association. A third feature common to many of these initiatives was that they involved attempts to mobilize support from across a very broad spectrum of opinion. All good men had to be mobilized to promote the public good.²¹ Since the effect of the war had been to exacerbate political and religious divisions, and since these divisions were notoriously to become very pronounced in the years which followed the French Revolution, it may seem surprising that the mid- and later 1780s should have seen repeated calls for united action to promote common causes. It was at this time possible to hope, however, that, since the immediate causes of division had disappeared, men might at last be on the brink of learning to work together. The foundations of political unity had been laid a couple of decades before, with the ending of Tory proscription. It seemed possible to hope that ancient dreams of unanimity might soon be realized under the reforming but sober aegis of the younger Pitt. Possible to hope too that long-standing religious differences might shortly be resolved.²² In the event, the campaign for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts launched by Dissenters in the late 1780s was to provoke an Anglican backlash and embitter interdenominational relations. Nonetheless it must not be forgotten that this campaign was launched in a spirit of optimism, because its proponents believed that the tide was turning in their favour. Its unfortunate outcome was not foreseen.²³ ²¹ J. R. Torrance, ‘Social Class and Bureaucratic Innovation: The Commissioners for Examining the Public Accounts 1780–7’, Past & Present, xxviii (1978), 56–81, suggests that many of the associative movements of this era may be seen as manifestations of a newly crystallizing ‘upper middle-class consciousness’. However, this seems to me both too imprecise and too socially reductive a formulation to be very helpful. The associative movements of this era were characteristically based on complex inter-class alliances, a circumstance which a formula of this kind also tends to obscure. ²² For the ending of Tory proscription, see B. W. Hill, British Parliamentary Parties 1742–1832 (London, 1985), ch. 3. N. Landau, The Justices of the Peace 1679–1760 (Berkeley, 1984), charts earlier changes in attitude to the appointment of magistrates. J. Owen, ‘The Survival of Country Attitudes in the Eighteenth-Century House of Commons’, in J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossman eds, Britain and the Netherlands, iv ( The Hague, 1975), suggests that Pitt succeeded to an unprecedented extent in rallying back-bench opinion behind his ministry. For expressions of optimism, see Berington, Essay on the Depravity of the Nation, 37; ‘A Layman’ [Duke of Grafton], Hints etc. Submitted . . . to the Serious Attention of the Clergy, Nobility and Centry, Newly Associated? (London, 1789), 37–43. ²³ Barlow, Citizenship and Conscience, ch. 6, describes the campaign. Grayson Ditchfield has published a series of essays exploring the political fortunes of religious issues in the later eighteenth century. For the repeal movement in particular, see ‘The Parliamentary Struggle over the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts’, English Historical Review, lxxxix (1974), 551–77, and ‘The Campaign in Lancashire and Cheshire for the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, cxxvi (1977), 109–38. Bonwick, British Radicals and the American Revolution, ch. 7, explores the influence of American developments on English Dissenters’ ambitions. A. Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1979), ch. 3, notes the polarizing effect of both the campaign and its outcome. Many Dissenters felt betrayed by Pitt in particular, having helped to set him securely in office in 1784 in the belief that he was sympathetic towards them.

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By the mid-1780s there was not a county in England that had not seen some local activity designed to repress vice and immorality in some of their more workaday forms: in the forms of blasphemy, intemperance, idleness, vagrancy, and crime. During 1786–7 certain counties became the scenes of unusually ambitious and comprehensive social-reforming activity. Some of these more ambitious local efforts deserve brief notice, both because they provided the germ out of which the reformation of manners movement proper most immediately grew, and because, by focusing upon some local activists, we can illustrate the range of interests that might animate a late eighteenth-century enthusiast for the reformation of manners.²⁴ One important focus of reforming activity was the West Riding of Yorkshire. Yorkshire had of course also been the cradle of the Association movement. A key figure in the West Riding was the Reverend Henry Zouch, chaplain to the Marchioness of Rockingham and erstwhile member of the Yorkshire Association committee (he had resigned during the East India crisis). Zouch was a clergyman of evangelical leanings, and also a hyperactive magistrate, serving for many years as chairman of the West Riding bench. During the war, he had written to the evangelical Secretary of State Lord Dartmouth bewailing the sad state of the times and suggesting that a tax on dogs might help curb rampant vice and immorality. In both the 1770s and the 1780s Zouch was a vociferous critic of MP Thomas Gilbert’s plans to tackle the nation’s social ills through a programme of poor-law reform. Zouch argued that existing laws were by and large adequate. What was needed was rather more vigorous effort to put the laws into execution.²⁵ In 1786, Zouch laid before the West Riding bench an ambitious and comprehensive plan of reforming activity: a ‘plan of police’ designed to set the machinery of local government into unprecedentedly vigorous motion.²⁶ The principal inhabitants of every parish were to be encouraged to associate to procure the better enforcement of laws against both petty delinquency and ²⁴ Hertfordshire Justices had drawn up comprehensive plans for the reinvigoration of local government as early as 1783: see W. J. Le Hardy, Hertford County Records . . . 1581–1894 (10 vols, Hertford, 1905–57), viii, 311–12. Their efforts demonstrate not only how widely shared were certain concerns, but also how widely held certain ideas about how current problems might best be tackled. Hertfordshire proceedings do not appear to have been as widely reported or as influential as the Yorkshire and Middlesex proceedings described below, however. Hertfordshire Justices perhaps lacked their metropolitan and northern counterparts’ appetite and talent for publicity. ²⁵ For Zouch, see ODNB; Howard, ‘Justices of the Peace and County Government’, ch. 5. For his letter to Dartmouth, HMC, 15th Report, App. pt. i Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth (London, 1896), iii. 239. No comprehensive study of Gilbert’s reforming efforts has been undertaken, but see Webb and Webb, Old Poor Law, i, 170–1, and Gilbert’s own various publications. Zouch’s criticisms of Gilbert were set out in his pamphlets Remarks upon the Late Resolutions of the House of Commons, respecting the Proposed Change of the Poor Laws (Leeds, 1776), and A Few Words on behalf of the Poor, being Remarks upon a Plan proposed by Mr Gilbert for improving the Police (1782). ²⁶ West Riding RO, Wakefield, QS 10/31 Pontefract Sessions Apr. 1786, f. 25. See also Zouch, Hints respecting the Public Police, published at the Request of Pontefract Quarter Sessions (London, 1786); ‘A Country Magistrate’ [S. Glasse], Narrative of Proceedings Tending towards a National Reformation (London, 1787), 15ff.

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crime. Constables were to be spurred on to execute their office more vigorously. Magistrates were to meet in special sessions to hear cases, and were to exercise particular vigilance in granting alehouse licences. The formation of associations for the prosecution of felons, friendly societies, and Sunday schools were all encouraged. Accustomed to following Zouch’s lead, the West Riding magistrates agreed to adopt his plan. Soon local newspapers were carrying reports of the establishment of local moral reform societies.²⁷ Among those who responded to the magistrates’ lead was a prominent citizen of Leeds, a surgeon, William Hey. A firm Pittite in politics, Hey was also an evangelical in religion: he had in fact begun his adult life as a Methodist. Hey had attempted to combat Joseph Priestley’s radical religious views in print, but maintained warm and co-operative relations with him on scientific questions. Hey was a member and had apparently served as president of the Leeds Literary and Philosophical Society. In 1786 he was an alderman and in 1787 became Mayor of Leeds. He exerted himself diligently to combat vice and immorality in the town: bringing down upon himself abuse, threats, physical assaults, and several actions for false imprisonment.²⁸ Middlesex was another centre of reforming activity. Here a key role was played by another chairman of the bench, also the Pittite MP for the county: the lawyer and banker William Mainwaring. In 1785, Mainwaring led his fellow magistrates in opposition to a bill for the reform of metropolitan policing, which was in the event defeated. Mainwaring conceded that vice and crime ran rife in the capital, and that the authorities needed some new cards to play. However, he questioned the practicality and likely effectiveness of the particular form of restructuring proposed. Borrowing one of the favourite slogans of the penal reformers of the day, Mainwaring also urged that there were already too many penal laws on the books. Like Zouch, he argued that the most promising way forward lay in attempting to execute existing laws with more vigour.²⁹ Shortly to emerge as another crucial actor in the metropolitan arena was a man who had only recently taken up office as a magistrate, the Reverend Samuel Glasse, rector of Wanstead in Essex. Glasse was chaplain to the Marine Society, one of the best known and most popular metropolitan charitable societies, a man very well connected in metropolitan charitable circles; also a friend of the ²⁷ For example, York Courant, 30 May, 20 June 1786. The Huddersfield society invited ‘all good men, of every religious denomination’ to become members. ²⁸ J. Pearson, Life of William Hey (London, 1822), esp. ii, 104ff. ²⁹ For Mainwaring see the biographical notes in L. Namier and J. Brooke eds, History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–90 (London, 1964), and R. G. Thorne ed., History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1790–1820 (London, 1986). For the 1785 Police Bill and Mainwaring’s opposition to it, Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, iii, 108–21; R. Paley, ‘The Middlesex Justices Act of 1792: Its Origins and Effects’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Reading, 1983), 225–32, and W. Mainwaring, Address to the Grand Jury of the County of Middlesex (London, 1785). For the cry of too many laws, Radzinowicz, History, i, chs 13, 15, esp. pp. 474–5.

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Gloucestershire prison reformer Sir George Paul and of the publicist of Sunday schools, Robert Raikes.³⁰ He had been appointed to the Middlesex bench in the early 1780s, at a time when the Lord-Lieutenant, perturbed both by the Gordon Riots and by what he termed ‘the alarming depravity of the times’, was trying to redress some of the deficiencies of metropolitan policing both by co-opting new members for the bench and by spurring existing magistrates on to the more vigorous performance of their duties.³¹ In the spring of 1787 the Middlesex grand jury complained about the prevalence of Sabbath-breaking and lewd and disorderly activity in the metropolis. The bench responded by drawing up a set of ‘Rules for the Better Ordering of Society’—rather similar to the Yorkshire rules—and ordering that these be distributed to every parish in the county.³² The grand jury’s request for action may have represented a spontaneous response to the troubles of the time. But it is possible too that the jury was responding to prompting. This metropolitan initiative may have represented a cautious opening move in the centrally directed, national campaign that was just then beginning to take shape.³³

T H E P RO C L A M AT I O N S O C I E T Y It is clear that one model to which moral reformers of the 1780s looked back was that provided by the reformation of manners movement of the 1690s and early ³⁰ For Glasse, see ODNB. Glasse had been a close associate of Jonas Hanway, who, but for his death in 1786, would surely have played a prominent and active part in the reformation of manners movement, which highlighted so many of his own longstanding preoccupations. For Hanway see J. S. Taylor, Jonas Hanway: Founder of the Marine Society. Charity and Policy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1985). ³¹ I am very grateful to Ruth Paley for information about the Middlesex magistracy in the 1780s. She tells me that there was an attempt to recruit volunteers for a new Commission of the Peace in 1783/4, but that this effort proved abortive. Glasse completed the formal steps necessary to allow him to act as a Justice in October 1783. For the Lord-Lieutenant urging existing magistrates to act, see TNA KB 1/25/4, Mich. 1787 no. 2, 84 (affidavits of Sir Francis Willes and Edward Montague) (I owe this reference to Ruth Paley). In 1784 Glasse had published a magistrate’s handbook—‘A Country Magistrate’, A Magistrate’s Assistant (Gloucester, 1784)—offered as no more than a rearrangement of material to be found in the standard handbook, Burn’s Justice of the Peace. The book is distinguished, however, by its especially full treatment of magistrates’ powers in relation to moral offences: noting for example under the heading ‘Lewdness’ that men and women taken in adultery or fornication might be taken before a Justice of the Peace to give sureties for their good behaviour. It was published by Raikes. ³² LMA MJ/QC 11, 1784–9. May 1787 sessions; [Glasse], Narrative of Proceedings, 25–8, 34, and chart annexed. ³³ Mainwaring and Glasse, both of whom Wilberforce named in the autumn as among the members of the executive committee for his proposed society, may well have been approached by

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eighteenth century. The 1690s—also of course a period of war and political upheaval—had seen the formation of many locally based societies dedicated to the prosecution of moral offences. Though originating at a fairly humble social level, this earlier movement had received backing from high places: both King William and Queen Mary and Queen Anne issued proclamations against vice and immorality. Following the royal lead, magistrates had scarcely been able to avoid paying at least lip service to the reform cause. Some were more earnestly active, as were certain of the bishops. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), from its foundation in 1698, attempted to operate as a kind of umbrella organization, co-ordinating and perhaps also keeping in check the burgeoning popular reform movement.³⁴ The SPCK—and other sympathizers with the movement—did not consider a campaign of moral prosecutions alone sufficient to constitute a serious reforming programme. Sympathizers also busied themselves with establishing workhouses and charity schools, trying to obtain legislation against blasphemy and duelling, and attempting to turn prisons into more seriously reformative institutions.³⁵ Not all these early efforts were remembered later in the century. But the prosecution campaigns were remembered, partly because propaganda put out by the early prosecuting societies survived. From the societies’ propaganda, later generations could learn the doubtfully veracious lesson that these early reforming efforts him during the spring of 1787. The grand jury may well have been responding to prompting in the chairman’s charge. Thomas Boddington, who was on the relevant grand jury, was an early recruit to the Proclamation Society. ³⁴ See n. 1 above. For the SPCK, see also W. O. B. Allen and E. McClure, Two Hundred Years: A History of the SPCK 1698–1898 (London, 1898). M. Clement, The SPCK and Wales 1699–1740 (London, 1954), ch. 4, surveys a wide range of SPCK activities in which Welshmen took part. ³⁵ For the SPCK’s efforts to promote workhouses and charity schools, see M. G. Jones, The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Puritanism in Action (Cambridge, 1938), and R. J. R. Robson, ‘The SPCK in Action: Some Episodes from the East Riding of Yorkshire’, Church Quarterly Review, clvi (1955), 266–78. For attempts to obtain legislation in relation to blasphemy and debauchery, see Portus, Caritas Anglicana, 61, 66. Clement, SPCK and Wales, 83ff., 93, notes activity in relation to duelling and prisons. The SPCK does not appear to have played a comparably active role during the late eighteenth-century reformation of manners movement, though the very poor quality of its records for the later period makes it difficult to be certain about this. It did experience a great leap in membership in 1786, I suspect as a consequence of the Sunday school movement, and the increased demand for materials for religious instruction that this created. I have not systematically analysed the overlap in membership between the two societies, but numbers of those who were recruited to the Proclamation Society were already members of the SPCK, for example (archbishops and bishops apart) the Earl of Guilford, Sir Charles Middleton, Samuel Glasse, Richard Clark, John English Dolben, Thomas Berney Bramston, and Thomas Butterworth Bayley (Bayley’s membership of the SPCK is interesting, given his strong Dissenting ties). Wilberforce was elected a member in March 1786. SPCK records are now housed in Cambridge University Library. New members are listed in the Minute-Books.

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had been extraordinarily effective.³⁶ Some early-eighteenth-century works were reprinted in the 1780s.³⁷ Among those influenced by the example of the earlier movement was the young MP for Yorkshire, William Wilberforce, new convert to evangelical Christianity, who in 1786 was looking around for a suitable cause on which to lavish his talents.³⁸ By the following year he had decided on two: ‘the abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners’—both causes which probably appealed to him because it could be supposed that they would promote moral introspection on the part of those drawn into them; also because each was in its own way a campaign against manifest sin.³⁹ The reformation of manners may have been suggested to him as a promising object for a popular campaign by press coverage of manifold local initiatives. Wilberforce was also a close friend and constant correspondent of William Hey of Leeds.⁴⁰ Late in 1786 or early in 1787, Wilberforce approached certain friends and acquaintances with the suggestion that they might act to promote the formation of societies such as those which had flourished under Queen Anne. One of those he approached was probably the evangelical Comptroller of the Navy, Sir Charles Middleton, also an early associate of Wilberforce’s in the anti-slavery campaign. Another (as we know from his own diary) was Beilby Porteus, at that time Bishop of Chester. Along with Shute Barrington, then Bishop of Salisbury—also an ³⁶ William Wilberforce seems to have learnt about the societies partly from Josiah Woodward’s Account of the Rise and Progress of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, which was several times reprinted in the early years of the eighteenth century (R. I. and S. Wilberforce, Life of William Wilberforce (5 vols, London, 1838), i, 131). Zouch, Hints respecting the Public Police, postscript, says he was given Woodward’s Account by an unknown person after the promulgation of the West Riding resolutions, and will do his best to see it gets a wider circulation. Knowledge of the early societies was transmitted to a wider audience by such new publications as An Account of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners in the Last Century; with some Remarks adapted to the Present Period, and an Abstract of Various Penal Laws (London, 1786). For rosy accounts of the early societies’ effectiveness, see, for example, An Address to the Public from the Society for the Suppression of Vice (London, 1803), 66; J. Scott, An Account of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners and the Suppression of Vice; with Answers to Objections against them (Hull, n.d.), 5. ³⁷ For example, An Address to the Grand Juries, Constables and Churchwardens, in which it is Proved that they are Bound by their Oaths to execute the Laws against Vice and Immorality, Chiefly Extracted from the Preface to Disney’s Essay on the Reformation of Manners (Wakefield, 1786). ³⁸ Wilberforce has been the subject of numerous biographies, e.g. R. Furneaux, William Wilberforce (London, 1974). Brown, Fathers of the Victorians, contains a great deal of useful information and comment. His sons’ Life also remains extremely useful, though note Brown’s caveats, 487–98. The Wilberforce papers previously known as the Wrangham MSS were deposited in the Bodleian Library, supplementing its previous holdings of Wilberforce MSS, after I began work on this article. ³⁹ Wilberforce, Life, i, 149. Wilberforce made his famous declaration of intent in October 1787, when he was already heavily engaged with both causes. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians, 113–15, and chs 7, 9, 10, and elsewhere stresses (perhaps overstresses) Wilberforce’s persistent interest in causes that would save souls, rather than in those that would provide relief from mere material hardships. ⁴⁰ Wilberforce, Life, contains extracts from many letters from Wilberforce to Hey. For early consultation with Hey in connection with the reformation of manners campaign, see esp. i, 132–4.

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early recruit to and key supporter of the Proclamation Society—Porteus was the eighteenth-century bishop most consistently sympathetic to evangelical causes.⁴¹ Porteus noted in his diary that he advised Wilberforce and his friends to proceed with caution. Wilberforce showed himself a cautious tactician throughout his career, and this advice may merely have reinforced his own instincts.⁴² Be that as it may, tactical caution was to be a hallmark of the Proclamation Society—or of its chief promoters—throughout the Society’s history, shaping the way the Society was established, the way it was launched, and its subsequent proceedings. If among at least the governing classes throughout the country there was widespread enthusiasm for the reformation of manners, why the need for caution? In fact, it was possible to anticipate that Wilberforce’s scheme would meet criticism from what we might anachronistically (but not I think misleadingly) term both left and right. Critics on the left would denounce the project as an oppressive, persecuting scheme, and as a species of persecution likely to be directed chiefly by the rich against the poor to boot. Critics on the right would argue that it was the responsibility of Church and State to watch over the morals of the realm. They would worry about whether it was wise—and, indeed, about whether it was even constitutional—for private individuals to band together to direct the operations of government. Their objections might take a still more paranoid form. They might claim that the history of the previous century showed what ill consequences might follow if laymen and private citizens were allowed to persuade themselves that it was their responsibility to reform the nation. The possibility that an attempt to promote good morals might mutate into an assault on the social order could never be entirely discounted.⁴³ Wilberforce and his friends consistently did their best to deflect criticism from both left and right. However, they showed most concern to ingratiate themselves ⁴¹ That Middleton held an important place in the Society from an early date is evident from Wilberforce’s remarks to Montagu, HMC Ailesbury, 286. For his early participation in the campaign against the slave trade, see T. Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade (London, 1808), 222ff., 250, 252. Porteus describes first being approached in his diary: Lambeth Palace MS 2099, f.160. R. Hodgson, Life of the Right Reverend Beilby Porteus (London, 1813), draws heavily on the diary, but does not make use of all its references to the Proclamation Society. Hodgson discusses Porteus’s involvement with the Society, 100–41. ⁴² For a splendid, if trivial, example of Wilberforce’s tactical self-consciousness, see Life, i, 368–9. For a sardonic account of the evangelicals’ habitually calculating conduct, see Brown, Fathers of the Victorians, esp. ch. 2. Walsh, ‘Anglican Evangelicals’, 91–8, observes more sympathetically that the evangelicals were anxious not to repeat what could be seen as the errors of self-presentation and tactics committed by those whom they were on the whole happy to recognize as their spiritual precursors: early Calvinists, Methodists, and the like. ⁴³ Roberts, ‘Society for the Suppression of Vice’, 168, notes criticism of both kinds being directed against the Vice Society. For examples of criticism from the left, see Fitzwilliam’s comments below and n. 56 and Grafton, Hints, 9–12. Wilberforce covered his right flank more effectively, and I have not discovered instances of the Proclamation Society itself being denounced as a threat to the social order. But see below, nn. 115, 118.

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with the right: with representatives of the religious and political establishment. Their own position and dispositions no doubt played a part in inclining them to choose this course (although in fact in pursuit of other causes the same men were to forge somewhat different alliances).⁴⁴ Other considerations were probably also in play. Wilberforce and his friends were certainly concerned to improve the manners of the great as well as those of the multitude. But they probably calculated that they could best advance this aim by incorporating the great themselves into their movement. It was certainly no part of their objective to make the cause of morality distasteful to the social and political e´lite—as they would have run the risk of doing had they linked it firmly with people this e´lite found repugnant. They may have calculated too that they were most likely to be successful in launching new projects for the reform of popular manners with establishment support.⁴⁵ What must not be lost from sight is that the alliance between Wilberforce and his friends and the conservative Establishment was never an entirely easy one—for all that Wilberforce was a wealthy and well-educated young man, an MP, and intimate of the Prime Minister. He and his friends inclined too far towards Methodism in religion for truly conservative tastes, and too far towards radicalism in politics. Ford K. Brown, in his study The Fathers of the Victorians, notes that Wilberforce and his friends were never in any other instance to succeed in mobilizing so much establishment support for any of their causes as in the campaign for the reformation of manners.⁴⁶ Given the potential difficulties of the task they had taken on, how could the reformers best proceed? The plan was first that the King should be recruited to the reforming cause. He should be persuaded to issue a proclamation against vice and immorality. Such a proclamation could be expected to excite reforming enthusiasm throughout the nation. Furthermore, the reformers would thenceforth be able to present themselves, not in the distasteful guise of ambitious projectors, but rather as loyal subjects answering their sovereign’s call. On this basis they might profitably attempt to enlist the great and the good in the cause of moral reform.⁴⁷ In practice, this plan unfolded with agreeably few hitches. Pious and moral king that he was, George could be expected to agree to the scheme if properly handled, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, recruited on Porteus’s advice, ⁴⁴ Most notably in the anti-slavery cause, though also in the Bible Society, for which see R. H. Martin, Evangelicals United: Ecumenical Stirrings in Pre-Victorian Britain 1795–1830 (London, 1983). ⁴⁵ Was it an accident that Wilberforce simultaneously launched one campaign most likely to appeal to the left and one to the right of the political spectrum—or might this too be regarded as the product of calculation? ⁴⁶ Brown, Fathers of the Victorians, 85. ⁴⁷ The claim that the Society ‘owes its origin’ to the proclamation is disingenuously repeated in the Seventh Report of the Committee of the Society for Carrying into Effect His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality (London, 1795), 19.

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succeeded in talking him into it.⁴⁸ The proclamation was issued on 1 June 1787. As usual, copies of the proclamation were sent to the sheriff of every county, and also the Custos Rotulorum (usually the Lord-Lieutenant) as well as to the mayors of towns. Accompanying the official document came a letter from the Home Secretary, urging immediate and vigorous compliance with the King’s wishes.⁴⁹ The response was gratifying. Magistrates already preoccupied with kindred issues were whipped up into a new frenzy of activity. At the very least they felt the need to make a show of effort. Many benches drew up special reforming resolutions, and took steps to see that these were distributed to local officials. Some were still more widely disseminated. One Middlesex hamlet reprinted the magistrates’ broadsheet at the ratepayers’ expense and sent copies to every household.⁵⁰ The usual burden of these resolutions was that constables should be diligent in enforcing moral laws. Ordinary citizens should assist them, perhaps by forming parish prosecution societies. Overseers should take care in apprenticing out poor children. Magistrates themselves usually resolved to be more vigilant in issuing alehouse licences, and more generally in the control of disorderly entertainments and festivities. Attention was sometimes drawn to the benefits that might flow from the establishment of Sunday schools, friendly societies, and associations for the prosecution of felons. Some magistrates’ resolutions circulated very widely outside their counties of origin: the Gloucestershire resolutions, for example, or the Middlesex ‘Rules’ (compiled before the issuing of the proclamation).⁵¹ Magistrates were anxious to ⁴⁸ Wilberforce, Life, i, 133. For George III’s piety and rectitude, see J. Brooke, King George III (London, 1972), 261–4. The King’s correspondence makes it clear that he himself blamed many of the troubles of his reign on the profligacy of the age. See, for example, The Correspondence of George III, ed. J. Fortescue (6 vols, London, 1927–8), iii, 27; vi, 443. ⁴⁹ TNA, PC 2/132. The proclamation was, as usual, printed in the London Gazette (29 May–2 June 1787, 212–13). The proclamation and Home Secretary’s letter were reprinted both by Glasse in his Narrative of Proceedings and by W. Godschall, A General Plan of Parochial and Provincial Police (London, 1787). Proclamations were supposed to be read out in church, to secure them the widest possible audience. Proclamations against vice and immorality were usually issued at the beginning of new reigns, and might be ordered to be re-read in the interim. In 1781, when the judges were asked to ginger up local administration, one of the devices they were told to employ was to order the proclamation to be read (see n. 16 above). ⁵⁰ LMA MJ/OC 11, 1784–9, September 1787 sessions, letter from Town Clerk of Mile End Old Town. For action in Surrey, see Godschall, General Plan. The Webbs, Liquor Licensing, 144n., list twelve English counties and one Welsh for which they have evidence of constructive response to the proclamation. This list is certainly incomplete (it omits, for example, Essex, Hertfordshire, and Shropshire, in all of which Justices certainly took action). Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, iii, 151–2, merely repeats the Webbs’ list. It should be noted that steps taken by Justices are not invariably recorded in Quarter Sessions order books—particularly if they were taken at specially convened meetings. ⁵¹ Hertfordshire Justices had a copy of the Middlesex Rules printed for distribution in September 1787 (Le Hardy, Hertford County Records, viii, 367). A manuscript copy of the Rules also survives among the Willoughby papers at the Oxfordshire RO (WiX/29—I owe this information to David Eastwood). Essex Justices collected copies of Gloucestershire, Surrey, and Middlesex instructions,

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get ideas from one another as to how best to proceed. Associates of Wilberforce, such as Samuel Glasse of Middlesex and Sir William Dolben of Northamptonshire, played a part in stirring up local benches to action.⁵² But some provincial enthusiasts for reform were probably happy enough to parade on the national platform that was opening up for them. Zouch and his colleagues on the West Riding bench, for instance, resolved to transmit their resolutions not only to all county magistrates and ministers in the West Riding, but also to every other county bench, and also to have them printed in both local and London papers.⁵³ Meanwhile, Wilberforce had set about recruiting members for an e´lite society which would rally the great and the good to the reforming cause, and with their aid keep the flame of enthusiasm alight throughout the nation. This was the society that was to become known as the Proclamation Society. A few days after the issue of the proclamation, Wilberforce approached the Duke of Montagu, eldest of a group of courtier brothers and former tutor to the Prince of Wales (a post in which he had signally failed to improve the morals of his charge), with the request that he would serve as president of the Society. Further recruitments within London followed.⁵⁴ After this, Wilberforce launched out into the provinces, pursuing both bishops and prominent laymen who might add lustre to the cause.⁵⁵ In some instances he was rebuffed. Earl Fitzwilliam, Rockingham’s heir, for example, denounced the scheme as incompatible with English liberty and oppressive to the poor—and expanded on his personal distrust of and dislike for Wilberforce in several complaining letters to Zouch.⁵⁶ In Norfolk, the local magistrates’ plan to implement the King’s proclamation was similarly denounced by Sir Thomas Beevor (who had recently failed to win election as Whig candidate for the county); he described it as ineffectual, partial, and eventually decided—in 1790—to circulate a broadsheet or pamphlet on the ‘Duties of Constables’, printed by Robert Raikes for the Proclamation Society, and copies of the Middlesex Rules (Essex RO, Q/SBb 336/7, 339/23, 44, 340/51, 157, 343/6, 42). ⁵² For Glasse’s activities in Middlesex, see LMA, MJ/OC 11, 1784–9, June 1787 sessions, July 1787 sessions. Glasse also published his Narrative of Proceedings, detailing proceedings in Yorkshire and the metropolis, and noticed by the Critical Review as early as August 1787, and a sermon, Fear God, Honour the King: A sermon Preached at Wanstead in Essex in Consequence of His Majesty’s Late Royal Proclamation (London, 1787). Reforming resolutions passed by the vestry of his Wanstead parish, presumably under his inspiration, were printed in the Chelmsford Chronicle, 10 August 1787—presumably once again both so that others might be inspired to act, and so that they might have a model to guide their proceedings. For Dolben see N’hants RO, D (F) 45—a letter which reads as if it were written to be shown around. For Dolben’s early knowledge of Wilberforce’s efforts, see Wilberforce, Life, i, 137. ⁵³ West Yorks RO, Wakefield, QS/10 31 Knaresborough Sessions October 87, 146ff. ⁵⁴ HMC Ailesbury, 286. For Montagu and his brothers see J. Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, rev. edn (London, 1954). In the judgement of the Bishop of Worcester, Montagu was ‘a nobleman of singular worth and virtue; of an exemplary life; and of the best principles in church and state’ (Wake, 327). ⁵⁵ Wilberforce, Life, i, 134–7. ⁵⁶ E. A. Smith, Whig Principles and Party Politics: Earl Fitzwilliam and the Whig Party 1748–1833 (Manchester, 1975), 34–5.

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and oppressive to the poor.⁵⁷ Whigs did not uniformly set their faces against the campaign, however; Zouch himself, as we have noted, seemed happy enough to go along with it.⁵⁸ It seems clear that, in his effort to attract recruits for his society, Wilberforce did have to fend off criticisms from left and right. To soothe conservative fears, he made much of early-eighteenth-century precedents: how could there be any harm in a movement such as Queen Anne and much of her episcopal bench had once been prepared to sponsor?⁵⁹ To those who questioned the compatibility of the scheme with English liberty, Wilberforce had an elaborate argument to offer. Political liberty depended on the virtue of the citizenry: so much was generally agreed. In ancient states, a public official had been charged with the task of regulating the nation’s morals. Such an office did not exist under the glorious English constitution, which left the task of enforcing the laws in the hands of the citizenry. In these circumstances, it was clearly the duty of the lover of liberty to exert himself to put his country’s laws into execution.⁶⁰ Two early lists of recruits to the Society survive. One, in Porteus’s diary, comprising some forty names, apparently dates from August 1787; the other, among Wilberforce’s papers, is longer by only a few names, and presumably dates from some time early in the autumn.⁶¹ It is clear from these lists how heavily early recruiting effort focused on the higher clergy and the nobility—and also how much success had attended the founders’ efforts to make their cause acceptable to the establishment. Wilberforce’s list included the Archbishops of both Canterbury and York, seventeen bishops, fifteen peers and eldest sons of peers, and thirteen commoners. Courtiers were very well represented: almost half the peers were or had been very closely associated with the royal household. Two of the men listed (Grafton and North) were former Prime Ministers. Among the commoners, all but two were, and all but one had at some time been, MPs. Several among the commoners were men notably active in local government, ⁵⁷ Webb and Webb, Liquor Licensing, 150–1. C. B. Jewson, Jacobin City: A Portrait of Norwich 1788–1802 (Glasgow, 1975), 22–5, for Beevor’s electoral fortunes. ⁵⁸ Similarly, it appears from Godschall, General Plan, that in Surrey the Whig magistrate Richard Carpenter Smith was party to the magistrates’ proceedings. Smith had been a prominent member of the Surrey Association, and was to become a member of both the Revolution Society and the Society of the Friends of the People. Pitt refused to make him a stipendiary magistrate in 1792, on the grounds that he was ‘violent in opposition and connected with the disaffected part of the community’, but he was appointed in 1797 after the Portland Whigs had joined the government (Paley, ‘Middlesex Justices Act’, 265). See also below, n. 118, for the Whig William Windham. ⁵⁹ Thus Wilberforce’s approach to Montagu, HMC Ailesbury, 286. ⁶⁰ Wilberforce, Life, i, 131–2. See also Report of the Committee of the Society for carrying into effect His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality (London, 1799), 4ff. The Gloucestershire resolutions, which such politically liberal moral reformers as Sir George Paul apparently played a part in shaping, similarly claim that the ‘general disinclination’ of ‘the inferior order to promote the execution of the law’ shows them ‘insensible to their ordinary duty as citizens of a free government’ (see the printed copy in Essex RO, Q/SBb 340/61). ⁶¹ Lambeth Palace, MS 2099, ff. 163–164; Wilberforce, Life, i, 393–4.

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including Mainwaring and Glasse from Middlesex, Brook Watson, a London alderman, and William Morton Pitt, a Dorset justice. Wilberforce and his friends undoubtedly planned their early approaches with the aim of using the names of their first recruits to attract further members. Noble and episcopal recruits conferred upon their project both respectability and prestige. Another consideration guiding their early choices seems to have been the desire to avoid identifying the Society too closely with any one faction in religion or politics. It is true that the earliest recruits were overwhelmingly Anglican—the large number of episcopal recruits ensured that. However, the lay members included two men bred as Presbyterians (Sir Henry Hoghton and Richard Slater Milnes) and one man (the Duke of Grafton) recently driven into Unitarianism by his dissatisfaction with the Established Church. Among the Anglican laymen at least four were evangelical, but two (Sir William Dolben and Sir Lloyd Kenyon) are probably most appropriately described as High Church in their sympathies.⁶² Politically, the earliest recruits were overwhelmingly Pittite—though, as we have seen, Wilberforce had attempted to canvas leading Whigs. The notoriously lax morals of Fox’s circle lessened the number of possible Whig recruits. The inclusion among early recruits of Fox’s former ally Lord North was probably intended—and does seem by some to have been read—as a signal of the Society’s non-partisan intent.⁶³ Though the Society’s first recruits were almost all supporters of government, it should nonetheless be emphasized that their political attitudes varied. Some were King’s men. Some were independents inclined to support government. Two were independents inclined to support the Whigs. Those most closely identified with Pitt appear to have supported the Prime Minister in part because of his generally reforming stance. Eight out of the thirteen commoners on Wilberforce’s list who were in the House at the appropriate time voted for parliamentary reform in the 1780s, it is worth noting—and two were to continue to vote for changes in the franchise throughout the 1790s.⁶⁴ The first formal meeting towards forming the Society, attended by a hard core of six members, was held in November 1787. Here ‘the outline of a plan’ was agreed upon, a secretary was appointed, and the annual subscription set at two guineas. In February of the following year the Society’s steering committee ⁶² Both were distrustful of Dissenters and of all moves to liberalize the Church, and very respectful of the Church as an institution. Both spoke in defence of ecclesiastical courts, for example, when a bill to modify their powers came before Parliament in 1787: Parliamentary History xxvi, 1004–9. ⁶³ Wilberforce, Life, i, 137. ⁶⁴ William Dolben and Richard Slater Milnes. In all, twenty-four of those who voted for parliamentary reform in the 1780s were at some time members of the Proclamation Society (of fifty-five who were in Parliament at one of the relevant dates), and six of those who voted for reform in 1797 were then Society members.

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formally met for the first time. At the end of that month, a list of members was published.⁶⁵ Interestingly, this list was presented to the world simply as a list of ‘persons [who] . . . have agreed thus publicly to declare their resolution of assisting to carry the [King’s] Proclamation into effect’. ‘Nothing is to be announced to the world of a society’, Wilberforce wrote to Lloyd Kenyon (Master of the Rolls and also a member of the Society) as the list was about to go to press.⁶⁶ Wilberforce’s reasons for wishing to continue to conceal from a wider audience the true character and scope of his project are not clear. However, it is hard to resist the conclusion that his reticence reflects his abiding lack of confidence in the general acceptability of his scheme. That so respectable a young man should hesitate for so long to make public so apparently blameless a project as the formation of a Society dedicated to the promotion of virtue and morality suggests how impressed Wilberforce and his friends continued to be with their project’s potential contentiousness. By the time its membership list was published, at the end of February 1788, the Society had garnered a total of 149 recruits. A few more bishops and noblemen had joined since the previous autumn. In contrast to Wilberforce’s list, the published list named twenty (out of twenty-four) bishops, and more than thirty peers and sons of peers (including nine Dukes and a Marquis). Ten of these peers had significant connections with the Court. Six metropolitan clerics had joined the Society, including the rectors of the important and fashionable churches of St George’s, Hanover Square, and St Martin-in-the-Fields. Of lay commoner members, five were privy councillors, and almost half those eligible were MPs. Other members holding public office included the Solicitor-General, the Master of the Rolls, and six other legal and judicial officers, a Major-General and several high-ranking naval officers and administrators. Old county families were represented, for example the Dolbens, Drakes, and Hills. Some twenty of the Society’s members were drawn from the world of commerce and finance (the world in which the Wilberforce family fortunes had been made): they were prominent bankers, or the directors of trading corporations. It would have been difficult to contrive a membership roster that would have excelled this in terms of the prestige and respectability of its members. Wilberforce and his friends had attracted to their cause a substantial slice of the nation’s e´lite. A number of factors had probably shaped the precise choices they made—or had perhaps determined people’s willingness to be recruited. The Society’s founders seem, not surprisingly, to have drawn heavily upon their ⁶⁵ Lambeth Palace, MS 2099, ff. 168–70, for early meetings. Porteus had to leave the first committee meeting to go to the first meeting of the Lords’ select committee on the slave trade: Wilberforce’s two projects were both developing apace. For the printing of the list, see HMC Kenyon 575. The list is reproduced in Characteristics of Public Spirit and National Virtue: Occasioned by the Honourable Union of Nobility, Clergy and Gentry in Support of a Late Royal Proclamation (London, 1788). ⁶⁶ HMC Kenyon, 575.

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own friendship and kinship networks. Thus, Wilberforce’s relatives and close friends, and friends and supporters from his Yorkshire constituency, were well represented. Sir Charles Middleton may well have been responsible for recruiting the naval contingent. Many both of the peers and of the financiers recruited were prominent in metropolitan charitable circles, a circumstance which may have created past bonds of acquaintanceship between them and the Society’s founders, or perhaps simply have marked them out as appropriate men to approach.⁶⁷ It is clear that Wilberforce himself was not well acquainted with all the people he recruited: many were approached primarily because of their high standing in courtly, social, or governmental circles.⁶⁸ Ideally, recruits had to be men of good personal moral standing. Some were notably pious. It is interesting to note that among old county families represented, those with traditionally Tory leanings predominated. Members of such families may have found it hard to resist an invitation to respond to their Sovereign’s call by aligning themselves with the cause of religion and morality. Churchmen and supporters of government dominated the Society’s ranks. But their dominance was not unrelieved. Staunch Whigs were certainly very few. But a number of the Society’s members were rather independents than consistent supporters of government.⁶⁹ Furthermore, the full membership list did add to the small contingent of those with Dissenting ties to the name of MP Henry Beaufoy. It was Beaufoy who in 1788 and again in 1789 proposed the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts—and in 1790 seconded Fox’s motion to the same effect. Wilberforce’s aim in founding the Proclamation Society appears to have been in part to encourage devotion to the cause of morality and virtue at levels of society too lofty for the manners of their inhabitants to be easily regulated by law. By securing the adherence of many of the highest in the land, he also hoped to make the cause of moral reform respectable: to remove from it any lingering taint of Puritanism and social subversion. But something more than just a flag-waving exercise was intended. The Proclamation Society was also to be a working body: one that would exert itself to infuse the spirit of moral reform into the workaday operations of government. In this connection, it mattered less that the Society’s members bore illustrious names than that they occupied a host of important and powerful official positions. ⁶⁷ I am grateful to Donna Andrew for information about the involvement of Proclamation Society members in organized charity. In her thesis (‘London Charity in the Eighteenth Century’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Toronto, 1977), 256–7) she notes that, of members of the Proclamation Society in 1795, almost a third subscribed to five or more charities. ⁶⁸ Thus, he does not appear to have known either Montagu or Fitzwilliam well. See also HMC Kenyon, 575, where he asks Kenyon to approach Sir John Scott (later Lord Eldon) for him. ⁶⁹ At least eleven out of twenty-seven in the Commons at the relevant period had attended the meetings at St Alban’s Tavern in 1784 at which back-benchers agreed to try to persuade Fox and Pitt to bury their differences.

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We have noted already that the Society’s members included numerous powerful and influential churchmen; that many were MPs (a clear majority, in fact, were members of one or the other House); and that some held high legal office. It should be added that seven were the Lords-Lieutenant of counties, twelve the Recorders or High Stewards of boroughs, two London aldermen, and at least eleven active county magistrates (of whom at least three regularly served as chairman of the bench).⁷⁰ The magisterial component of the Society’s membership was to expand significantly in the course of the next few years, as the Society’s practical work brought it increasingly into contact with men engaged in directing the operations of government at county level. During the first few months of the Proclamation Society’s existence, the energies of its leaders had largely been consumed in expanding the number of its members. More than a decade appears to have passed before recruitment again became a subject of concern. We cannot reconstruct the pattern of recruitments to the Society during its early years in any detail, since no membership lists appear to survive between 1788 and 1795.⁷¹ Judging from the 1795 list, however, only some forty new members were admitted during the seven years following the publication of the first list—a total which barely sufficed to replace the number of those who died or resigned.⁷² Of the new recruits at least nine were active magistrates, some if not all of whom probably joined the Society after coming into contact with it as a result of its practical work.⁷³ The remainder were ⁷⁰ For an example of a Society member who used the power and influence reflected in and perhaps consolidated by his tenure of the office of Recorder—not an office that necessarily entailed engagement in routine administration—to advance the reform cause, see the Earl of Exeter’s attempts to put an end to the Stamford bull-running (Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, 127–8). The fact that he made his move in January 1788 makes it tempting to believe that he may have been acting under the influence either of the proclamation, or the Society, of which he was a member by February 1788. ⁷¹ For membership in 1795, see the Society’s Report for that year. It is of course possible that membership had sharply risen and declined in the interim, but there is no evidence of this. Later membership lists survive with the Society’s reports for the years 1799 (in several libraries), 1800 (in the Bodleian Library), and 1802 (in Lambeth Palace). Lambeth Palace also possesses an undated pamphlet: To the Members of the Society [etc.] (London), including a list of members and probably dating from not later than 1803. The picture of the Society’s fortunes which emerges from these later lists is discussed below. ⁷² Forty-three of those named as members of the Society in 1788 were not so named in 1795. Of these at least twenty-five had died, and one (Lloyd Kenyon) had probably resigned on becoming Lord Chief Justice. The Duke of Grafton published a pamphlet in 1788 (Hints etc. Submitted to the Serious Attention of the Clergy, Nobility and Gentry Newly Associated ) in which he argued that the Society would not go to the root of current moral troubles if it concentrated on prosecuting a few wretched lawbreakers: what it should aim at rather, he said, was the reform of the liturgy, in order to bring more people into church. He may have resigned because he did not approve of the way the Society directed its energies. (He is not listed as a member of the Society after 1788, although he did not die until 1811.) While it is possible that others may have resigned on principled grounds, the general tenor of their lives and beliefs provides no special reason for supposing them to have done so. ⁷³ Suggestively, five magistrates not originally members of the Society who turned up as members in 1795 had attended the 1790 convention (for which see below): J. P. Andrews, Thomas

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men very similar to the first draft of recruits in point of rank. They included a peer, several bishops, and, among the commoners, several baronets and men of well-established families, as well as a further clutch of legal office-holders, bankers, and businessmen. The Proclamation Society’s steady state in the years following its launch contrasts markedly with the subsequent experience of the Vice Society.⁷⁴ The Society for the Suppression of Vice—to give it its formal title—was founded in 1802, fifteen years after the Proclamation Society. As the younger society’s name suggests, its basic aims were similar to the Proclamation Society’s. From the beginning, the younger society had a somewhat lower social centre of gravity, drawing its members chiefly from the lesser gentry and professional classes (it also differed in admitting women as members).⁷⁵ Unlike the older society, the Vice Society admitted only adherents of the Established Church to its ranks. Despite this religious exclusiveness, it grew extremely rapidly: from a base of about 200 members in 1802 to over 1,200 by 1804. The example of the Vice Society suggests that the Proclamation Society might have grown in a way it did not. It seems highly probable that a pool of support analogous to that the Vice Society tapped might equally have been tapped fifteen years earlier, for a substantial proportion of the men and women who subscribed to the Vice Society in such large numbers appear to have been much of a piece with those who had long subscribed to the older metropolitan charities.⁷⁶ If such support was indeed potentially available, then the fact that it was not tapped suggests either that the Proclamation Society’s leaders wanted imagination or energy, or else that they had a vision of their society’s nature and purpose which made efforts to expand its size by broadening its social base seem unnecessary—and perhaps even inappropriate. It cannot be demonstrated that they made this judgement. But if we push the comparison between the Proclamation Society and the Vice Society a little further, we can suggest some reasons why the leaders of the older society—unlike those of the younger—might have been content with a socially (and therefore numerically) limited membership base. In practice, the two societies operated Butterworth Bayley, Thomas Berney Bramston, Sir George Onesiphorous Paul, and John Rolle. All these men were outstandingly diligent and committed magistrates, and both Bayley and Paul had a national reputation, chiefly though not entirely because of their work in prison reform. ⁷⁴ Roberts, ‘Society for the Suppression of Vice’, 163. ⁷⁵ The Proclamation Society did in fact announce its willingness to admit women members in 1799, by their own account, at the request of ‘several very respectable ladies’ (see the Report for that year, 19). It does not appear from subsequent membership lists that any ladies were admitted. Note, however, the reference to ‘Society Ladies’ in the remark quoted (see p. 206 below). ⁷⁶ An unusual feature of the Vice Society’s membership list was the not large but nonetheless unusually substantial number of provincial residents it included. Many of these were clergy or inhabitants of Canterbury—suggesting the importance of clerical networks in recruitment. Proclamation Society members were, by contrast, all expected to be people resident in London for at least part of the year (Report for 1799, 13). But this restriction alone would not have sufficed to make the Proclamation Society as exclusive a body as it was.

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in quite different ways. The Vice Society, with its more extended social base, operated first and foremost as a prosecution society. Members’ subscriptions were used to fund agents who brought many hundreds of prosecutions for a variety of petty ‘moral’ offences in the course of each year. Totals of convictions obtained in each category were contained in the Society’s annual report. New members were urged to join so that their subscriptions would augment the fund which financed prosecutions.⁷⁷ The founders of the Proclamation Society were far from discountenancing such efforts. On the contrary, as we have noted, Wilberforce had drawn his original inspiration from the example of the prosecution societies founded a century before. The Proclamation Society’s leaders constantly encouraged men active in local government to exert themselves to bring just such prosecutions. When the Vice Society appeared on the scene, they not only speedily gave it their blessing, but several of them took a turn in serving on its committee.⁷⁸ In the meantime, however, Wilberforce and his friends had directed the energies and resources of their own recruits into rather different channels, and had devised a part for their own society to play for which its select character not merely adequately but admirably fitted it. The role the Proclamation Society assumed was essentially a directive and co-ordinating one. Rather than setting on foot a host of petty prosecutions, its members bent their efforts towards infusing new energy and instilling new attitudes into the whole body of the magistracy, diffusing new forms of governmental practice, and promoting the enactment of new laws. These were tasks the Society could usefully perform, at a time when no department of central government set itself anything like such an agenda.⁷⁹ They were tasks the Society was well placed to perform, given the power and influence its members were able to command. Finally—a consideration that may possibly have shaped the Society’s development—these were tasks the Society could undertake with a minimum of controversy, or at least without provoking quite such bitter criticism as might have followed had its rich and powerful members engaged more directly in sponsoring the sorts of punitive incursion into the lives of ordinary folk that were customarily managed by parish constables. How in practice did the Proclamation Society proceed? First, a few practical details.⁸⁰ Most of the Proclamation Society’s business was transacted by a ⁷⁷ Roberts, ‘Society for the Suppression of Vice’, 165, and see the Vice Society’s printed annual reports. ⁷⁸ Roberts, ibid., 162–3; [Proclamation Society], To the Members of the Society [etc.], explains and justifies to members the relationship forged between the two societies. ⁷⁹ For the limited functions of the Home Office at this period, see R. R. Nelson, The Home Office 1782–1800 (Durham, NC, 1969). ⁸⁰ Brief accounts of the Society’s organization are provided in its printed reports. Wilberforce’s Journal sheds some light on the pattern of its meetings: see, for example, Wilberforce, Life, ii. 219, 271. For other references to meetings see, for example, Lambeth Palace, MS 2099, f. 172; 2100, f. 11; Report of the Sub-Committee Respecting the Improvements Lately Made in the Prisons . . . in

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‘committee’ ultimately comprising (at least notionally) several dozen members (very probably all those who were prepared to serve),⁸¹ or alternatively by subcommittees of this committee. One or the other met frequently, sometimes even more than once a week, during the mornings, chiefly during the winter and spring (the London season). Meetings were usually held at the houses of some of the Society’s leading members: at Montagu House, for example, or the Bishop of Salisbury’s. Once a year, a report on the Society’s work was laid before a full meeting of the Society. Wilberforce himself wrote several, and perhaps all, of these reports.⁸² In its later years, the bulk of the Society’s membership seems to have degenerated into little more than a—not always very enthusiastic—supporting cast for Wilberforce and Porteus. But in the Society’s early days initiatives emanated from, and responsibilities were taken by, a rather larger body of men.⁸³ The Society’s proceedings cannot be fully documented. However, we can partially reconstruct them from evidence in the Society’s own publications, from traces left by its activities in the archives of various public bodies, and from occasional references in private papers. The nature of the evidence makes it easiest to learn about the Society’s most public activities, more difficult to learn about the various informal means its members must also have often employed to advance their ends. Undoubtedly there was a good deal of string-pulling behind the scenes. Wilberforce was never hesitant about exploiting his long-standing friendship with the Prime Minister, who in the spring of 1788 wrote to assure him that ‘[a]ny applications from your society shall most certainly be attended to’.⁸⁴ Lloyd Kenyon, a member of the Society while Master of the Rolls, probably felt obliged to resign on becoming Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in the summer of 1788: he could scarcely with propriety have tried cases brought by a society of which he was a member. His continuing sympathy with the Society’s aims was nonetheless in evidence, and Wilberforce remained in contact with him, at least England and Wales (London, 1790); Corp. of London Archives, Rep. 193, ff. 159–60; Essex RO Q/SBb 360/78. ⁸¹ According to the Society’s reports, the committee consisted of sixty members, but these are not identified. From references in various places I have been able to identify twenty-three people who were at some time members of the committee. ⁸² Wilberforce, Life, i, 301; ii, 29. ⁸³ Lambeth Palace, MS 2099, f. 172, notes Montagu’s frequent attendance at meetings during his presidency. Thomas Bowdler appears to have been an especially diligent member: see [Proclamation Society], Report of the Sub-Committee . . . respecting . . . Prisons, 3, and [T. Bowdler], Memoir of the Late John Bowdler esq., to which is Added some Account of the Late Thomas Bowdler (London, 1825), 306. J. P. Andrews, urging his claims to one of the new stipendiary magistrates’ posts in 1802, claimed to have been ‘a steady and original member’ of the committee (which he termed the ‘Bathurst-House-society committee’, after the residence of its then president; Paley, ‘Middlesex Justices Act’, 219n.). Wilberforce himself was seriously ill during the late spring and autumn of 1788, but the Society apparently continued to do business in his absence. ⁸⁴ Private Papers of William Wilberforce, ed. A. M. Wilberforce (London, 1897), 19.

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once sailing sufficiently close to the wind in his communications to feel the need to assert that there could ‘be no impropriety’ in what he was doing (though at the same time pronouncing the substance of his letter ‘not a fit matter for general communication’).⁸⁵ How often and how effectively members of the Society used their private influence cannot be established. It seems fair to assume, however, that the Society’s public initiatives were often complemented by more private and informal approaches to men whose support might be crucial to their success. More difficult to make adequate allowance for is the possibility that some of the Society’s operations may have been pursued entirely by informal means. The Society is especially likely to have relied upon the discreet exertion of influence when its object was to influence the conduct of the great: people whom it would not have been easy, and might not have been thought appropriate, to pursue by law. Given that we are best placed to document the Society’s most public activities, it is possible that we might be led into underestimating its members’ commitment to reforming manners at the highest levels of society. We do know, from references in various sources, that on several occasions in the late 1790s and early nineteenth century the Society authorized private approaches to people of wealth and position in the hope of persuading them to observe the Sabbath more strictly.⁸⁶ The first such moves—taking the form of efforts to establish a ‘voluntary association among persons of weight and influence for the better observance of the Lord’s Day’—were intended to prepare the way for new Sabbatarian legislation. The calculation was plainly that legislation of this kind would prove more acceptable if the great could first be persuaded voluntarily to abstain from pleasures others were to be deprived of by force of law. Unfortunately, the great proved unco-operative. Even those best affected to the ends of the proposed association proved unwilling to join it; the King ‘turned the conversation’ when Porteus raised the subject with him; and Speaker Addington—a member of the Society—was deeply offended when Wilberforce asked him to discontinue his Sunday entertainments.⁸⁷ Even after Parliament had several times rejected more and less narrowly conceived Sabbatarian bills, the Society, however, continued to authorize informal approaches to the rich and ⁸⁵ HMC Kenyon, 538. The exact purport of this letter is unclear, and it may be that it does not refer to Society business, though it does at least demonstrate continuing confidential communication between Wilberforce and Kenyon. D. Hay, ‘The State and the Market in 1800: Lord Kenyon and Mr Waddington,’ Past and Present 162 (1999), 101–62, fills out a picture of his idiosyncratically moralistic judicial stance. ⁸⁶ For what follows, see especially Wilberforce, Life, ii, 271; iii, 237; Proclamation Society, Report for 1799, 25–8; Hodgson, Life of Porteus, 138–41, 189–96. Whitaker, Eighteenth-Century English Sunday, 158–64, surveys successful and unsuccessful attempts to procure Sabbatarian legislation in the last ten years of the century, in most of which the Society played a part. ⁸⁷ In 1795, however, the King had, agreed to discontinue his Sunday ‘drawing rooms’ on Porteus’s representation: Lambeth Palace, MS 2099, f. 79, and see also R. Huish, Memoirs of George IV (2 vols, London, 1831), i, 245–6.

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respectable. In 1805, for instance, it was resolved that Porteus should write to certain ‘Society ladies’ who were in the habit of staging Sunday concerts in their houses, requesting them to desist for the sake of example. There may have been other such attempts at private persuasion. But on balance it seems improbable that much of the Society’s business had this character. Wilberforce and some of his friends did recurrently try to find out ways of influencing the conduct of those not easily reached by law. But they do not seem commonly to have tried to achieve this end through the agency of the Proclamation Society.⁸⁸ From the beginning the Proclamation Society had been conceived as a body that would strive to promote moral reform by attending to the laws and their execution. In practice, it seems likely that the Society remained fairly faithful to this original brief. Problems that did not look as if they might easily be tackled through the law were not regarded as the Society’s business. The Society’s occasional commissioning of attempts to persuade people of rank to observe the Sabbath more strictly constitute a minimally disturbing exception to this general rule. For, as we have noted, the Society’s involvement with that issue arose in the first place out of a scheme for obtaining new legislation. This is not the place to attempt a thorough survey of the Society’s engagement with government and law.⁸⁹ We can briefly illustrate the three main ways in which the Society operated, however. We shall consider, first, its correspondence with—and attempts to develop other ways of communicating with—local government officers (chiefly magistrates) throughout the country. Second, its (highly selective) use of the law courts. And third, its use of Parliament. In all its operations, the Society displayed a notably clear-headed sense of how a body such as itself might best get things done within the loosely structured apparatus of eighteenth-century English government. It seems to have been in 1789 that the Society first began to correspond, chiefly by means of circular letters, with urban corporations and county benches.⁹⁰ The first circular so far traced urged magistrates to compel victuallers to put a stop to the pernicious practice of allowing artificers to be paid their wages in public houses. (The prevalence of this practice had been drawn to the Society’s attention, its circular noted, by ‘one of its correspondents’.) Subsequent circulars ⁸⁸ For efforts by Wilberforce and his evangelical friends to reform the manners of the rich, see, for example, Brown, Fathers of the Victorians, 115–22, and Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, iii, 199–203. Wilberforce was not averse to using legal means to discipline delinquents in office: he voted for the impeachment of Hastings in 1786, for that of Melville in 1805, and for the removal of the Duke of York from his office as Commander-in-Chief, after the involvement of his mistress in a corruption scandal in 1809. See Furneaux, Wilberforce, 50–2, 232–7, 305–7. ⁸⁹ I no longer actively plan to write more about this, though I have by no means exhausted the topic here. ⁹⁰ Copies of the Society’s circulars are preserved in several Quarter Sessions archives, and they were also sometimes copied into Quarter Sessions minutes. See, for example, Essex RO, Q/SBb 335/52, 336/41, 340/66, 343/22, 347/45, 360/78, 396/23; LMA, MJ/OC 12 1789–95, February 1790 Sessions.

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dealt with such matters as the legal means of conveying discharged convicts to their homes, and the evils springing from unlawful race meetings. On several occasions, the Society also circulated pamphlets. In 1789, for instance, packets of papers relating to Sunday schools, prisons, and the like were sent out; in 1790, tracts on the duties of constables and overseers.⁹¹ Magistrates were encouraged to respond, and some of their responses provided the substance of subsequent communications. In 1792, for example, the Society put into general circulation a broadsheet account of the employment of prisoners in the house of correction at Dorchester.⁹² In a sense the Society was doing no more than furthering a process already under way, the exchange of information among magistrates about what they considered to be good practice in local government.⁹³ In practice, the Society clearly felt the need to tread delicately, for fear of offending the susceptibilities of magistrates used to exercising well-nigh unchallenged power in their own patch. Thus, letters might include a note to the effect that, of course, the Society would not presume to instruct magistrates in their duties.⁹⁴ In general, the Society’s letters seem to have been amicably received. It is interesting, for example, to find Sir Thomas Beevor, the Norfolk magistrate ⁹¹ The pamphlets are mentioned in the Society’s Report for 1799, 22–4. For covering letters which accompanied them, see Nottinghamshire RO, CP 4/7; LMA, MJ/OC 12 1789–95, February 1790 Sessions. Quarter Sessions minutes in several counties record their receipt, and plans to distribute copies of them. Different pamphlets on prisons were produced for each assize circuit: they consisted chiefly of relevant extracts from J. Howard’s State of the Prisons in England and Wales. The Society asked that these be distributed to members of the grand jury at the next Assizes (grand juries were responsible for presenting the need for prison building work). Numerous copies of the prison pamphlets survive, and there is a copy of The Duty of Overseers of the Poor in the University of London’s Goldsmith’s collection. I have not succeeded in tracing the pamphlet on Sunday schools. ⁹² For a copy of the broadsheet, see Essex RO, Q/SBb 347/45. West Riding magistrates responded by sending the Society an account of how they ordered their house of correction: West Yorks RO, Wakefield, QS/10 32 Pontefract Sessions Ap. 1792, f. 129. The original pamphlets on prisons had solicited information updating Howard, or other relevant observations. Much of this material was included in the Report of the Sub-Committee . . . respecting . . . Prisons. The Society also collected information on prisons through Thomas Bowdler, a member with a special interest in the subject dating from his service on the Commission to consider the establishment of a National Penitentiary in 1781. He followed Howard’s example by touring round inspecting prisons, reporting his findings to the subcommittee. See Evans, Fabrication of Virtue, 121; [Bowdler], Memoir of . . . the late Thomas Bowdler, 303–4; [Proclamation Society], Report of the Sub-Committee . . . respecting . . . Prisons, 3–8. ⁹³ For a striking illustration of the extent of the existing communications network, see Annual Register, xxviii (1786), pt. 2, 87–93, reprinting an account of the administration of the new bridewell at Wymondham by the Norfolk magistrate Sir Thomas Beevor, which Beevor had originally sent to the Bath Agricultural Society, for publication in their Letters and Papers —a less odd choice than might at first appear: like several other ostensibly agrarian bodies of the day, the Bath Society conceived of itself as having a very broad social as well as economic remit. Beevor notes in the original article that he has had letters from gentlemen in Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Hertfordshire, Hampshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Suffolk, Wales, and Scotland asking for more information; presumably the publication of the Annual Register piece won him a yet larger audience. ⁹⁴ Thus Essex RO, Q/SBb 396/23.

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noted earlier denouncing his fellow magistrates’ moves to implement the King’s proclamation, only a few years later corresponding in a very amicable spirit with the Society on the subject of prison reform (a subject close to his own heart).⁹⁵ The Society was probably able to attract a favourable response from such men as Beevor because it did not identify itself solely or even primarily with schemes of prosecution; but rather worked in a more general way to refine and improve governmental practice. The Society made its most imaginative attempt to further communication among magistrates, and to draw upon their accumulated knowledge, expertise, and influence to bring about improvements in the ways and means of domestic government in 1790, when it organized a magistrates’ convention in London, to which every county bench was invited to send two delegates.⁹⁶ Most counties did send delegates. Many asked MPs resident in the county and with some experience as local magistrates to represent them; some, by contrast, commissioned the most outstandingly active local magistrates to appear on their behalf: thus, Sir George Paul was asked to represent the Gloucestershire bench; Sir Christopher Willoughby, the Oxfordshire bench; Thomas Butterworth Bayley, the Lancashire bench; and the irrepressible Henry Zouch, the West Riding of Yorkshire. It should be noted that those who attended the convention were very much less uniformly Pittite in their political affiliations than were the Society’s own members. The Society had apparently succeeded in projecting a non-partisan identity at least sufficiently effectively for substantial numbers of staunch Whigs to feel that they could gather under its auspices. It had been announced in advance that the main subjects the convention would consider would be prison government and the regulation of vagrancy. In practice, the Society’s committee laid before the assembled magistrates draft resolutions on both these subjects. The resolutions were debated and amended in certain respects, and it was agreed that both should form the substance of bills to be laid before Parliament. (Both bills ultimately passed, but only after at least a couple of sessions’ debate, and in more or less heavily amended form.⁹⁷) A second convention was planned for 1791, and some counties went so far as ⁹⁵ [Proclamation Society], Report of the Sub-Committee . . . Respecting . . . Prisons, 13. ⁹⁶ For proposals laid before, attendance at, and resolutions approved by, this convention, see Statement and Propositions from the Society for Giving Effect to His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality Delivered to the Magistrates at their Meeting Held at the St Alban’s Tavern on Wednesday the 5th of May 1790 (London, 1790), and Resolutions of the Magistrates deputed from the Several Counties of England and Wales, assembled at the St Alban’s Tavern (London, 1790). Quarter Sessions minutes often record the appointment of delegates. Some counties (e.g. Surrey) appointed delegates who are nonetheless not recorded as having attended. ⁹⁷ The resulting acts were 31 Geo. III c.46 and 32 Geo. III c.45. The legislative history of these bills can be traced in CJ, Parliamentary Register (fuller than the Parliamentary History), and Lambert’s Sessional Papers.

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to nominate delegates to attend, but for some reason as yet unclear the second convention never met.⁹⁸ The Society—we have already remarked—did not itself initiate any large number of moral prosecutions (though it certainly encouraged others to bring such prosecutions). The Society did bring a certain number of lawsuits, however. Most of these fell into one of two categories. Some were intended to clarify points of law. The Middlesex magistrates ran into various legal obstacles in their struggle to gain effective control over the metropolitan drink trade, for example. To facilitate the magistrates’ operations, the Society brought certain suits designed to ascertain the current state of the law.⁹⁹ Though it did not generally stoop to prosecute petty offenders, the Society would also bring suits against people it regarded as sufficiently substantial and influential to merit its attentions: against managers of especially profitable places of disorderly entertainment, for example, Bishop Porteus seems to have been especially exercised about the trade in indecent prints, by which Westminster schoolboys were regularly led astray (he said). At his urging, several actions were laid against the sellers of such prints.¹⁰⁰ The third and final aspect of the Society’s activities to be considered focused on Parliament. The two acts which emerged from the 1790 magistrates’ resolutions have already been mentioned. These were by no means the only acts originally drafted and introduced into Parliament under the Society’s auspices. The Society also played a part—exactly how large a part is unclear—in promoting the Middlesex Justices Act of 1792, which established a number of stipendiary magistrates for Middlesex (four of those initially appointed were members of the Society, a fact to which at least one had drawn attention in his application).¹⁰¹ The Society was probably also responsible for obtaining minor technical amendments to the law on liquor licensing, and to that regulating the treatment of parish apprentices. It succeeded in obtaining restrictions on Sunday baking in 1794, but failed (as we have noted) in the next few sessions to secure a more comprehensive ⁹⁸ Essex RO, Q/SBb 340/66, 343/22. Essex and Warwickshire benches both appointed delegates to attend the second convention. The Society’s Report for 1799, 22, notes that no further meetings have been held, but suggests that the first nonetheless demonstrated their practicality and value. ⁹⁹ See the Society’s Report for 1795, 8–9. There is no easy way to identify prosecutions brought by the Society, but a possible candidate is R v. Downes (1790)/13 Term Reports 560. ¹⁰⁰ Prosecutions of flagrant offenders are reported in the Report for 1795, 9, 15; Report for 1799, 15–20; Report for 1800, 3; Report for 1802, 5–7. The Society’s Reports consistently emphasize that, on the one hand, they much prefer prevention to punishment, but that, on the other hand, they do not believe in being merciful to flagrant offenders unless their circumstances truly warrant mercy. For Porteus’s concern with indecent prints, see Lambeth Palace, MS 2100, f. 11r . Thomas, A Long Time Burning, 115–20, surveys prosecutions of obscene publications. ¹⁰¹ The Society claimed to have had a hand in this act in their Report for 1799, 21, and it is true that over half the Commons committee appointed to bring in the bill were its members. All three magistrates appointed to the West End police office (in Queen Square, Westminster) were members of the Society. For activity in the Society advanced as a qualification for appointment, see above, n. 83. For the act, see Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, iii. 123–37; Paley, ‘Middlesex Justices Act’, ch. 7. She lists appointments under the act in an appendix.

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revision of Sabbatarian legislation—its object being chiefly to make existing provisions more readily enforceable.¹⁰² Few of the Society’s bills were passed unrevised; most had to be reintroduced, with amendments, in several succeeding sessions.¹⁰³ Even members of the Society might criticize its proposals during parliamentary debates. William Mainwaring of Middlesex, for example, who was on the Society’s committee, and had attended the 1790 convention, was nonetheless the most vigorous and effective critic of its prison reform proposal. Criticism usually focused on questions of means rather than ends. Of all the Society’s proposals, only its Sabbatarian scheme provoked dissent from its very principle among MPs.¹⁰⁴ How effective was the Society at its self-appointed task of refining and improving the character and operation of English domestic government, in such a way as to allow for the more effective repression of vice and immorality? In terms of its ability to accomplish the immediate objects it set itself, its record was very good. Its success rate at obtaining legislation conforming more or less closely to its own desires seems impressive, for example. It is much harder to judge the effect the Society may have had on local government practice, since in almost every aspect of its activities it may be said to have been backing a tide that was already flowing. Clearly we cannot credit the Society with all responsibility for the building of new prisons in this period, for example. It is interesting, however (to pursue the case of prisons), to note that the Society’s chief concern—a point to which it believed the great publicist of prison reform, John Howard, had given insufficient emphasis—was that prisons should be equipped with cells in which prisoners might be solitarily confined. Solitary cells were in fact an increasingly common feature of prisons built from the later 1780s—perhaps a coincidence, perhaps not.¹⁰⁵ ¹⁰² Again, the case for ascribing at least some of the responsibility for acts of Parliament to the Society rests on their own claims in their Reports, conjoined with the presence of their members on the relevant parliamentary committees. For activity in relation to liquor licensing and apprentices, see Report for 1799, 20–1, 25, and the acts 30 Geo. III c.38; 31 Geo. III c.28; 32 Geo. III c.57, c.59; 33 Geo. III c.55. The successful Sunday baking act was 34 Geo. III c.61. For unsuccessful Sabbatarian legislation, see Whitaker, Eighteenth-Century English Sunday, 158–64. Society members were also involved in promoting many other measures of course, some of them on closely related matters, but there is no reason to suppose that they were consistently acting as agents of the Society. ¹⁰³ This was very commonly the case with bills relating to general matters of domestic government. For the main sources that can be used in tracing the legislative history of bills, see above, n. 97. ¹⁰⁴ For Mainwaring on prisons see Parliamentary Register xxviii, 326–7; xxix, 411. For parliamentary reactions to Sabbatarian proposals, see, for example, Parliamentary History, xxxi, 1428ff. ¹⁰⁵ [Proclamation Society], Report of the Sub-Committee . . . Respecting . . . Prisons, 35. It was presumably the Proclamation Society Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote in 1797 that the promotion of solitary confinement in England had been the work of a ‘particular society’ (quoted by H. C. Rice, ‘A French Source of Jefferson’s Plan for the Prison at Richmond’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, xii 4(1953), 28–30). For increasing provision of facilities for solitary confinement, see Evans, Fabrication of Virtue, 174–7; for hostile reactions and its subsequent partial decline in favour, 187–92.

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That the more general reformation of manners movement, of which the Society was in a sense only an offshoot, had an effect on the practice of English government cannot be doubted. Peter Clark, for example, has noted that, in the industrial Midlands and North, it was in the 1780s that the number of alehouse licences granted began to decline—a decline that was not subsequently reversed.¹⁰⁶ Whether changes in governmental practice had any significant effect on people’s behaviour is another question altogether. But it would be wrong to assume that the Society’s leaders set their sights unrealistically high. On assuming office as president in 1793, Bishop Porteus wrote in his diary that ‘in such times and such places as London and Westminster, keeping things from getting much worse is about the most that can be expected’.¹⁰⁷ The Society maintained some sort of existence until 1808. But its most active years were already over by the end of 1792. It continued active on the parliamentary front until the later 1790s, but its communications with county benches appear to have diminished, perhaps ultimately ceasing altogether. In 1798 its secretary left abruptly, taking important books and papers with him. Subscriptions were not collected, and membership records fell into arrears. By that date very few new members were joining each year in any case: keeping up the books was mainly a case of crossing off those who had died or failed to renew their subscriptions.¹⁰⁸ At the turn of the century an attempt was made to reinvigorate the Society. But such new life as was injected into it was not accompanied by a revival of the full range of the Society’s old activities, nor of its old far-reaching aspirations. On the death of Beilby Porteus, its third and longest-serving president, the Society lapsed into final extinction.¹⁰⁹ Several circumstances helped to bring about this prolonged decline in the Society’s fortunes. It is not uncommon for societies to flag, as their founders’ initial enthusiasm fades. Porteus, who agreed to become the Society’s president in 1793 only because of the lack of an obvious alternative candidate, was by that time Bishop of London and a very busy man, with little free time or energy to devote to the Society’s affairs.¹¹⁰ From the spring of 1792, county magistrates, the Society’s chief supporters in the localities, equally had many other calls on their time, being preoccupied first by the sedition scare, second by the expansion in their administrative responsibilities associated with the outbreak of the French ¹⁰⁶ Clark, The English Alehouse, 55–9, 255. In southern counties, decline apparently began at mid-century (another period of moral-reforming excitement, it should be noted). ¹⁰⁷ Lambeth Palace, MS 2100, f. 61. ¹⁰⁸ See the apologies and explanations in the Society’s Report for 1799, 2, 36, and Report for 1800, 2, 11. The 1799 list of members claimed to be up to date only to 1798, but in fact includes several men who had died some years previously. In all, the Society still had over 130 members, but only 6 new members had been recruited since 1795. ¹⁰⁹ Wilberforce mentions attending a meeting in April 1808, but in December 1809 speaks of the Society as extinct (Life, iii, 361, 435–6). Porteus died on 8 May 1808. ¹¹⁰ Lambeth Palace, MS 2100, f. 60.

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Revolutionary War, and third by relief and public order problems associated with the high cost of living and successive bad harvests.¹¹¹ Like the magistrates, numerous leading members of the Society responded to the changing pressures of the times by becoming increasingly preoccupied with questions of welfare. Several members of the Society, Wilberforce among them, played a leading role in the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor (SBCP) from its establishment in 1796.¹¹² Some social questions which such men had first considered within the context of the Proclamation Society’s remit—questions about the regulation of apprenticeship, for example, or about vagrancy—came instead to be considered under the aegis of the SBCP. The concerns of the Proclamation Society narrowed accordingly. Increasingly, it seems to have come to function as a residual society, in which only the issues falling outside the other society’s brief were attended to, meaning chiefly sabbathbreaking, blasphemy, and pornography—not the sorts of issue which had been central to most of its members’ concerns in the first place. The development of new or much-sharpened political antagonisms in the tense years of the French Revolutionary Wars may also have made it difficult for the Society’s leaders to retain the loyalty of its fairly diverse membership. From the point of view of the Society, the most troublesome antagonisms were probably those that grew up between the political centre and the political right. Wilberforce and his close associates were certainly no Jacobins. But the antislavery cause with which they were also identified had acquired a Jacobin taint by the early 1790s, staining their own reputations in the eyes of the Society’s more conservative members.¹¹³ Wilberforce attracted more opprobrium from the staunchly loyal in the mid-1790s, when he began to argue in Parliament that the time had come for Pitt to sue for peace.¹¹⁴ By late 1794, it is possible to find one member of the Proclamation Society writing to another (a brother of the Duke of Montagu who had been the Society’s first president) that he disliked ‘citizen Wilberforce’ almost as much as the radical Whig Grey.¹¹⁵ It is unlikely ¹¹¹ For a survey of this period which gives a good sense of the multiple problems facing magistrates, see C. Emsley, British Society and the French Wars 1793–1815 (London, 1979). ¹¹² For this society, see Poynter, Society and Pauperism, 91–8. Fourteen of the SBCP’s original committee of forty were members of the Proclamation Society, including Wilberforce, Porteus, and Glasse. ¹¹³ For Jacobinism and anti-slavery see B. Fladeland, Abolitionists and Working-Class Problems in the Age of Industrialization (London, 1984), esp. ch. 2. For its effect on the campaign, Wilberforce, Life, ii, 18–19, and see 54 for Wilberforce’s characteristically image-conscious wish that anti-slavery campaigners would forebear to mix politics with their advocacy. Wilberforce himself, however, observed to Wyvill in 1795 that the ‘infamous recent vote’ of the Commons on the slave trade provided a powerful argument for parliamentary reform (Life, ii. 84). ¹¹⁴ Wilberforce, Life, ii, 63–93 passim; J. Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Reluctant Transition (London, 1983), 380, 44; Furneaux, Wilberforce, 130–4. J. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: AntiWar Liberalism in England 1793–1815 (Cambridge, 1982), 139, sets Wilberforce’s initiative in the context of a wider—and mainly Whiggish or radical—peace movement. ¹¹⁵ HMC Ailesbury, 265.

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that developments over the next couple of years—which saw Wilberforce make his pitch for peace—would have done much to soften the feelings of such men. In 1797–8, as English radicalism apparently became more extreme and insurrectionary in character and, as the threat of a French invasion loomed, both Wilberforce and the Society came to be more clearly associated with antiJacobinism. In 1797, the Society initiated a prosecution against the bookseller Thomas Williams, who had produced a large cheap edition of Thomas Paine’s onslaught on established churches and orthodox creeds, The Age of Reason, to the order of the London Corresponding Society. However, it should be noted that the Society’s fears about the consequences for popular morality of the widespread dissemination of Paine’s ‘atheistical’ writings was sufficiently widely shared for the renowned Whig barrister Thomas Erskine to agree to represent the Society in this cause. Erskine withdrew his services only when the Society insisted on pressing its prosecution to the point of securing a prison term for Williams: a conclusion to the proceedings that many regarded as supererogatory and vindictive.¹¹⁶ The last year of the century would appear to have represented a very unpropitious moment for an attempt to revive the Society’s fortunes. Wilberforce and the evangelicals more generally were under attack from both left and right. Wilberforce was attacked from the left because of his failure to criticize the government’s suspension of habeas corpus, or to countenance the complaints of radicals confined in Middlesex’s new Coldbath Fields prison. To radical reformers, Wilberforce appeared firmly linked with the cause of reaction.¹¹⁷ But the ultra-Tory, High Church right that had gained ground during the 1790s, and which was beginning to win forceful new recruits among the rising parliamentary generation, apparently regarded him with almost equal disdain. For was he not an advocate of a Methodistical sort of religion, subversive of the doctrines and practice of the Established Church? A man who mixed freely with sectaries, and encouraged them in their enthusiastical missionary schemes? Wilberforce attracted criticism too from some of the more conservative Whigs, now in coalition with the government. Thus, the Burkite Secretary at War, William Windham, repeatedly argued that evangelicals and Jacobins were two of a kind; he and William Cobbett (then in his reactionary phase) agreed in ¹¹⁶ For the prosecution of Williams, see Lambeth Palace, MS 2100 ff. 119–21, 132–3; [Proclamation Society], Report for 1799, 17–18; Wilberforce, Life, iii, 251; Furneaux, Wilberforce, 158–60. Responses to Paine’s book are examined in greater detail in F. K. Prochaska, ‘Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason Revisited’, Journal of the History of Ideas, xxxiii (1972), 561–76. Erskine had been briefed for the defence in an earlier prosecution directed against Paine’s Rights of Man. Though sometimes described by historians as an atheist, in his speech in the Williams trial Erskine described himself as a sincerely religious man, who found this work of Paine’s disturbing in a way his earlier books had not been. Erskine’s speech was printed and distributed by the Proclamation Society. J. A. Lovat Fraser, Erskine (Cambridge, 1932), esp. 58–60, 144. ¹¹⁷ Wilberforce, Life, iii, 320–1; Furneaux, Wilberforce, 188–94. On Coldbath Fields, see also Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain, ch. 5.

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condemning the two equally. In 1800, Windham emerged as the chief opponent of a Whig–evangelical alliance intent on promoting a bill against bull-baiting. According to Windham, bull-baiting was a manly sport, well suited to develop the sturdy physique and temperament of the freeborn Englishman. His stance helped to assure that it was indeed an alliance of evangelicals and Jacobins that secured his humiliating defeat at Norwich in 1802.¹¹⁸ In fact, in precisely these unpropitious circumstances the Society managed to engineer a minor revival. New applications for membership were for the first time publicly solicited. The faithful Samuel Glasse assumed the post of honorary secretary. And new applications did come in. At least thirty-seven new members joined between 1800 and 1803 (the date of the latest membership list so far located).¹¹⁹ Strikingly, a substantial proportion of these new members were men of the new right: erstwhile associates of the loyalist organizer John Reeves; young politicians associated with Canning and the Anti-Jacobin Review circle; partisan High Churchmen, such as the Reverend H. H. Norris and the Reverend J. J. Watson, soon to take over the direction of the militant High Church organ, the British Critic: precisely the sorts of men who in print set themselves up as scourges of evangelicalism.¹²⁰ The peculiar acceptability to the political right of the reformation of manners movement, among evangelical causes, seems once more to be demonstrated. There are no grounds for regarding this influx of members as some form of take-over bid—even if some of the new members were shortly also to involve themselves with the newly founded (and exclusively Anglican) Society for the Suppression of Vice. For this later society does not appear to have been regarded by the Proclamation Society as a rival and competitor, nor did the Vice Society’s members represent the relationship between the two societies in these terms. Rather, both societies publicly expressed the view that they complemented and might profitably support one another.¹²¹ Some explanation for this unexpected mixing of apparently antagonistic forces may be found in the common origins of certain members of the two groups. Norris, most notably, emerged from very much the same sort of wealthy, mercantile, philanthropic circles in which Wilberforce himself and his Thornton cousins had their roots. His father had sat alongside the Thorntons on various corporations and charitable bodies. Certain forms of metropolitan High ¹¹⁸ Brown, Fathers of the Victorians, chs 5–6, for anti-evangelicalism at the turn of the century. For Windham, see Parliamentary History, xxxv, 203–10; W. Windham, The Windham Papers (2 vols, London, 1913), ii, esp. 193–4. In the late 1780s, it should be noted, Windham, then still an opposition Whig, had expressed enthusiasm for Wilberforce’s moral reforming efforts: see Wilberforce, Life, i, 136. ¹¹⁹ See above, n. 71. ¹²⁰ Brief biographies of many of these men can be found in E. L. de Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins 1798–1800: The Early Contributors to the Anti-Jacobin Review (London, 1988). ¹²¹ [Proclamation Society], To the Members of the Society [etc.]; [Vice Society], An Address to the Public, 6–7, 93.

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Church Toryism (at least) had their roots in just that cultural milieu from which metropolitan evangelicalism had previously sprung—and in the ensuing decades, the new High Church party were to show themselves prepared to adopt many of the techniques and strategies for spreading the true faith that the evangelicals had pioneered.¹²² To the Proclamation Society, however, this new blood brought no more than a remission. The Society’s new vigour was not such as to carry it through the death of Porteus, in 1808. On Christmas Eve of the following year, Wilberforce wrote in his journal that he longed to carry through his plan for reviving the Proclamation Society—but lacked the strength.¹²³

M O R A L R E F O R M A N D S O C I A L R E L AT I O N S The Proclamation Society was, it is clear, an e´lite society. Its leaders were, from the beginning, particularly intent on securing the support of men of rank: both because they wanted the Society to have the sort of prestige only the support of such men could confer, and because they were especially concerned to reach the sorts of people who could influence the course and character of English government from the top. Wanting the support of such men, they were naturally especially sensitive to the kinds of criticism they encountered—or anticipated encountering—from within the social and political e´lite. It is equally clear, however, that the late-eighteenth-century reformation of manners movement was not exclusively an e´lite movement. We have seen that the foundation of the Proclamation Society was preceded by a surge of enthusiasm, manifest throughout the country, for projects conceived at least in part as devices for reversing moral decline. The Proclamation Society’s basic strategy, furthermore, presupposed an interest in moral reform extending beyond its own ranks. Plainly, there would have been little point in struggling to obtain new legislation, for example, had it not been supposed that there existed in the country at large a body of people who might be prepared to implement such laws. What sorts of person in practice made up the rank and file of the reforming movement? How far down the social scale is it reasonable to suppose enthusiasm ¹²² The fullest account of this group is A. B. Webster, Joshua Watson: The Story of a Layman 1771–1855 (London, 1954). See also Best, Temporal Pillars, 123, 258, 269; Brown, Fathers of the Victorians, 352–3. No doubt a large number of links of personal acquaintanceship and indeed friendship could be traced between the Proclamation Society’s old corps and the new men. Samuel Glasse may well have been an important linking figure: he himself was on close terms with the leading High Church ecclesiastic George Horne, and his son George Henry Glasse contributed to the Anti-Jacobin Review: ODNB, ‘Glasse’; Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins, 96–7. The Bowdler family also had old-established High Church connections ([Bowdler], Memoir of . . . the late Thomas Bowdler). ¹²³ Wilberforce, Life, iii, 35–6.

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for this cause may have penetrated? Did the reform movement mean something different, or present a different face, to people at different social levels? How did the attitudes of those neither great nor perhaps good help to determine the movement’s character and limits? The current state of research does not make it possible to return either very full or very confident answers to these questions. Nonetheless, in a few concluding pages we shall attempt to sketch out a few very general and tentative answers: to offer, if no more, at least a few hypotheses about continuities and discontinuities in attitudes and experience up and down the social scale in this sector in English public life. Clearly the sorts of person upon whose support the Proclamation Society most immediately depended in its efforts to promote the cause of reform in the country at large were county and borough magistrates. More than any other group, too, magistrates set the agenda for the late-eighteenth-century reformation of manners movement: explicitly, in the various sets of ‘Resolutions’ they drew up, specifying tasks which lesser officials and the ordinary citizenry should undertake; implicitly, during the decade and more preceding the issuing of the proclamation, when they set on foot a variety of initiatives which caught the public eye, and encouraged the hope that progress might yet be made in improving public morals. Historians have commonly portrayed the late-eighteenth-century reformation of manners movement as par excellence a magistrates’ movement—and above all as a county magistrates’ movement—whereas, in studies of various earlier moral reforming campaigns (those of the early seventeenth century, for example, and the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries), emphasis has more often been laid on the contributions of other groups: on the efforts of statesmen, the officers of municipal corporations, parish officers, and miscellaneous men of the middling sort.¹²⁴ Such contrasts can easily be overdrawn, and might wither away entirely on closer inspection. Yet there may well be some substance to them. Several circumstances combined to increase the power and influence of the county magistrates in the later eighteenth century. The decline of old political animosities may have made it easier for them to present a united front in county affairs; rising agricultural incomes perhaps gave them larger budgets to play ¹²⁴ For the account of the late-eighteenth-century movement which gives most emphasis to the role of magistrates, see Webb and Webb, Liquor Licensing, 137–51. For studies of the early seventeenth-century movement see, inter alia, J. Kent, ‘Attitudes of Members of the House of Commons to the Regulations of Personal Conduct’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xlvi (1973), 41–71, and K. Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in Early Modern England’, in J. Brewer and J. Styles eds, An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1980). For an account stressing the contribution of magistrates, A. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven, 1986), ch. 8, and see also P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), ch. 4. For accounts of the early-eighteenth-century movement, see n. 1 above.

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around with; developments in the newspaper and periodical press provided them with a public platform on which to air their concerns and aspirations.¹²⁵ Magistrates were commonly substantial landowners—a minority of these landowners also being beneficed clergy; more rarely they were merchants or major industrial employers. Urban magistrates might be merchants, bankers, or substantial tradesmen. Their social position undoubtedly influenced their social outlook. At the same time, it would surely be wrong to regard them as typical of their class. Active magistrates, by virtue of their office, were exposed to a distinctive set of experiences—experiences which must have played a part in shaping their attitudes, beliefs, and preoccupations. Their responsibilities are likely to have made them especially sensitive to certain sorts of change in their environment. Vagrancy and crime, for example, would not have to rise to such an extent as to make an impact on the consciousness of the ordinary gentleman to impinge on the consciousness of magistrates, who would be likely to be struck if there were any marked change in the volume of business they were handling—even if the absolute number of cases they were dealing with remained, in a wider perspective, relatively small. If magistrates’ experiences disposed them to believe that crime and vagrancy posed an increasingly serious problem, on the other hand, they might well, both through formal exhortation and through informal conversation, transmit this view to a wider public. Conscientious and active magistrates were probably also influenced, in forming their view of the world, by the ethos of their office. It needs to be stressed that, in the eighteenth century (as in earlier centuries), the magistrates’ task was routinely represented as consisting largely in striving to repress ‘vice and immorality’. It was in these terms, for example, that presiding magistrates usually characterized the business of Quarter Sessions, in their prefatory ‘Charges’. Magistrates might dispute the view that vice and immorality presented an increasingly serious problem—this was a ‘frivolous’ and not a ‘wicked’ age, averred Sir Thomas Beevor.¹²⁶ They were highly unlikely to deny that they presented a problem. In the world as they experienced it, ‘vice and immorality’ manifested themselves especially in the forms of crime and various kinds of actionable petty delinquency. Although the experiences of active magistrates helped to make them especially sensitive to the issue of vice and immorality, clearly the issue also had the power to arouse interest among a wider group of men (and indeed women) of comparable or marginally lower social status: among members of the landowning, mercantile, business, and professional classes more generally. Whether or not they themselves directly participated in government, such people commonly found it easy to identify imaginatively with England’s governors. Questions of public ¹²⁵ For the decline of political animosities see Landau, Justices of the Peace, esp. chs 3–5; for rising rents, G. Mingay, The Gentry: The Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class (London, 1976), 12. I have illustrated some of the uses magistrates made of the press in the pages above. ¹²⁶ Quoted Webb and Webb, Liquor Licensing, 150.

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policy—not only on the domestic front, but on this front among others—must frequently have formed the subject of conversation among at least the more serious-minded of them. If persuaded, either by their own experiences or by what they read or heard, that vice and immorality constituted, for the time being, a particularly pressing social problem, such people were very likely to debate among themselves how the problem might best be dealt with. Even if not active magistrates (as of course the vast majority of them were not), men at this social level might well have some sort of experience of participating in government, or exercising quasi-governmental authority. A few would have served as sheriffs, as aldermen, or members of urban ‘improvement commissions’. Some would have taken part in parochial affairs, served as trustees for workhouses or schools, or for charities, or have been governors or active members of subscription charities. Most would have experience of exercising authority as landlords or employers. Such experiences were likely to predispose all men of this class to conceive of vice and immorality as manifesting themselves, at least in part, in the form of troublesome or offensive behaviour among inferior social orders.¹²⁷ It would certainly be wrong to suppose that they habitually conceived of problems of public morals entirely in those terms. It is clear from what we know about the character of late-eighteenth-century political discourse that there was a good deal of talk among the relatively wealthy and well educated about the shocking extent of vice and corruption in high places. Though agreeing that the poorer classes were all too often disturbingly vicious and immoral, some nonetheless denied that responsibility for this circumstance lay chiefly with the lower orders themselves. According to the Essex clergyman John Howlett, for example, the poor were not indigent because they were vicious and immoral, but vicious and immoral because of their extreme indigence: a state of affairs he thought better public policy might alleviate.¹²⁸ A basic premise of most late eighteenth-century discussion of social problems was that faulty public policy was to blame for a major part of the nation’s troubles. The governing classes were culpable, whether or not they had wilfully erred; they too—indeed, they above all—had to mend their ways. Though their critical attention might focus in part on the wealthy and powerful, and their sins by commission or omission, people at this social level were nonetheless not likely to distance themselves very far from the terms of the standard ‘official’ discourse on vice and immorality. They were likely ¹²⁷ For a society of gentlemen interesting themselves in moral reform in the late 1780s, and employing the opportunities their social position opened to them to promote reform, especially among their social inferiors, see Jewson, Jacobin City, 146–7. For other accounts of moral reforming activity in a local context, B. Trinder, The Industrial Revolution in Shropshire (London, 1981), ch. 19; R. Glen, Urban Workers in the Early Industrial Revolution (London, 1984), 29–30, 49–54. ¹²⁸ Howlett, The Insufficiency of the Causes, 27–30. See also his letter to the Secretary of the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, BL, Add. MS 16920, f. 7.

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to accept that crime, intemperance, idleness, and a propensity to engage in various forms of ‘disorderly’ conduct were endemic among at least sections of the lower orders. These ‘social problems’ would appear to them features of an alien sphere of life—a sphere profoundly unfamiliar to them. They might try to make an imaginative leap, and envision the world as it presented itself to an unemployed labourer, a poor chimney sweep, a seduced servant girl, or an imprisoned felon. Both ‘sentimental’ poets and novelists, and charities appealing for funds, routinely pressed the rich to make just such imaginative efforts. But for them these experiments in sympathy remained exercises of the imagination. To such as they, it came more easily to debate the relative merits of possible ‘solutions’ to social problems than genuinely to imagine what it might be like to be at the receiving end of such policies, with all the complex and contingent inconveniences and embarrassments that might involve. Men such as the Duke of Grafton and Earl Fitzwilliam might indeed inveigh against the oppression of the poor.¹²⁹ It needs to be stressed that what they were calling into question was the need for additional efforts to control the common people. It is highly unlikely that either intended to suggest that it would be possible to dispense with the traditional apparatus of criminal and vagrancy laws. Nor indeed does it appear that either of these men ever put very much thought into imagining ways in which the traditional apparatus of government might be improved, so as to bear less heavily upon the poor. In this respect they were in fact less considerate than the at-first-sight more complacent reformers. The ‘official discourse’—as we have termed it—on vice and immorality was by no means entirely an oppressive one. This fact needs to be underlined for the character of its appeal to be fully appreciated. It was frequently argued that, to be maximally effective, any reforming strategy must include provision for rewards as well as punishments: prisoners, for example, should be given positive incentives to reform, in the form of partial remissions of sentence, and cash gifts on release.¹³⁰ Virtuous habits, it had become usual to suppose, were most likely to be nourished by sturdy independence; it followed that the poor should not be too hastily institutionalized, and that they should if possible be enabled to support themselves.¹³¹ It was frequently suggested that the most promising route to moral reform lay in better provision for the impressionable young, in the form either of education or of protective care to save them from abuse or corruption ¹²⁹ See nn. 56, 72, above. ¹³⁰ The Critical Review, 62 (1786), 478, reviewing An Account of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners in the Last Century observed that ‘in a licentious age, men must probably be seduced rather than terrified: . . . rewards would be more alluring than only to escape punishment’. For this idea pursued in the management of reformed prisons, see [Proclamation Society], Statement and Propositions, 22–5, and see also Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor (5 vols, London, 1798–1808) i, p. xiii. ¹³¹ For this theme, see Andrew, ‘London Charity’, chs 4–5, and the discussion in her Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1989).

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at the hands of parents or employers.¹³² Even the most politically and socially radical gentlemen, those most suspicious of measures that might entrench upon the liberty, or deplete the happiness, of the poor, found it possible to support the moral reform programme when it bore one of these aspects.¹³³ We have suggested that the late-eighteenth-century reformation of manners movement may have differed from earlier movements in that the county magistracy may have played a more important leadership role. Another distinctive feature of this movement—one we can identify somewhat more confidently as distinctive—was that, among those of gentle status not holding magisterial office who nonetheless managed to devise for themselves some kind of supporting role, several women must be numbered. Two achieved special prominence, Hannah More and Sarah Trimmer.¹³⁴ Both attracted notice through their efforts to promote Sunday schools, and through their writings. Hannah More wrote, in 1788, Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society, and at the same time a series of moral tracts aimed at poor audiences. Sarah Trimmer began by writing a series of didactic children’s books, in 1788–9, brought out a Family Magazine . . . Designed to Counteract the Pernicious Tendence of Immoral Books etc . . . among the Inferior Classes of People, and subsequently chronicled her own and others’ improving efforts in The Oeconomy of Charity. Other women also produced moral and educational works, and subscribed to—and sometimes helped to manage—a variety of charitable projects.¹³⁵ Women had ¹³² The markedly growing prominence of education as a focus for public concern and discussion in this period has not received much attention from historians, except in connection with the Sunday school movement, but see B. Simon, Studies in the History of Education (London, 1960), ch. 1, and H. Silver, The Concept of Popular Education: A Study of Ideas and Social Movements in the Early Nineteenth Century (London, 1965), esp. chs 1–2. A few remarks about manifestations of concern about the condition of apprentices are to be found in I. Pinchbeck and M. Hewitt, Children in English Society (2 vols, London, 1969–73), i, ch. 9. The late 1780s also saw the foundation of a charity to care for children at risk of falling into a life of crime: the Philanthropic Society. ¹³³ See Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain, ch. 3, for some discussion of the appeal of the prison reform cause for the politically radical. For John Jebb and workhouses, see J. Jebb, Works . . . with Memoirs of the Life of the Author (3 vols, London, 1787), i, 26; iii, 565–7; for Price, Priestley, and friendly societies, Thomas, ‘Francis Maseres, Richard Price and the Industrious Poor’. For the notion of a reformation of manners absorbed into a vision of social progress, see, for example, J. Bentham, A Fragment on Government (Oxford, 1967), 3: ‘Correspondent to discovery and improvement in the natural world, is reformation in the moral . . .’. R. Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country (London, 1789), 46–7, expressed the hope that the example of the French Revolution might bring about ‘a reformation of manners and virtuous practice’. ¹³⁴ More and Trimmer, see B. Rodgers, Cloak of Charity: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philanthropy (London, 1949), chs 6–7. For More, see also M. G. Jones, Hannah More (Cambridge, 1952), and Brown, Fathers of the Victorians, passim. ¹³⁵ Several female members of the Bowdler family produced moral and educational works: see N. Perrin, Dr Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (New York, 1969), ch. 3. Certain ladies helped to promote the establishment of the Foundling Hospital in the 1730s, but they do not appear to have taken an active part in its management (R. McClure, Coram’s Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1981), 21–3). In 1759, however, twelve lady subscribers to the Lambeth Asylum for Orphan Girls were appointed as ‘Visiting Ladies’, and were made responsible for inspecting the ‘economy’ of the

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no opportunity to hold public office. But changes in the nature of public life during the later eighteenth century opened up to them new opportunities to be active in the public sphere. When we penetrate one step further down the social scale, to the level of the petty bourgeoisie, to the world of small landowners, tenant farmers, shopkeepers, and master craftsmen, the picture of attitudes to the reformation of manners movement that we must paint becomes altogether more complex and contradictory. People of this kind were commonly literate; they read books, magazines, and newspapers, and might well take an interest in public policy debates.¹³⁶ They too might well have experience of exercising authority as employers, or of holding minor office, especially within the structures of parochial government: posts such as church-warden, overseer of the poor, and constable were commonly held by men of this station. Such people might sympathize with the moral reform project in much the terms that it was conceived by their social superiors. Support of some kind from people at this social level was in fact crucial to the practical operation of the project, for it was they—as petty office-holders—who were expected to do much of the work of implementing its more coercive aspects at street level (and they indeed who were expected to staff the prisons and workhouses, instruct Sunday school scholars, and the like). However, whereas to the gentry the moral reform project was always, in very substantial part, a project for the reform of others, the petty bourgeoisie, or lesser middling sort, often found themselves also the objects of reforming interest: the subjects of regulatory effort, the victims of moral prosecutions. Even if they played the part of enforcers, rather than of those upon whom the law was enforced, yet they saw in much more vivid detail than their superiors at their writing desks and in their committee rooms what efforts to repress vice and immorality meant in practice to the people most immediately involved.¹³⁷ house and the employment of its child inmates. (An Account of the Institution and Proceedings of the Guardians of the Asylum or House of Refuge . . . for the Reception of Orphan Girls . . . (London, 1761), 6.) In the late eighteenth century women also appear to have become active in the management of provincial charities. The York Courant, 16 January 1787, carried notice of the establishment of a charitable spinning school, supported entirely by the subscriptions of women, and in an earlier issue had printed an item about the management of the Orphan House in Edinburgh, which, it suggested, might be of interest to these ladies (5 December 1786). For the role of women in organized charity from the late eighteenth century, see F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1980). ¹³⁶ See the very wide reading of the Sussex shopkeeper Thomas Turner at mid-century: The Diary of Thomas Turner 1754–65, ed. D. Vaizey (Oxford, 1984), 347–52. Especially relevant to our concerns is his entry for 7 December 1757 (126), when he notes that he has been reading the Monitor, a periodical usually characterized by historians as a mouthpiece for ‘country’ political views. What most struck Turner was the author’s endeavour ‘to point out the only way to restore the nation to its former strength and dignity, which is by suppressing vice and encouraging virtue and merit’. ¹³⁷ Sydney Smith notoriously characterized the Vice Society, in 1809, as the ‘Society for suppressing the vices of those whose income does not exceed five hundred pounds a year’ (Furneaux, Wilberforce, 201). His critical point is clear enough, but it is important to note precisely what he

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Studies of earlier reforming movements have commonly emphasized the important part played by tradesmen and the like in attempting to implement the reforming vision.¹³⁸ It happens that we know rather little about this level of activity in the late-eighteenth-century reformation of manners movement—although more work on local sources might make it possible to fill out the picture. It will be surprising if further research does not turn up evidence of some men of this kind exerting themselves in the cause of reform. Though some may have been little more than the willing instruments of their social superiors, we should expect to find others throwing themselves heart and soul into the campaign. Zeal at this level was likely to manifest itself chiefly in the bringing of large numbers of moral prosecutions. Such prosecutions, a supporter of similar efforts had argued in the 1760s, represented ‘almost the only way by which persons in the lower ranks of life can do any considerable service to the public’.¹³⁹ ‘Reforming’ or ‘informing’ constables—both names were in fairly common use throughout the eighteenth century—were probably often buoyed up by a complex sense of mission. Certainly they needed something to sustain them, for they routinely attracted bitter hostility not only from the gentry and working classes, but also from substantial sections of their own class. Such hostility derived in part from a widespread prejudice against the very act of ‘informing’—disdained as a snooping, prying, treacherous, malicious, persecuting kind of activity. Furthermore, ‘reforming’ constables were quite frequently accused of running protection rackets under cover of piety and civic dutifulness: of prosecuting only those who would not pay them off. Probably there was at least sometimes some justice to this charge. Finally, any attempt to account for the widespread hostility such men attracted must make allowance for the fact that, although probably they commonly directed the bulk of their attention towards the regulation of the poor—to the arrest of vagrants, prostitutes, and the like—yet characteristically they also brought some suits against their equals or betters in wealth and position. So they would prosecute a wide range of people for swearing; butchers (notorious offenders) for Sunday trading; publicans for permitting tippling on the Lord’s Day; shopkeepers for the use of false weights and measures; and a variety of dealers for marketing offences. It was such prosecutions as these which often sparked off the most violent resistance, provoked countersuits for false imprisonment, and the like.¹⁴⁰ was suggesting about the limits of the moral reform movement: only the wealthiest ‘middle class’ families would have had incomes of as much as £500 a year at this date. Historians usually reckon that a ‘middle class’ life-style could be supported on anything from £50 a year upwards. ¹³⁸ See nn. 1, 124, above. ¹³⁹ London Chronicle, 3–5 June 1762. This and the following paragraphs draw on my work on William Payne: see below, Chapter 7. ¹⁴⁰ Pearson, Life of Hey, ii, 106–33, details violent resistance and countersuits often provoked by just such prosecutions.

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It was undoubtedly in part because they needed both moral and financial support to help them cope with such hostility that, from the late seventeenth century at least, would-be reformers at this social level had quite frequently banded together to form reforming societies—perhaps under the auspices of, and with promises of patronage from, certain more e´lite supporters. Such petty reforming societies played a prominent part in the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth-century reformation of manners movement. It remains unclear as yet how large a part they played in the campaign of the 1780s and 1790s. We have seen that Wilberforce initially hoped to promote the formation of such societies. In practice, both the Proclamation Society and the county magistrates appear to have directed their efforts above all towards stirring up petty office-holders to action—though they clearly hoped too that vestries might be incited to play a more active and interventionist role in parish affairs than had been customary. Injunctions to the ‘principal inhabitants’ of parishes to ‘associate’ to promote action against vice and immorality may nonetheless sometimes have served to stimulate the formation of societies. We know that such societies were formed in several Yorkshire towns. It is unfortunate that their precise social composition remains unclear.¹⁴¹ In considering the activities of reforming constables we have already touched on some of the reasons why there should have existed among the lesser middling sort considerable hostility to as well as enthusiasm for the cause of moral reform. Lesser men had fewer sorts of opportunity open to them than were open to their social betters to promote the reform project through official or semi-official action; the sorts of opportunity that lay most readily open to them were of a kind many found unpalatable; they were much more likely than the gentry to find themselves the objects of coercive reforming efforts. Two further considerations which tended to arouse doubts among people of this rank about projects which enjoyed more broadly based support among their social superiors should also be noted. First, the reformation of manners movement presented itself to those tenant farmers, tradesmen, and the like liable to be called upon to serve parish office quite largely as a set of burdensome demands. Though no more than part-time, unsalaried officers, they found themselves scolded for lax attention to their duties, and enjoined to take on an extraordinary programme of work, only too evidently calculated to upset substantial numbers of their friends and neighbours. In the eyes of magistrates and others of that ilk, parish officers constituted by no means the least troublesome part of the ‘inferior order’ of people; they were consequently quite as ready to upbraid as to encourage them.¹⁴² ¹⁴¹ For a society formed at Leeds, see Pearson, Life of Hey, ii, 105–6; for one in Huddersfield, n. 27. ¹⁴² See the Gloucestershire magistrates, quoted n. 60 above. It is clear from the context that, when they speak of ‘the inferior order’, it is inferior office-holders they here have in mind.

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Second, it should be noted that even some of those reforming projects which appeared to a very broad cross-section of the gentry to be benign and constructive—the establishment of ‘reformed’ prisons and workhouses, for example—presented a rather different face to the petty bourgeoisie. Projects of this kind commonly meant large rate increases—relatively easily borne by the wealthy, but possibly imposing a severe burden on lesser ratepayers. Small tradesmen furthermore were much more likely than the gentry to consider such institutions from the point of view of those who might one day find themselves inside them. On this basis they might make common cause with journeymen and the unskilled working classes to nip such projects in the bud. In East Anglia in the 1770s protests from ratepayers and the poor together led to the abandonment of certain schemes for the construction of large district workhouses. In Bristol in the 1790s, protests mounted in the name of the small ratepayer led to the abandonment of plans to construct a new model prison.¹⁴³ Among the lower middle classes and the poor of later-eighteenth-century England—as among the lesser gentry and the very rich—there were undoubtedly some who lacked sympathy with the reformation of manners movement because they wished to enjoy their pleasures, immoral though these might be, without restraint. Others, we have suggested, opposed the sorts of reforming project which commanded significant support among the rich chiefly because these projects presented to them a different and largely unattractive face. People of this latter kind may well have been largely sympathetic to the ends of the reforming movement, as e´lite reformers conceived them, however—and even defiant hedonists did not always dissociate themselves entirely from all forms of moral-reforming cry. Farmers, small tradesmen, skilled craftsmen, and unskilled labourers who were sceptical of the merits of a reforming programme implemented by law, at some cost and little immediately obvious benefit to themselves, might find denunciation of the very vices the reformers targeted acceptable, even positively engaging, if presented to them with sufficient verve and imagination by a preacher or other religious leader. Millennarian leaders, who attracted a significant following, chiefly (though not exclusively) among the less educated classes in the final decades of the eighteenth century, often denounced workaday vice and immorality. They prophesied that the last terrestrial era, soon to dawn, would usher in a universal reformation of manners. Some millennarian prophets, it is true, announced that the last days would see the emergence of a new moral order, in which traditional conceptions of virtue and vice would undergo radical ¹⁴³ M. Lloyd Prichard, ‘The Treatment of the Poor in Norfolk 1700–1850’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1949), 69–78. For the effect of prison reform on the rates see M. De Lacy, Prison Reform in Lancashire 1700–1850: A Study in Local Administration (Manchester, 1986), ch. 6. For the Bristol agitation, A Reply by the Delegates of the Several Parishes . . . in the City of Bristol (Bristol, 1792). It is also objected here that parish officers are to be made the instruments for enforcing an unpopular act, and that this prospect is likely to deter people from serving.

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revision. But others expressed largely conventional moral views. Followers of the millennarian prophet Richard Brothers, in the 1790s, listed among the vices they thought disfigured contemporary society (and which they believed would soon attract God’s judgement) idleness and luxury on the part of the nobility, cheating and monopolizing on the part of merchants and tradesmen, swearing—especially among sailors (also charged with many other ‘unclean practices’), and bull-baiting, dancing, and bull-fighting on the part of the populace.¹⁴⁴ That society was vicious and corrupt at every level was equally a favourite theme of plebeian radicals.¹⁴⁵ Lower social groups often appear to have differed from e´lite reformers less in their ideas as to what constituted vice, than in their notions as to how it might best be attacked. When vice among the lower orders of society was in question, they were probably more consistently disposed to favour voluntarist solutions: to believe that people should be exhorted and educated into reforming themselves. Men and women in the lower ranks of society were probably also more likely than their social betters to identify the ‘aristocracy’ or governing classes as the section of society at once most errant and most obdurately resistant to reform. Even those plebeian radicals who ostentatiously indulged in blasphemy, obscenity, and heavy drinking were characteristically happy enough to denounce the culpable vice and immorality of the upper classes.¹⁴⁶ The 1802 general election saw the Proclamation Society’s version of moral reform put under direct challenge in Middlesex: a county with a large electorate, including many relatively humble voters. William Mainwaring’s bid for reelection as one of the county’s representatives was challenged in that year by a flamboyant young radical landowner, Sir Francis Burdett.¹⁴⁷ Clearly this election was about many things other than approaches to the task of moral reform. But one of the most prominent issues in it was the nature of the regime in the ¹⁴⁴ J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millennarianism 1780–1850 (London, 1979), for millennarianism generally, and for followers of Brothers, esp. 68. ¹⁴⁵ The Holborn Society of the Friends of the People, for example, prefaced their address to the public with the observation that ‘to account rationally for the degradation of human nature, with a view to its reformation, is an object surely deserving the attention of every thinking individual’. It was to this task that they proposed to address themselves. (Holborn Society of the Friends of the People, untitled pamphlet; London, 1792 [BL: 8135 b8(4)], 1.) Francis Place’s preoccupation with the theme of moral improvement, evident in his early-nineteenth-century writings and collections of material—for example, in his Autobiography, ed. M. Thale (Cambridge, 1972)—is sometimes supposed to have been the product of an appetite for respectability developed in the later years of his life. But in fact I suspect that it at least built upon an attitude also characteristic of his radical youth. ¹⁴⁶ For this sort of plebeian radical culture, see especially I. Macalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London 1795–1840 (Cambridge, 1988), ch. 2. Their charge against the upper classes was of course partly one of hypocrisy: given that there was so much intolerance of the vices of the poor, it was particularly scandalous that the rich should also be vicious. ¹⁴⁷ For Burdett, see J. Dinwiddy, ‘Sir Francis Burdett and Burdettite Radicalism’, History, xv (1981), 17–31, and references therein, and for the context of the 1802 election, J. A. Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London 1796–1821 (Oxford, 1982), esp. 117–33.

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‘reformed’ county prison at Coldbath Fields.¹⁴⁸ Coldbath Fields prison was in some ways a reformers’ showpiece. In practice, however, its inmates suffered cold, hunger, and abuse. In the late 1790s, the prison was denounced by radicals (some of whom had themselves spent some time inside), not so much because of what it set out to be, as because of the extent to which it failed to fulfil its promise. Apparently feeling nonetheless that the whole thrust of their endeavour was being called into question, the reformers closed ranks. A Commission of Enquiry including such provincial members of the Proclamation Society as Sir George Paul and William Morton Pitt among its members exonerated their Middlesex colleagues from blame.¹⁴⁹ The Middlesex freeholders at large, however, were plainly unconvinced, and Burdett’s early espousal of the radicals’ criticisms proved one of the strongest cards he had to play. Scepticism about the merits of efforts to reform the inferior orders by force of law, combined with a readily aroused anger against the vice and immorality of the upper classes—whom Burdett identified as the most proper targets for reforming action—sufficed to carry the day for Burdett. It is clear that, in the capital at least, the cause of moral reform, as the Proclamation Society had implemented it, had failed to win the hearts and minds of the people. ¹⁴⁸ For Coldbath Fields, Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain, ch. 5. I am grateful to Ruth Paley for showing me her unpublished paper on this prison and the controversy which blew up around it. ¹⁴⁹ Sir Christopher Willoughby was also named to the Commission, but was unable to attend its meetings, being fully employed coping with public disorders in Oxfordshire. For the report see PP, cx (1800), also reproduced in Lambert, Sessional Papers, cxxxii, 439–562.

6 The King’s Bench prison in the later eighteenth century: law, authority, and order in a London debtors’ prison The government of the King’s Bench [prison] . . . must be allowed not only mild, but liberal to a degree. The Debtor and Creditor’s Assistant (1793) It would be highly presuming in your petitioners to attempt to shew that the deprivation of liberty is one of the greatest evils that can befall Man; or that any exaggeration of this evil through the conduct of those to whose custody prisoners for debt are committed is exceedingly reprehensible in itself, and a direct violation of the statutes which the Legislature in their humanity have thought fit to make on behalf of persons in that unfortunate situation. Petition of prisoners to the court of King’s Bench (1782) Englishmen must and will be free, despite prison, chains and death. Worcester Journal (1769)

This chapter sets out to investigate imprisonment for debt in the eighteenth century by an examination of the King’s Bench prison, the largest of the debtors’ prisons in England. The discussion is divided into five sections. The first examines the legal process by which debtors might be imprisoned. It seeks to explain both why the debt laws were criticized and why they were defended, as well as demonstrating how the imprisoned debtor’s sense of grievance grew out of public ambiguity towards the law and the anomalies of the law itself. The second section describes the prison environment and the nature of officialdom in the prison. Most accounts of eighteenth-century gaols have been written from the point of view of such reformers as John Howard. There has been very little attempt to see the prisoners in their own terms. This chapter offers a different approach: the prison environment is not depicted as a world of corruption in First published in J. Brewer and J. Styles eds, An Ungovernable People? The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1980, paperback edn. 1983), 250–98. Reproduced by permission of Springer Science and Business Media.

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earnest need of moral reform; rather, it is portrayed from the point of view of the prisoners (many of whom would have regarded the reformers’ proposals as anathema) and as a functioning social environment. This perspective seems especially appropriate as the prisoners had far more influence and impact on the day-to-day running of the prison and the nature of prison life than either those who wielded authority over them or the reformers. The prison officers, as the second section demonstrates, were a weak body whose effective exercise of authority depended upon the support of the prison population. They therefore needed to appear to be acting legitimately in the eyes of the prisoners, and this both served as a constraint upon authority and affected the ways in which it was exercised. The vacuum created by the absence of an effective formal presence in prison life was, as the third section shows, filled by the prisoners themselves. They established their own sophisticated prison economy as well as complex organs of self-government, notably the so-called prison ‘college’. Sections two and three portray the imprisoned debtor not as a languishing and impotent figure, but as an individual capable of affecting his own fate and of participating in what was in many ways a viable community. The fourth section examines the relationship between prisoners’ institutions and the formal authorities, and discusses the ways in which the college’s notion of harmony either clashed or conformed with the marshal’s idea of prison order. It explains how a viable compromise between the college and the prison officers worked, and in what circumstances such a relationship was likely to break down. The final section examines one special instance of this breakdown in 1770–1, with the emergence of a campaign within the prison walls for the abolition of imprisonment for debt on the grounds that such a practice was ‘unconstitutional’. This radical campaign is used to illustrate the weakness of authority in the gaol and the use to which the prisoners’ institutions could be put, and to make a number of general points about debtors’ attitudes towards the law and towards authority in the prison.

T H E D E BTO R A N D T H E L AW The eighteenth-century English economy rested upon an extensively ramified network of credit and debt, in which all sorts of men and women, from gentry and great merchants to shopkeepers and wage labourers, were deeply implicated. The reasons for this ubiquitous practice of borrowing and lending were many, notably a shortage of specie, the absence of any great number of formal financial institutions, and the amount of circulating (as opposed to fixed) capital in most commercial enterprises.¹ Legal procedures governing indebtedness were of ¹ The best textbook account of the credit network in the eighteenth century is in T. S. Ashton, An Economic History of England: The Eighteenth Century (London, 1955). Among recent articles,

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considerable importance inasmuch as they were supposed to sustain confidence in the system of credit which underlay the English economy (Figure 6.1). The foundations of the eighteenth-century legal process governing debt were laid in the later middle ages when the courts first began to offer a general service to creditors of all kinds, to aid them in the collection of debts.² The process current in Hanoverian England was a civil process, which could be initiated by any creditor owed a debt of 40s. or more, in any of the more important courts handling civil suits. On commencing the process the creditor acquired a number of powers over his debtor. He could order him to be brought into court to attend the hearing of the suit, either by a simple summons or by having him arrested and held to bail or, in default of bail, by having him cast into prison. If, at the trial of the suit (which might occur several months later), the debt was found to be good, the creditor could choose to proceed ‘in execution’ either against the property of the debtor (by having the sheriff seize and sell the debtor’s chattels) or ‘against his body’, that is, he could have him detained in prison as a pledge for ultimate payment. Thus, two kinds of imprisonment for debt were possible: pre-trial and post-trial, the first called ‘imprisonment on mesne process’ and the second ‘imprisonment on final process’. The debtor imprisoned on final process was, in normal circumstances, dependent upon his creditor for his discharge.³ Eighteenth-century critics of this process singled out as its most remarkable and unjustifiable feature its gift of extraordinary discretionary powers to the creditor. Certainly the process is less well described as a system of court-supervised arbitration than as a system of legalized bullying. Throughout, the courts played no more than a passive and procedural role, never attempting to ascertain the debtor’s resources nor to impose any kind of settlement. It was normal in civil cases for a suitor to enjoy great latitude in the conduct of his suit but, in the case B. L. Anderson, ‘Money and the Structure of Credit’, Business History, xii (1970), 85–101, and B. A. Holderness, ‘Credit in a Rural Community 1660–1800’, Midland History, iii (1975), 94–115, are worthy of note. Several histories of particular industries contain extended discussions of the role of credit in production, e.g. A. P. Wadsworth and J.de L. Mann, The Cotton Industry and Industrial Lancashire (Manchester, 1931), and M. B. Rowlands, Masters and Men in the West Midland Metalware Trades before the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, 1975). Consumer credit is discussed in D. Davis, A History of Shopping (London, 1965). ² The early history of the English debt law, with particular regard to the practice of imprisonment for debt, is discussed in A. L. Freedman, ‘Imprisonment for Debt’, Temple Law Quarterly ii (1928), 330–69, and in R. Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1968), 5–8, 45–6. For a learned (and critical) eighteenth-century account of the evolution of the eighteenth-century law, see [T. Delamayne], The Rise and Practice of Imprisonment in Personal Actions Examined (London, 1772). This pamphlet was composed in response to the controversy discussed on pages 270–6. ³ A meticulous account of the legal process is provided by I. P. H. Duffy in his thesis, now published as Bankruptcy and Insolvency in London in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (New York, 1985). See also P. J. Lineham, ‘The Campaign to Abolish Imprisonment for Debt in England 1750–1840’ (unpublished MA thesis, Canterbury, New Zealand, 1974), 5–8. I am indebted to both these theses for their clear and careful accounts of the state of the law of debt in the later eighteenth century.

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Inferior Politics Creditor brings suit

Summons issued

Writ for arrest issued

Mesne process

Debtor arrested

Debtor goes to prison

Debtor puts up bail

Suit comes to trial

Decided pro debtor

Decided pro creditor

Creditor proceeds against debtor's property

Creditor proceeds against debtor's body

Debtor in prison

by seizing it

Final process

by having sheriff auction it

Figure 6.1. The legal process for the collection of debts: an instrument in the hands of the creditor.


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of suits for debt, where the debtor’s liberty was at stake, the creditor’s discretion had an exceptionally oppressive aspect. According to the blackest pictures painted of the practice in debt cases (favoured by eighteenth-century critics and, frequently, by historians), creditors were accustomed to exercise their discretionary powers to the full, seizing upon penniless debtors and casting them into prison to rot. This oppressive proceeding, critics maintained, was encouraged by the inefficiency of the alternative process against a debtor’s property: land could not be seized for debt; nor could liquid assets such as bills of exchange; nor could any arrangement be made for tapping future earnings. Critics of the law saw incarcerated debtors as the victims of a process at once capricious and inefficient. Nevertheless, there was always a substantial body of citizens, usually tradesmen, who defended existing legal arrangements and opposed alterations in the law. They did so, we may suppose, less because they relished the power of incarceration, than because they knew that the law, for all its inadequacies, worked, and sometimes worked well, providing an appropriate mechanism for securing the payment of debts.⁴ Most suits reached some kind of resolution so that it was not necessary to gaol the debtor. The long-term imprisonment of debtors was therefore not a necessary consequence of the legal process, but a symptom of its (periodic) failure. In order to understand the ways in which the debt laws functioned, we have to remember the circumstances of most actions for debt. An action was not usually brought against someone who was penniless or who had a balance of debts over assets; but simply against someone who had contracted a financial obligation which he had failed to discharge. A creditor would commonly try appeals, demands, and threats before actually going to law. Only when these failed to move a recalcitrant debtor would a creditor initiate proceedings to gain for himself an enhanced coercive negotiating power. What a creditor wanted, in these circumstances was, above all, the power to threaten imprisonment. A debtor who was brought to court, even if he could put up bail, received a forceful reminder of his perilous situation. Court appearance might well induce a debtor with resources to re-order his priorities and settle outstanding claims. Even a debtor without resources might find himself able, under the shadow of the law, to dredge up sufficient funds from friends and relatives. ⁴ P. H. Haagen, ‘Imprisonment for Debt in England and Wales’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Princeton, 1986). The account which follows is a highly conjectural but plausible reconstruction, based on a wide reading of the many polemical pamphlets published on the subject of imprisonment for debt in the course of the eighteenth century. It draws also upon the report of a parliamentary committee set up in 1791 to investigate the law and practice of imprisonment for debt; the committee’s report, which confines itself to the London area, is printed in CJ xlvii, 640–73. There have been several suggestive accounts of the practice of imprisonment for debt as it has been carried on in recent years; see, for example, P. Rock, Making People Pay (London, 1973), and R. Ford, ‘Imprisonment for Debt,’ Michigan Law Review, xxv (1926–7), 24–49.

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In 1791 a House of Commons committee discovered that, from about 12,000 bailable writs issued against debtors in the city of London and the county of Middlesex in the preceding year, only about 1,200 commitments to prison had ensued.⁵ The great majority of prosecuted debtors therefore never ended up in gaol. Some, no doubt, evaded arrest, others probably proved so unforthcoming that their creditors, deterred by legal costs, abandoned their suits. But a great many paid up, and they therefore demonstrate the successful application of the debt laws and show the deterrent value of threatened imprisonment. Of those debtors who were committed to prison in the late eighteenth century, the majority (by the evidence of the same Commons report) were detained on mesne process only, that is, they were imprisoned because they were unable to put up bail.⁶ Mesne process imprisonment was not completely indeterminate, and could end when the suit came to trial. Creditors must have hoped that the debtors’ desire to get out of prison would drive them to strenuous efforts to pay off the debt. The King’s Bench prison books, which record the ground of a prisoner’s ultimate discharge, show that creditors’ expectations were often fulfilled.⁷ Many imprisoned on mesne process settled with their creditors, thus cutting off the suit before it ever came to trial. In many other cases, frustrated creditors abandoned their suits when the cold bath of imprisonment failed to have the desired effect. In these circumstances, debtors, after remaining in prison for several months, became ‘supersedable’—eligible to apply for a discharge from the court.⁸ Creditors cannot have expected much from the minority of debtors confined on final process. When debtors held out against their creditors long enough to be imprisoned, the chances of their paying were exiguous. Commitment to prison reduced the chance that the debtor would pay still further if only because, when the news spread of a man’s going to prison, all his creditors would hasten to slap writs on him. Prisoners for debt thus represented the failure rate of the legal process. As an eighteenth-century proverb had it, ‘a prison pays no debts’. And yet creditors argued keenly for the preservation of imprisonment—for the sake of what pickings there might be, and because they wanted their threats to have teeth. It might appear from this account that the debtor was entirely at the creditor’s mercy. But, in fact, debtors were as capable of exploiting aspects of the law as their creditors, and could marshal considerable powers of resistance to their ⁵ CJ xlvii, 645. ⁶ CJ xlvii, 647. ⁷ The entire set of prison books for the King’s Bench prison for the period 1760–1800 is preserved at TNA PRIS 4. Careful analysis of these books would yield some information about the practices of creditors. Unfortunately, however, the record in the books is purely formal: what actions creditors took at law are recorded, but how much if any money changed hands at any stage of the process is nowhere indicated. The same limitations inevitably characterize all formal records of the legal process. ⁸ For the writ of supersedeas, see ‘An Old Practitioner’, The Debtor’s Pocket Guide in Cases of Arrest (London, 1776).


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prosecutors. Although the courts made little active attempt to defend their interests, they did hedge the operation of the law with a multitude of restrictions which debtors could exploit to their own advantage.⁹ Thus, for example, the bailiffs’ powers of arrest were strictly circumscribed. They could not make arrests at night, nor on Sundays, nor could they break into a house in order to make an arrest, and if they did infringe any of these conditions then they were acting without legal authority and could be resisted by force. If a debtor was prepared to regulate his life very carefully, and to be always on his guard, he could avoid arrest more or less indefinitely and, moreover, could probably count on mob support in fighting off bailiffs’ incursions. Even when captured, the debtor was under no legal compulsion to surrender what he had, unless the creditor attempted the difficult course of proceeding against his property. If, instead, the creditor chose to proceed against the debtor’s body and keep him in prison (strictly an alternative to process against property), the debtor could retain everything he owned and spend it as he pleased. Because imprisonment actually offered the debtor protection for his property, some men chose to have themselves imprisoned by ‘friendly actions’.¹⁰ Baffled creditors frequently complained that debtors’ prisons were a haven for the spendthrift, and on at least one occasion in the eighteenth century they sought statutory powers to compel their debtors to come out of prison and make some kind of settlement.¹¹ Even in prison the debtor did not languish but was able to fall back on a number of expedients to relieve his situation. Certain privileges were available to facilitate debtors’ efforts to sort out their affairs.¹² Prison staff often allowed them, formally or informally, to go out of the prison on day trips. But the most important liberty which debtors were allowed was that of living outside prison, usually in the immediate vicinity of the gaol and under the jurisdiction of the prison government. This privilege was not automatically available, and was usually offered only to debtors who could find friends to stand surety for ⁹ Numerous technical guides to those portions of the law of debt of potential interest and advantage to debtors were published in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Two outstandingly informative examples are the Debtor’s Pocket Guide (1776) and R. Dorset Neale, The Prisoner’s Guide; Every Debtor his own Lawyer, 3rd edn (London, 1813). ¹⁰ A friendly action could be dropped at any time, of course. When John Howard toured the prisons of England and Wales in the 1770s and 1780s he was told by a number of gaolers of the significant proportion of their prisoners who moved in and out of prison apparently at their own convenience. See, for example, J. Howard, Account of the Principal Lazarettos (Warrington, 1789), 186. ¹¹ Lineham, ‘The campaign to abolish imprisonment for debt’, 31. The act in question is 1 Geo. III c.17. The compulsive clause was repealed 2 Geo. III c.2. ¹² The mode of obtaining both the ‘day rules’ and the privilege of the Rules in the early nineteenth century is discussed in PP (1814–15) iv, 537, 635. Eighteenth-century practice was the same. ‘Day rules’—formal permission to make a trip out of the prison—were available only during the legal terms. In 1790, the court of King’s Bench ruled that prisoners should only be allowed three day rules a term and that the extent of the rules should be narrowed. See The Debtor and Creditor’s Assistant (London, 1793), 9–10. See also n. 34.

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their debts. In the King’s Bench the system of allowing debtors to live outside the prison was more extensively developed than anywhere else. Several square miles around the prison, called ‘the Rules’, was designated as the area in which prisoners might settle. Prisoners living in the Rules could wander freely within the area, but were not supposed to go outside it. As many as one-third of all debtors committed to the King’s Bench at one time were settled in the Rules.¹³ The privilege of the Rules was especially sought after by tradesmen committed for debt, who hoped, by setting up in business again, to provide themselves with a living income.¹⁴ As prisoners, such tradesmen were not liable for arrest for debt, but presumably they would not have been able to get much credit. Both in the Rules and the prison itself, debtors called meetings and negotiated with their creditors; they also sought legal advice. They might consult any of a number of debtors’ handbooks, published throughout the eighteenth century, which strove both to instruct debtors in the law of debt (particularly those portions which they might invoke in their own defence) and to teach them survival tactics for prison life.¹⁵ In addition, debtors’ needs were served by ‘gaol lawyers’ and by others with legal knowledge (such as former bailiffs, prisoners who were themselves lawyers, or even the prison staff ), who provided a minor service industry centred on the London prisons. Such ‘gaol lawyers’ provided instruction in techniques of manipulating the law to the creditor’s loss; they also contributed a sophisticated legitimating rhetoric to debtor activities.¹⁶ These services helped create a ‘debtor ethos’ in prisons. Debtor communities developed their own notions of legitimacy which were often at odds with those of creditors. Because it was possible for debtors to do much to advance their own interests within a legal framework, many of them insisted that they had the greatest respect for property and propriety, even as they fought against surrendering to the claims made upon them. Many debtors were prepared to make an even stronger case for their activities. They argued that the state of the law of debt was such that creditors were able to make an arbitrary assault on property and liberty. Their own efforts to resist such monstrous power were, by contrast, a vindication of the spirit of English law.¹⁷ ¹³ See, for example, TNA KB 1/17/2, Hil. 1768, no. 2, unnumbered (petition of King’s Bench prisoners). ¹⁴ TNA KB 1/21/6 Trin. 1779, no. 1, 68 (petition of King’s Bench prisoners), notes the especial desire of distressed tradesmen to obtain the liberty of the Rules. ¹⁵ See n. 9. ¹⁶ For a hostile account of gaol lawyers, see A Companion for Debtors and Prisoners, and advice to Creditors, in Ten Letters (London, 1699), 31–7. The name ‘gaol lawyer’ was usually a term of opprobrium. Richard Dorset Neale, author of the early nineteenth-century Prisoner’s Guide, however, announced that he had ‘attained the summit of his ambition . . . in being instrumental to the release of many worthy, but unhappy debtors’. He was, he said, ‘content to bear the appellation of ‘‘the Gaol Lawyer’’ ’ (Prisoner’s Guide, pp. iii–iv). ¹⁷ The ‘debtor ethos’ is expressed in many of the written productions of debtors. Thus, for a histrionic account of the debtor as victim, see M. Barrell, The Captive (London, 1790). In


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This ‘debtor ethos’ derived a certain amount of support from the sympathy that the public at large extended to debtors.¹⁸ For a number of reasons eighteenthcentury public opinion never entirely reconciled itself to the fate of the debtor. Ubiquitous credit meant that almost every Englishman was a potential candidate for imprisonment for debt. It was recognized that debtors were not always to blame for their insolvency: some suffered through accidents of fire or theft, trade or health, or even from the vindictive action of an enemy who had chosen to exploit a debt unfairly. And the notion that the blameless were subjected to what appeared to be punishment (though in law it was not) caused some disquiet. In consequence, giving food and clothing to poor debtors was a favourite work of eighteenth-century charity,¹⁹ and some of the charitable even paid off the debts of minor debtors, a project which was institutionalized in the 1770s with the foundation of the Society for the Discharge and Relief of Persons Imprisoned for Small Debts, known as the Thatched House Society.²⁰ Such interventions were not only privately sponsored. From the late sixteenth century first the Crown, and then Parliament, made efforts to speed the discharge of imprisoned debtors by setting up commissions to investigate individual cases and to force settlements between debtor and creditor.²¹ Between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, parliamentary intervention chiefly took the form of a series of temporary relief or insolvency acts.²² These ordered Justices of the Peace in each county to form a special commission on a named date, to invite applications in the form of schedules of assets from all debtors imprisoned (on mesne or final process) at some other named date (previous to the passage of the act), and to discharge all those who appeared to have given an honest account of themselves. Creditors of the debtors discharged could then proceed against debtors’ property, as listed in their schedules, but were not allowed to return them to prison for the same debts (Figure 6.2). By the 1770s such acts pro-creditor accounts, the adoption by debtors of a hostile attitude to the law of debt, and to those who made use of it, is described as the ‘corrupting’ effect of a gaol. ¹⁸ Sympathy for the imprisoned debtor is evident in many eighteenth-century newspaper reports, and also in such novels as Henry Fielding’s Amelia. As Peter Lineham remarks in his thesis (p. 77), the hero of an eighteenth-century novel is much more likely to suffer imprisonment for debt than the villain. ¹⁹ The Biblical injunction to visit those in prison was commonly invoked in the eighteenth century in favour of debtors, rarely in favour of criminal prisoners. ²⁰ For the ‘Thatched House Society’ see especially [J. Nield], An Account of the Rise, Progress and Present State of the Society for the Discharge and Relief of Persons Imprisoned for Small Debts throughout England (London, 1796), and Lineham, ‘The Campaign to Abolish Imprisonment for Debt’, 81–101, 110, 140. ²¹ The earliest relief legislation for debtors is discussed in P. Shaw, ‘The Position of Thomas Dekker in Jacobean Prison Literature’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, lxii 2 (1947) 372–3n. Interregnum measures are discussed in the several histories of interregnum law reform, e.g. D. Veall, The Popular Movement for Law Reform (Oxford, 1970), 146–51. ²² The first post-Restoration Insolvency Act was in 1670. In the later eighteenth century, insolvency acts were passed in 1755, 1761, 1765, 1769, 1772, 1774, 1776, 1778, 1781, 1794, 1795, and 1797.

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Inferior Politics Creditor brings suit

Writ for arrest issued

Summons issued

Mesne process

Debtor evades arrest

Debtor arrested

Debtor goes to prison

Creditor drops suit

Debtor takes Insolvency Act

Debtor supersedable

Creditor brings suit against debtor'sproperty

Debtor puts up bail

Debtor pays debt

Creditor drops suit

Debtor pays debt

Creditor drops suit

Debtor pays debt

Suit comes to trial

Decided pro debtor

Decided pro creditor

Creditor proceeds against debtor's property

Creditor proceeds against debtor's body Final process

by seizing it

by having sheriff auction it

Debtor in prison

Debtor pays debt

Debtor takes Insolvency Act

Debtor takes Lords Act

Creditor brings suit against debtor's property

Creditor brings suit against debtor's property

Debtor remains in prison

Figure 6.2. The legal process for the collection of debts: opportunities for the debtor.


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were being passed every other year, and hundreds of debtors were discharged under every act.²³ Conceived as charitable gestures these acts were worthy enough; as the policy of a sovereign legislature, however, they were curiously half-hearted measures. Revealing concern with the inadequacies of the debt law, they yet restricted themselves to tampering with some of its consequences. No doubt Parliament shunned radical interference with the sacred corpus of English law; it is also possible that the half-heartedness of parliamentary intervention was finely judged: because only imprisoned debtors were relieved, and then only irregularly, the basic system of threat and coercion was left intact for creditors to employ as they saw fit. Far from being a period of great reform in the debt laws, the late eighteenth century saw a stern pro-creditor reaction, marked by the temporary cessation of insolvency acts.²⁴ Much creditor opinion was hostile to the acts, which were seen as increasing the opportunity for debtors to exploit the law to their own advantage. Thus significant numbers of debtors were said to have themselves put in prison by friendly actions in anticipation of insolvency acts, thereby acquiring immunity from imprisonment for accumulated debts. In the 1780s hostile sentiment temporarily triumphed: between 1781 and 1793 all insolvency acts proposed in Parliament were either abandoned when Parliament was prorogued or went down to defeat in the Lords.²⁵ The results were not as catastrophic as might have been predicted—the prison population continued to turn over at a tolerable rate—but nonetheless the acts were ultimately resumed under the ardent championship of certain MPs who had associated themselves with the debtors’ cause.²⁶ Insolvency acts were significant to debtors because they provided the means by which many of them were able to regain their freedom. They were also significant in other ways. First, they encouraged debtors to see themselves as suffering under abused power, because they apparently provided evidence that Parliament was not happy with the way creditors were using the legal process. Second, they drew the attention of debtors towards Parliament as a fulcrum of change. From the late seventeenth century, year after year, debtors in all the larger debtors’ prisons in England bombarded Parliament with petitions for insolvency acts, sometimes making suggestions for the inclusion of specific provisions.²⁷ ²³ After 1711, debtors seeking release under insolvency acts were required to publish their names in the London Gazette in order to avert their creditors. Not all debtors who sought release were released; nonetheless, these lists provide the most easily accessible indication of numbers making use of the acts. Lists of those actually discharged were drawn up by the Quarter Sessions justices. Some such lists of King’s Bench prisoners are preserved in the Surrey RO, QS 3/2. ²⁴ Lineham, ‘The Campaign to Abolish Imprisonment for Debt’, 112–15. ²⁵ CJ xxix–lxvii; LJ xxxvii. The fate of insolvency legislation is easily traced through journal indexes. ²⁶ Lineham, ‘The Campaign to Abolish Imprisonment for Debt’, 142–54. ²⁷ For a detailed account of an early petitioning campaign, see M. Pitt, The Cry of the Oppressed (London, 1691). Petitions from debtors in the later eighteenth century may be traced in the indexes of the Commons Journals.

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The protests against imprisonment for debt that emerged from the 1770s onwards took up the ideas and rhetoric of nationally resurgent radicalism, but also drew on this long heritage of prisoner activity and resistance to the debt law. The sense of grievance which underpinned debtors’ protests was never nurtured in isolation: it thrived on a highly ambivalent public attitude towards the law, and drew sustenance from the ambiguities and complexity of the law itself. These circumstances sustained the imprisoned debtor’s belief that he had an enduring legitimate grievance; they also, paradoxically, maintained his morale in circumstances of considerable adversity. THE KING’S BENCH PRISON: PRISONERS A N D AU T H O R I T Y All the prisoners in the King’s Bench prison were, without exception, prisoners of the court of King’s Bench; the vast majority were debtors, prosecuted on the ‘plea’ (civil) side of the court. The remainder were products of the ‘Crown side’, or had been committed for contempt of court. These occasionally included felons on appeal from the lower courts, but frequently such difficult prisoners were sent to Newgate; those allowed to remain were minor offenders whose presence made little impact on prison life.²⁸ Debtors were committed to the King’s Bench prison at the rate of several hundred a year, the annual total rising steeply between 1760 and 1780 and levelling off for two decades thenceforth at a new high level (Figure 6.3).²⁹ The total population of the prison varied widely according to circumstance. Very large numbers were generally confined before an insolvency act, while hundreds were released when the act came into operation. Figures for the total population were reported occasionally; some of these are set forth in Table 6.1. These figures give the total population of prisoners, not that of the prison, which was substantially greater since it included many prisoners’ families. In 1791 it was reported that, of the 570 prisoners, about 340 had wives and children living in the prison.³⁰ ²⁸ For the jurisdiction of the court of King’s Bench, see W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, 1768) 41–3. The court had the power to commit to any prison in the land, but prisoners who actually appeared before the court were usually committed to the King’s Bench prison. Debtors arrested in the country were usually committed to the nearest local gaol until their suits came to trial; they could choose to transfer to the London prison even at the mesne process stage of the proceedings, however. The instrument for effecting such a transfer was the writ of habeas corpus. ²⁹ Duffy, Bankruptcy and Insolvency, Table 2.2, gives annual commitment totals, derived from the prison books. ³⁰ CJ lxvii, 647. J. Howard, in State of the Prisons (Warrington, 1777), 198, gives a slightly more detailed picture. According to him, the 395 prisoners in the prison at one point in 1776 had between them 279 wives and 725 children, a total of 1,004 dependents, of whom he estimated approximately two-thirds lived within the walls. Sources for Table 6.1 are as follows: TNA KB 1/17/2, Hil. 1768, no. 2 unnumbered (petition of King’s Bench prisoners); Howard, State of the

1000

1654 2203

Number of prisoners committed

800

600

400

200

0 1760

1770

1780

1790

1800

Figure 6.3. Annual commitments to the King’s Bench prison 1760–1800. Source: Based on calculations made by Ian P. H. Duffy from the prison books. Note: Freak commitment totals for the years 1780–1 are explained by the destruction of the prison by Gordon rioters in the summer of 1780. While the prison was being rebuilt, all prisoners lived in the Rules. Being a prisoner for debt under these conditions was a sufficiently attractive option for many to choose to have themselves committed.

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Inferior Politics Table 6.1. Total population of prisoners, King’s Bench prison Year 1768 1774 1776 1782 (i) 1782 (ii) 1783 1787 1788 1795

Total 571 424 444 457 515 582 430 444 570

Living in prison 330 324 364 450 485 532 370 340 500

Living in Rules 241 100 80 7 30 50 60 104 70

A sketchy social analysis of the prison population was provided by the prisoners themselves in 1795.³¹ They estimated that there were then 800 prisoners, whom they distinguished into occupational groups in a ranking which seems to reflect the social hierarchy (Table 6.2). Their list suggests the range of the prison population. A category surprisingly not identified, and hard to locate within this table, is that of the professional men—lawyers, clergymen, estate agents, journalists—who seem to have been present in fair numbers. Table 6.2. King’s Bench prisoners’ analysis of the composition of the prison population, 1795 Occupation 60 military and naval 40 mercantile 50 manufacturers 110 mechanics 160 agriculturians 150 trade 200 labourers

Percentage 8 5 7 14 20 19 25

Prisons, 3rd edn (Warrington, 1784), 243, and Account of the Principal Lazarettos, 130; CJ lxvii, 651. For other accounts and estimates, see TNA TS 11/73/228; TNA KB 1/17/5, Hil. 1769, no. 1, unnumbered (affidavit of William Bingley); Guildhall Library, London, MS 659.1, ‘Copy of a letter sent to the Right Honourable Lord Mansfield December 26 1775 . . .’: TNA KB 1/24/4/1–2 Trin. 1784, no. 2, unnumbered (memorial of 422 prisoners, and petition of 552 prisoners), and TNA 30/8/149, f. 183. It is notable that the prisoners, on one or two occasions, estimated their numbers as in the 770–800 range—unfortunately with no greater degree of precision. It is possible therefore that the variations in the number of prisoners were somewhat greater than this table might suggest. ³¹ Chatham Papers, TNA 30/8/149, ff. 182–3.


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Almost all the prisoners for debt were men. Married women were not legally responsible for their own debts; the few women debtors were either widows or single, independent women. John Howard, the prison reformer, who recorded the total prisoner population in 1779 and again in 1782, estimated male-tofemale ratios of 19:1 and 25:1 respectively.³² The presence of many prisoners’ wives within the prison, of course, ensured that women were not so greatly outnumbered as might appear from these figures. The prison itself consisted of a number of brick buildings standing in an open yard which was enclosed by a high brick wall (Figures 6.4 and 6.5).³³ Located on the southern outskirts of London, it stood little more than a mile south of the Thames, by the side of the main road leading south from London Bridge. The Rules of the prison encompassed the whole of St George’s Fields, and a small part of Southwark.³⁴ The site of the prison had been chosen in the 1750s for its healthy qualities, the hope being that prisoners would benefit from the fresh air.³⁵ By the end of the century, however, roads had begun to branch out through the fields and the metropolis to extend around the prison. In general plan the King’s Bench was a ‘free prison’, almost without internal barriers. Prisoners were able to move from one part to another as they pleased. The major part of the buildings was taken up with the prisoners’ accommodation which was not especially prison-like, except inasmuch as large blocks of rooms were not at this time common in London. Most of the prisoners’ rooms were contained in a large dormitory block. A small group of rooms was set aside for Crown prisoners; the rest, reserved for debtors, were various in quality: those under the shadow of the prison wall, the least desirable, were called the ‘commonside’ rooms (and the prisoners who lived in them, commonside prisoners), the remainder were ‘master’s side rooms’ inhabited by master’s side prisoners. A dozen especially luxurious rooms were set apart in a special building called the State House. Rents were charged for all these rooms at moderate rates set by the court of King’s Bench: 1s. a week for commonside rooms, 1s. 6d . for ³² Howard, State of the Prisons, appendix, TNA 283. ³³ Several prison reformers wrote generally critical accounts of the prison as a physical environment. See W. Smith, State of the Gaols in London, Westminster and the Borough of Southwark (London, 1776), 43–61; Howard, State of the Prisons, 196–201; and Report of the Subcommittee (of the Society for Giving Effect to His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality) respecting the Improvements which have lately been made in the Prisons and Houses of Correction of England and Wales (London, 1790), 19. The last report did not note that any marked improvements had been made. See also the later editions of Howard. On the other hand, for a highly enthusiastic description of the prison, see The Debtor and Creditor’s Assistant, 1–55. ³⁴ The Rules of the King’s Bench prison were generously defined in the early eighteenth century: see A Report from the Committee appointed to enquire into the State of the Goals [sic] of this kingdom. Relating to the King’s Bench Prison (London, 1730), 8. In 1790 the court of King’s Bench redefined them more narrowly, and ruled all taverns out of bounds. The rule of court is reproduced in CJ xlvii, 665. ³⁵ For the investigations which led to a parliamentary vote to finance the reconstruction of the prison, and for the early plans, see CJ xxvi, 437, 505–13, 680, 764, 921.

Coach house and stabling

Yard

Passage

Bakehouse

Passage

Commonside rooms Chapel

Coach house Dung pit Garden

Coffeehouse

Larder and scullery

Tap Second lobby

Marshal’s and deputy marshal’s houses Yard

coals First lobby

Yard

Passage

Brace Racket ground (‘Parade’)

Steps State House

Entrance yard WC

Garden

Public kitchen

Master’s side rooms

Passage

Strong room

Carriage-way

Figure 6.4. A nineteenth-century plan of the King’s Bench prison. Source: Reproduced by permission of The National Archives, ref. WORK38/17.

0

Feet

100


243

Figure 6.5. Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin, ‘King’s Bench prison’: handcoloured engraving and acquatint, illustration to Rudolph Ackermann, Microcosm of London (London, 1808). Source: Reproduced by permission of the Guildhall Library, City of London

master’s side rooms, 2s. 6d . for the State House.³⁶ (A London artisan paid for his rent at this time about 2s. 6d. a week.³⁷) Every prisoner had a key to his own room, which he could furnish as he pleased. In the prison as originally constructed there were twelve rooms for Crown prisoners, twenty-four on the commonside, eighty-four on the master’s side, and twelve in the State House: 132 in all, billed as accommodation for 200 prisoners. New buildings of the 1770s added 108 more rooms; later in the century still more were added. In the 1790s the standard size of the rooms was reported as eleven feet by fifteen feet. The number of rooms in the prison must almost always have been smaller than the number of prisoners. Prisoners frequently shared rooms, therefore, often sleeping two to a bed, also a common practice in ³⁶ The table of fees drawn up by the court of King’s Bench in 1760, which pertained for the rest of the century, is reproduced in PP (1814–15) iv, 775. ³⁷ M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1966), 100.

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London rented rooms at this time. Prisoners were not evenly distributed among rooms, however, and there were usually rooms that contained half a dozen or more people. Overcrowding was, of course, exacerbated by the presence of many prisoners’ families. When the prison was very full overcrowding was so acute that many prisoners had to sleep on tables in the prison ‘tap’, on the pews of the chapel, on staircases, or on benches in the open air.³⁸ Other buildings in the prison performed various functions for the support of the community. The kitchen, taphouse (the marshal held a licence to keep a public house), coffeehouse, bakehouse, and chapel were arranged around the main street of the prison (sometimes called King street). A large open space, known as the yard or the ‘parade’, contained the prison pumps, and served as the scene for all kinds of sporting activity, most notably skittles and ‘rackets’. Early in the century the prison yard also contained a set of stocks. It is not clear, however, that any were set up in the new prison. There was, however, a room called the ‘strong room’ set aside for the confinement of unruly prisoners, especially those who had tried to escape. The prison was surrounded by a high brick wall, topped by a fringe of spikes, called a chevaux de frise. (The rooms on the top floor of the dormitory building were the only ones high enough to give a view over the wall to the ‘Surry and Kentish hills’ beyond, and were especially coveted for that reason.) The wall was punctuated in two places: once by a massive pair of iron gates, which could be opened to admit building materials (it was through these gates that the Gordon rioters battered their way into the prison in 1780), and once, the more normal entrance, by an arched gateway, in the base of which was the office, called the lobby, of the junior prison officers, the turnkeys. During the day, when the gate was left open, the turnkeys sat in the lobby, watching the flow of prisoners in and out of the prison—debtors living in the Rules, debtors out on day trips, wives of prisoners, children running messages, friends of prisoners, hawkers, prostitutes, and tourists. Only by being acquainted with the faces of all the prisoners were the turnkeys able to prevent escapes; new prisoners were accordingly brought into the lobby to be studied. Even so a prisoner with a little ingenuity could often make his way out unobserved.³⁹ Attempts to regulate the entrance of commodities were similarly imperfect: spirits, for example, were supposedly banned, but were smuggled in under women’s skirts, or in things ‘painted like cheeses’.⁴⁰ A rule of the prison forbad the importation of arms, but it seems unlikely that any serious attempt was made to enforce this.⁴¹ Some gentlemen still wore swords as a regular part of their dress ³⁸ On overcrowding, see, for example, TNA KB 1/17/2, Hil. 1768 no. 2, unnumbered (petition of King’s Bench prisoners), and St. James’ Chronicle, 21 February 1769. ³⁹ For example, Public Advertiser, 13 June 1785. ⁴⁰ PP (1814–15) iv, 592. ⁴¹ TNA KB 21/38 ff. 225–6, rule 1 (1759).


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and did not expect to have to surrender them. There is also evidence of prisoners who had not only swords but duelling pistols as well.⁴² At night, when the turnkeys left the lobby, the gate was closed and left unattended till morning, so that, even if a prisoner fell ill, there was no way of sending for medical assistance.⁴³ Beyond the lobby was a small courtyard, at the end of which another arched gateway led out into the street. Within the courtyard were a number of houses intended for senior prison officers. One of these, the house of the ‘clerk of the papers’, was the prison clerical office, where all new commitments were entered into the prison books, where discharges were reported, and where all prisoners had to go to check that all their debts were settled before they might leave the prison. The clerical office was an important link between the court of King’s Bench and the prison, and all kinds of legal business were transacted there. Other houses were provided for the marshal and deputy marshal. They were described as ‘very good houses’ but nevertheless the officers repeatedly complained that they were too small for married men with families, and generally avoided keeping residence when they could.⁴⁴ The prison officers constituted one of the two tiers of formal authority that were exercised over King’s Bench prisoners.⁴⁵ They manned the prison and were answerable to their superiors, the judges of the court of King’s Bench, with whom final authority in the prison rested. In modern prisons the prison officers are assigned the task of prison government: as an essential duty they are expected to penetrate prison society with ambitious systems of regulation and control. In the eighteenth century the task of government was not clearly assigned to prison officers, whose role was the more limited one of providing a service to the courts by fetching and carrying prisoners and by keeping them in safe custody. Prison officers, who were generally few in number, were not well equipped to keep up a close surveillance of prison life. In the King’s Bench prison, in accordance with this pattern, the officers constituted a service arm of the court of King’s Bench rather than a prison government. Apart from the clerk of the papers and the turnkeys already mentioned, the officers comprised a marshal, who was appointed by the Lord Chief Justice of the court, and who had overall responsibility to the court for ⁴² TNA KB 1/23/5 Mich. 1783, 38 (affidavit of Noel et al.). ⁴³ CJ xlvii, 660. ⁴⁴ On the absenteeism of prison officers, see CJ xlvii, 655; TNA KB 1/27/4 Ea. 1792, 34 (affidavit of Hill and Young); and KB 1/43/6 Mich. 1821, no. 1, 1 (affidavit of William Jones). ⁴⁵ The account of the prison government presented here is compiled from a mass of small pieces of information, contained mainly in the affidavit files of the court of King’s Bench ( TNA KB 1). There are some observations on the workings of prison government in The Debtor and Creditor’s Assistant, but there is no extended eighteenth-century account. The report of the committee appointed in 1815 to look into the state of the London debtors’ prisons (PP (1814–15) iv) contains much useful information but must be employed with care when an earlier period is under consideration: the character of the prison government did change in some respects between 1800 and 1815.

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Inferior Politics

the safe keeping of the prisoners; a deputy marshal, who headed the turnkeys; and four ‘tipstaffs’ who escorted the prisoners back and forth between court and prison. The duties of the marshal and tipstaffs kept them in attendance as much upon the court as upon the prison. Only the deputy marshal and the turnkeys were in close and continuous contact with the prisoners. Numbering only three or four men and faced with a prison population of several hundreds, they concentrated their efforts on maintaining prison security by control of the prison perimeter. Even considered solely as a bureaucratic and administrative arm of the court, the King’s Bench prison regime left much to be desired. The officers habitually discharged their duties in a less than assiduous way. To help them in their work, they all employed assistants, who ranked as their personal servants. Frequently these assistants were left to do the work, while the officers absented themselves. The marshal erred in these respects as much as the junior officers. When he did attempt to exercise his authority to enforce a closer attention to duty, he was frequently not heeded, and sometimes defied.⁴⁶ These flaws and imperfections in the prison regime were deeply rooted. They were in large part the consequence of the prison’s financial arrangements. Because there were no public funds made generally available for the support of prisons in the eighteenth century, and because the King’s Bench had no local government base to draw upon, it was not possible to provide the prison officers with salaries. They were expected to support themselves by means of fees which they were directed to collect from the prisoners on commitment and discharge, and in return for specific services. The scale of fees was regulated by the court of King’s Bench. The incomes that prison officers derived from fees in the later eighteenth century seem to have been comfortable, even substantial, ranging from the turnkey’s £50 a year upwards.⁴⁷ ⁴⁶ On conflicts between the marshal and junior officers, see especially Middlesex Journal, 18 November 1769; TNA KB 1/20/3 Hil. 1776, no. 1, 6 (affidavit of Richard Curtis), KB 1/27/4 Ea. 1792, 34 (affidavit of Hill and Young). ⁴⁷ For the scale of fees see n. 36 above. It is not easy to determine the incomes of prison officers. The marshal’s income is probably to be reckoned in the thousands of pounds. He reported the sources of his income to a parliamentary committee in 1791 (CJ x/vii, 657) but gave no overall figure. In 1750, according to an itemized estimate drawn up by some hostile prisoners, the marshal was drawing an income of some £3,752 from a population of 200 prisoners—a figure that did not include the profits of the day rules (Guildhall Library, London, MS 659.1, ‘Original affadavits complaining of the marshal’s treattment’, 16). The marshal himself in 1815 reported that his gross income for the past few years had averaged £6,192 per annum, and his net income, £4,462 (see PP (1814–15) iv, 778, and J. Wade, A Treatise of the Police and Crimes of the Metropolis (1829; reprinted New York, 1972), 264). It is probable that the general trend in the marshal’s income was upwards, since certainly the number of prisoners was increasing. As for the other officers, when, in the 1790s, the marshal began to pay salaries to his turnkeys he paid them at the rate of one guinea a week (Guildhall MS 659.1: ‘An account of all the fees & c.1791’); it is probable, however, that the turnkeys’ income was augmented by other perquisites. In 1815, the marshal estimated the profits of the clerk of the papers as £600–£700 per annum. At the same time, the deputy marshal reported his profits as £350–£400 per annum (PP (1814–15) iv, 779).


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The effect of this system was not to motivate the officers to extraordinary assiduity, but rather to endow them with a sense of independence, which encouraged them to discharge their duties by their own lights and to ignore, and even resent, external directives. Deriving their income directly from their work, they expected to have control over the way in which they carried out their duties, and to be immune from criticism so long as the tasks incontestably annexed to their offices were performed. Their attitude was in fact proprietorial: they ran their offices as if they had been private businesses, and the King’s Bench judges, though they often lamented the consequences of the officers’ attitude, actually buttressed it by recognizing their rights in office as freehold property rights.⁴⁸ Prison security concerned the marshal more than any other of the prison officers. By the terms of an ancient statute designed to curb irresponsibility in gaolers, he was liable to be sued by the creditor of any debtor who escaped.⁴⁹ In the later eighteenth century he was paying out a certain amount on this account every year.⁵⁰ Naturally he was concerned to keep his liabilities to a minimum, and he attempted to enforce responsibility on his fellow officers by demanding from each a bond in a considerable sum, payable if their carelessness gave rise to any expense.⁵¹ This ought to have ensured effective security, but the officers had, in this sphere as in every other, a keen sense of what they could get away with. They knew that many creditors would not sue; they knew, moreover, that they had a right of recapture. While they could not afford to have large numbers of prisoners escaping, they did not feel compelled to maintain absolute security.⁵² The marshal, more mindful of escapes, employed a number of watchmen at his own expense to walk around the prison at night, inside and outside the walls, and prisoners attempting escape were sometimes prevented by the watchmen’s vigilance.⁵³ But even the watchmen were not wholly concerned with security. They were also supposed to watch for fire and to cry the hours, like other eighteenth-century watchmen. And, also like other eighteenth-century watchmen, they seem to have spent much of their time asleep. ⁴⁸ See, for example, Sone v. Ashton (1762) 3 Burr. 1287, in English Reports, xcvii. ⁴⁹ Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 242–3. ⁵⁰ In 1815, the warden of the Fleet prison, a prison very similar to the King’s Bench, told a parliamentary committee that he only bothered to contest at law claims of £200 or more: PP (1814–15) iv. ⁵¹ On the bonds furnished as sureties for junior officers, see, for example, [William Penrice], The Extraordinary Case of William Penrice (London, 1768), 13, and TNA KB 1/27/6 Ea. 1792, 59 (affidavit of William Milward). ⁵² The laxity of the prison’s security precautions was most fully revealed by the inquiries of the 1815 parliamentary committee, whose members were prompted to probe into the subject by an incident which marked their visit to the prison: they learnt from conversation with the prisoners of the escape of a particularly notorious prisoner (the radical politician Lord Cochrane, imprisoned on charges of fraud) of which the prison officers proved to be unaware (PP (1814–15) iv, passim, especially 542). ⁵³ For example, Public Advertiser, 18 June 1779.

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The absence of public funding, which made it necessary to reward prison officers by means of fees, also made it necessary to tap private sources to pay for the costs of prison maintenance and for the provision of essential services to the prisoners. A common eighteenth-century solution to this problem was to farm the prison out to the gaoler, who was made personally responsible for prison upkeep and for the provision of services, and who was allowed to recoup his expenses by charging the prisoners for what he made available to them. In the King’s Bench prison the marshal performed this role. He received not only a portion of the prisoners’ commitment and discharge fees, but also all rents from prison rooms and (of more importance) all profits from the prison tap.⁵⁴ His income from these sources amounted to several thousand pounds a year,⁵⁵ wealth sufficient to make him quite a substantial figure in the county of Surrey, a commissioner of the land tax, and sometimes a member of grand juries at the Assizes.⁵⁶ From his income the marshal paid the basic expenses of the prison: taxes and the cost of minor repair works.⁵⁷ Of the other officers, only the turnkeys were much concerned with the life of the prison. They acted as the marshal’s agents for most purposes; probably they collected rents for him. They also, characteristically, put some money into prison management on their own account. William Penrice, who was a turnkey in the 1760s, paid for the erection of the chevaux de frise on top of the prison wall, after a number of prisoners had escaped. Presumably he wanted to reduce the risk of his being charged for the debts of further escapees. He also paid for a new building to be put up within the prison, apparently as a speculative venture, for he was able to charge exceptionally high prices for his especially luxurious accommodation.⁵⁸ It was also a general practice among the turnkeys to furnish and let out at high rents the rooms they were assigned for their own use within the prison. But all these activities were marginal, making no more than a minor contribution to prison life.⁵⁹ Services that the prison officers themselves did not wish to undertake, such as catering, were sometimes farmed by the marshal to a variety of individuals and by a variety of arrangements.⁶⁰ The keeper of the tap, for example, who sold beer for the marshal at the ordinary market rate of 31/2d. a pint was allowed to keep a portion of the profits. (By 1815, the tapster’s profits were estimated at between £900 and £950 a year.) The coffeehouse keeper, by contrast, kept all his profits, paying only a fixed annual rent. The prison baker also paid an annual rent, and a number of tradesmen—butchers, for example—paid a nominal sum for the ⁵⁴ CJ xlviii, 657. ⁵⁵ This seems to be indicated by Sone v. Ashton (1762) 3 Burr. 1287. ⁵⁶ See, for example, for the marshal Benjamin Thomas TNA ASSI 31/12 (Surrey Summer Assizes 1779, Grand Jury list), and 31 Geo. III c.23. ⁵⁷ Guildhall MS 659.1 (‘An account of all the fees & c.1791’). ⁵⁸ [Penrice], The Extraordinary Case, 9. ⁵⁹ PP (1814–15) iv, 609. ⁶⁰ PP (1814–15) iv, 589.


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right to keep stalls within the prison. Some people, such as the prison cook, were allowed to operate rent-free. Many of the catering franchises and minor employments in the prison were granted to prisoners and ex-prisoners and made up an important part of the prisoners’ economy discussed in the next section. The commercial organization of the prison had both advantages and disadvantages for prisoners. Chief among the disadvantages must be reckoned the general indifference of prison officers for their prisoners’ welfare. Only those wants which could be backed up with cash were likely to be regarded. An advantage, on the other hand, was that, by means of various small employments, prisoners did have the opportunity of making a living within the prison. And, having cash at their disposal, they were able to procure whatever appealed to their taste with little interference. Moreover, prison officers, who regarded their prisoners in part as their clients, were unlikely to be harsh and rigorous in demeanour. The ambiguous character of the relationship between prisoners and prison officers, and the fact that those of the officers who had most contact with the prisoners—the turnkeys—had often come from the ranks of the prisoners themselves, helped to blur the distinction between prisoners and staff.⁶¹ Because the cost of running the prison was in fact largely borne by the prisoners themselves, and because the prison officers’ income came out of the prisoners’ pockets, it was always possible that the prisoners might turn against a system which exploited them in order to finance their own oppression. But the impression is that prisoners in most instances accepted the commercial system as inevitable, and paid for their food and drink and lodging with no more resentment than they would have felt at paying for them in outside life. Even fees seem to have been paid without violent objection. The explanation for this attitude probably lies in the relative financial ease of prison officers in the later part of the eighteenth century.⁶² Being comfortable enough, prison officers saw no need to defy the price-setting efforts of the court and screw up prices and fees beyond the limits of tolerance—a mistake they had sometimes made in earlier years. The one part of the commercial relationship which did remain highly explosive was that which concerned beer. The marshal held a licence to sell beer within the prison, and the tap had a monopoly of sale. It was possible for prisoners to ⁶¹ For turnkeys rising from the ranks of prisoners, see, for example, [Penrice], The Extraordinary Case, 5–6. A large proportion of all the turnkeys appointed in the later eighteenth century first entered the prison as prisoners. Not uncommonly, they were appointed even before their debts were discharged. ⁶² Until the mid-eighteenth century, the position of the prison officers had been much more financially precarious; from the early seventeenth century, the right to make appointments to all offices in the prison had lain in the hands of mortgagees, who had rack-rented the offices at stiff rates. The suspicion that financial pressure on the officers led them to engage in various corrupt and exploitative practices prompted parliamentary inquiries in 1696 and 1729. In 1753, Parliament had voted to compel the mortgagees to surrender their rights, in return for £10,500, provided from public funds (CJ xxvi, 505–13, 680–94, 764).

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send out of the prison for beer, but the turnkeys discouraged this practice as a nuisance and a threat to prison security. The prisoners, however, were suspicious of this explanation, believing rather that the marshal was jealous of commercial rivals and intent upon maximizing his own profit. When the beer at the tap was of especially poor quality, the prisoners’ resentment with their monopolist gaoler sometimes exploded into violence. In 1771, for example, the prisoners, claiming that the strong beer was unduly weakened, destroyed over fifty barrels of beer at the tap. Troubles over beer played at least a part in several of the more serious disturbances of the period.⁶³ Beyond their responsibilities as servants of the court, and as commercial managers of the prison, the prison officers did have some responsibility for, and interest in, the preservation of order within the prison. Although the prison housed a fair-sized community, often of a thousand people or more, it fell outside the normal care of magistrates and constables. The prison officers had a vested interest in ensuring that disorder did not get so far out of hand as to pose a serious threat to their haphazard security arrangements. For the routine maintenance of order and the enforcement of the law within the prison, the marshal was given the authority of a magistrate.⁶⁴ He had the power to commit offenders to the prison strong room, a power which he seems to have exercised most frequently in the case of prisoners who attempted to escape. He could also commit to the local felons’ gaol, the New Gaol, Southwark. This power, as one marshal remarked, was of great service in cooling down hot-headed prisoners. There is no evidence that the marshal ever attempted to provide his prisoners with the full range of a magistrate’s services. Indeed, when prisoners wished to press prosecutions for assault against each other, or to bring charges for marketing offences, they usually sent for some local Southwark magistrate.⁶⁵ Since the marshal almost never set foot within the prison (he would talk to the prisoners in the lobby, but he feared to demean himself by venturing inside), he could not in any case ever have identified trouble for himself, but was always dependent on turnkeys or prisoners bringing him complaints.⁶⁶ The turnkeys were in fact the officers who bore the brunt of the task of preserving order. They played a part within the prison similar to that of the constable on the street. And like most eighteenth-century constables, they were more interested ⁶³ For 1771, see Gentleman’s Magazine, 4 May 1771, and below, pp. 274–5. For other incidents, see TNA KB 1/23/1 Ea. 1782, no. 1, 29 (case of John Dawer and John Frome against various prisoners), 38; 1/23/5 Mich. 1783, 23 (affidavit of James Campbell et al.), 38 (affidavit of Noel et al.); CJ xlvii. 655. ⁶⁴ PP (1814–15) iv, 545. The marshal’s disciplinary powers were defined by rules of court in 1729, reprinted in ibid., 774. ⁶⁵ All legal charges brought against prisoners were noted in the prison books ( TNA PRIS 4). ⁶⁶ PP (1814–15) iv, 573–4, 592. For an interesting account by an ex-turnkey of the problems of preserving order in the prison, see [Penrice], The Extraordinary Case, 6.


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Figure 6.6. Robert Cruickshank, ‘Surrey collegians giving a lift to a limb of the law’: handcoloured engraving and acquatint, illustration to ‘Bernard Blackmantle’, The English Spy (London, 1825). Source: Reproduced by permission of the City of London, London Metropolitan Archives

in dispelling or resolving troubles when they appeared than in enforcing any abstract conception of order. Had the turnkeys been interested in anything more than pacifying the prisoners in the interests of peace and quiet, there was much in the prison that might have attracted their attention. There was much drunkenness and general rowdiness. Gambling, though officially frowned upon, was very popular. Prostitutes frequently came into the prison to ply their trade.⁶⁷ Some prisoners, moreover, were actively engaged in traffic in smuggled goods: a raid in 1779 by revenue officers, backed up by grenadiers, resulted in the seizure of contraband goods ‘to a considerable amount’ (Figure 6.6).⁶⁸ Because of their lack of numbers the turnkeys could only suppress such activities when they had the tacit support of the prison population. Because they lacked both the desire and the capacity to act as a powerful supervisory and coercive force (except in extremis), successful prison government depended upon the consent of the prisoners. Naturally this affected the way in which authority was exercised. It was vital that prison officers acted in ways that were regarded as legitimate by the prisoners and that they were seen so to behave. Consultation, ⁶⁷ PP (1814–15) iv, 575–6. ⁶⁸ Morning Chronicle, 21 June 1779; London Chronicle, 22 June 1779.

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conciliation, mediation: these were the most powerful weapons in the weak armoury of prison government. And all the characteristics of the prison—the attitudes of the officers to their task and their posts, the lack of finance, the system of farming, and the employment of prisoners as turnkeys—served to reinforce such a system. The marshal and his officers knew that if harmony, peace, and good order were to be preserved in the King’s Bench, then they had to develop a good working relationship with the prisoners. They derived their legitimate authority in the prison from their ability to command the support of the prison community, even though they held their offices from the court of King’s Bench. The need to win prisoners’ support did not render the officers totally impotent. The prisoners were usually willing to accept the authority of the officers provided that they acted in a fair and equitable manner and maintained a low profile in prison life. However, attempts to regulate or coerce prisoners were usually regarded, in typical eighteenth-century fashion, as the tyrannical abuse of power and were violently opposed.⁶⁹ Like other citizens, the prisoners of the King’s Bench had a clear idea of the limits beyond which Englishmen should not be pushed around. The authority of the officers was therefore limited, but not entirely invalidated, by the attitudes of the prisoners. If the marshal lost prisoner support and there was trouble in the prison on a large scale, there were several courses of action which he could take.⁷⁰ One, which accorded with the officers’ recognition that conciliation and consent were the basis of viable authority, was to attempt to reason with the prisoners, to discover the source of their anger, and suggest to them some non-violent means of obtaining redress. Magistrates from outside the prison were sometimes imported for this purpose, in the hope that prisoners would see them as impartial arbiters. If this expedient failed, outside help in the form of troops or extra hands might be called in. Such recourse was, however, rare—the marshal had to pay for extra help—and its adoption was always a sign that the harmony and equilibrium between authority and the prisoners had been seriously upset. Troops and extra men often exacerbated the troubles they were brought in to control, because they had no legitimate authority in the eyes of the prisoners. Hostility to the military was, of course, of long standing, and the extra hands were usually bailiffs’ men, thieftakers, or other prison hangers-on—men who inspired little more than the prisoners’ contempt. In circumstances of conflict both the marshal and the prisoners could appeal to the final source of authority over the prison, the court of King’s Bench. The marshal could appeal to the judges’ punitive powers over prisoners. The judges ⁶⁹ For troubles in the prison arising from the prisoners’ wariness of tyrannical excess, see TNA KB 1/27/1 Ea. 1791, no. 1, 122 (affidavits of Richard Pinkard et al.), and for general comment, J. Pearce, A Treatise on the Abuses of the Laws, particularly in Actions by Arrest (London, 1814), 108. ⁷⁰ The report of the 1791 troubles carried in the Public Advertiser, 28–31 May 1791, provides an exceptionally detailed and informative account of a prison riot, of the difficulties prison officers experienced in putting it down, and of the various expedients they adopted. See also below, pp. 275–6.


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claimed jurisdiction over any offence whatsoever which their prisoners might commit. If a prisoner was accused before them, they could order him to be brought into court and, having delivered a solemn peroration, impose a sentence of a few days or weeks in the strong room, or in the New Gaol, Southwark. In the case of more serious offences, which they could try by jury, they might impose sentences of several years in a felons’ gaol. In practice the marshal turned to the judges only in exceptional circumstances, when it seemed necessary to make an example of a prisoner.⁷¹ Prisoners called upon judicial powers more frequently than the marshal, for judicial supervision of the prison meant that they could invoke the judges against the prison officers, and so hope to check officials if they were extortionate or oppressive. Because they recognized the many deficiencies of the prison regime, the judges had offered protection to prisoners over several centuries.⁷² Several passages in the eighteenth-century statutes regulating the relationship between courts and prisons, however, required the judges to perform tasks that they had previously undertaken voluntarily. They were ordered to draw up tables of fees to be paid to prison officers, and exhibit the tables in the prison; to look into charity monies due to prisoners, to see that neither trustees nor prison officers were embezzling them, and to have a table of charities likewise exhibited; and, finally, to ensure that prisoners were not prevented by prison officers from sending out of the prison for furniture or bedding, food or drink. These provisions focused on the difficulties and the opportunities for abuse to which commercial and exploitative arrangements of prison government gave rise. The same statutes ordered the judges to draw up general tables of rules for prison government (again refurbishing an old power); these tables were also to be put on public display.⁷³ ⁷¹ The judges’ powers over the prison, and their right to exercise them or not as they saw fit, were discussed in a series of cases in 1703; see Sutton’s Case, 6 Mod. 91, in English Reports, xxxvii, and at 2 Ld Raym 1005 in ibid., xvii. It is because the judges did claim and exercise judicial powers over their prisoners that so many affidavits relating to upsets in the prison are preserved in the court’s affidavit files ( TNA KB 1). Sentences imposed by the judges are recorded in the court rule book; see, for example, KB 21/43 (entries for Saturday after fifteen days after Easter, Thursday after three weeks after Easter, and Saturday after the morrow of Ascension 1782). When prisoners were removed to other gaols, a note was also made in the prison commitment book; see, for example, for occasions in 1785 and 1791, when prisoners tried to blow up the prison wall with gunpowder, PRIS 4/10, f. 1672, and PRIS 4/12, f. 296. ⁷² See The Oeconomy of the Fleete, A. Jessopp ed., Camden Society Publication, N.S. 25 (Westminster, 1879), 168–71. ⁷³ 2 Geo. II c.22 and 32 Geo. II c.28. These acts substantially repeated the provisions of seventeenth-century legislation: see Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum 1642–60, ed. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, (London, 1911), 753–64 (especially 756–7), and 22–3 Chas. II c.20. The function of legislation in these instances seems to have been essentially hortatory: Parliament was not creating any new responsibilities but merely urging the judges on to discharge their duties. For rules the judges drew up in the eighteenth century, see below pp. 260, 267–8. The acts did provide specific monetary penalties for prison officers failing to comply with court orders. Even before thus specifically empowered to punish, however, the judges had claimed a general disciplinary power over prison officers as over all other servants of the court.

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The official concern to make rules public was a stratagem for dealing with a situation in which, for the lack of any rigorous system of inspection, the burden of ‘pulling up’ the prison officers had inevitably come to rest upon the prisoners. The judges had long appointed, as prison Visitor, a ‘secondary’ or barrister from the Crown Office, who could be reached by the prisoners by letter at any time. He usually responded promptly to complaints, either by visiting the prison himself or by reporting the problem to the court. Once a year, usually on Holy Thursday, the Visitor paid a formal visit to the prison, not to make a tour of inspection, but rather to hold an audience. He invited complaints from all the prisoners, forwarded any written petitions to the judges, and, if he saw the need, made a report himself.⁷⁴ Unquestionably this system was perceived by the prisoners as offering a real service. One prisoner told a parliamentary committee in 1791 how he had been able to combat an extortionate prison officer—a tipstaff who demanded from him an inflated fee—merely with the threat of an appeal to the Crown Office.⁷⁵ The tipstaff had not merely refunded the money, but promised never to try the same trick on another prisoner. Many instances could be cited of prisoners who wrote letters of complaint, or sent petitions to the judges, and received speedy attention and action—not, of course, invariably in their favour.⁷⁶ At the same time it must be observed that the judges had other purposes in mind in offering these services than merely the protection of the prisoner. Even the system of complaints can be seen as part of the law-and-order machinery of the prison—an important part precisely because the repressive component of the machinery was so weak. Because the prison officers had so little power to put down riots when they did arise, it was vitally important for the judges, if they wished ultimately to reinforce authority within the prison, to prevent riots by responding quickly to every complaint, reconciling conflicting parties, and seeing that justice was demonstrably done. The manner in which the prison Visitor performed his duties bears out the court’s emphasis on quelling incipient disorder.⁷⁷ On arriving in prison in response to any complaint, he immediately drew the contending parties together, and lectured them on the virtue and necessity of harmony. Disputes were resolved, ⁷⁴ CJ x/vii, 662. Only two written records of reports made by Visitors over this period have survived: see TNA KB 21/40 (entry for Monday after three weeks after Trinity 1771), and KB 1/29/3 Mich. 1796, no. 2, 96 ( Templer’s report of the state of the prison). ⁷⁵ CJ xlvii, 661. ⁷⁶ Petitions of prisoners are preserved in the affidavit files of the court of King’s Bench ( TNA KB 1). They are most easily traced through the affidavit index (KB 39), a notebook kept by clerks as a record of the fees they received for filing documents, in which all documents in the affidavits files are chronologically listed. Guildhall MS 659.1, a miscellaneous collection of documents relating to the prison, also contains some letters and petitions of prisoners. Letters and petitions are frequently annotated with remarks on the action taken by the court. ⁷⁷ For a suggestive account of the prison visitor at work, see TNA KB 1/23/6 Trin. 1784, no. 4, item 51 (affidavit of James Spragg), 52 (Kings Bench prisoners’ affidavits).


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whenever possible, by mediation and conciliation, rather than by an exertion of power. The Visitor and judges, moreover, were all most anxious to educate prisoners in the use of proper legal channels, and to convince them that it was by proceeding in the proper way that they were most likely to attain their ends. The success of this system, like the successful exercise of authority within the prison, was entirely dependent on the prisoners’ confidence that their interests, opinions, and concerns were truly taken into consideration. There were times, of course, when prisoners came to suspect that they were being sold out. At such times they would denounce the judges and prison officers and turn elsewhere and to other means for redress.⁷⁸ But for the most part the King’s Bench judges seem to have succeeded very well in obtaining the prisoners’ confidence. Though it might be assumed that the incarcerated debtor was rendered powerless to control his own fate in the King’s Bench prison, this was manifestly not the case. The mechanisms for redress of prisoners’ grievances were highly developed. The weakness of formal authority within the gaol meant that the wishes of the prisoners had almost invariably to be consulted and were often complied with. Moreover, the absence of effective and ongoing intrusion by the prison officers into the environment of the prison created something of a social and political vacuum which the prisoners occupied themselves: they were able to develop not only their own sophisticated local economy but to establish their own forms of local government.

S O C I A L A N D E C O N O M I C R E L AT I O N S A M O N G PRISONERS: THE PRISONERS’ ECONOMY AND COLLECTIVE INSTITUTIONS The fact that imprisonment forced into close proximity people of different classes and social origins, who in society at large might have had little or no contact with one another, was frequently the subject of contemporary comment. ‘Debtors’ prisons like the grave . . . level all distinctions’, wrote the author of a guide to London debtors’ prisons in 1793.⁷⁹ In fact, the evidence suggests that social distinctions were anything but obliterated. Sustained in part by habit and assumption, the social hierarchy also had, in the prison as outside, a foundation in economic relationships: the prison had its own internal economy, which underpinned a prison class structure.⁸⁰ The form of the prison economy was largely determined by the prison establishment’s failure to provide basic services. To some extent, therefore, the ⁷⁸ See below pp. 266–78. ⁷⁹ The Debtor and Creditor’s Assistant, 43. ⁸⁰ The account of the ‘prison economy’ provided here draws upon The Debtor and Creditor’s Assistant; the 1815 parliamentary report, King’s Bench, Fleet, Marshalsea &c. PP (1814–15) iv; and miscellaneous information in the affidavit files ( TNA KB 1).

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economy arose to serve the needs neglected by the authorities. Thus there was no public catering system in the prison. Or rather, although there was a ‘public kitchen’ and a cook who would prepare prisoners’ food for a small fee, prisoners had to provide the food for themselves. To cater for the needs of prisoners, a market was therefore held daily in the main street of the prison, at which fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat were sold. Some of the stallholders were themselves prisoners, who thus met the expense of supporting themselves in prison by pursuing profitable employment within the walls. Some prisoners found other niches for themselves in the provision of food and catering. Some, holding much coveted ground floor rooms in the main dormitory block, turned their rooms into chandler’s shops and sold dry goods. Others ran restaurants in their rooms—every room was provided with a small stove. The prison tap and coffeehouse both offered meals and were staffed at least in part by prisoners. Other services in demand in the prison were also supplied by prisoners. Doctors and lawyers found plenty of opportunity to pursue their callings.⁸¹ At a humbler level, some prisoners hired themselves out as bootblacks, wet-nurses, or valets to other prisoners. Carpenters, plumbers, and builders were sometimes employed by the marshal about the prison. Some prisoners made a business of renting furnishings for prison rooms. Several inmates worked for a greater market than that of the prison. Artisans of many kinds carried on their trades in their rooms. The marshal, discussing prisoners’ employments in 1815, noted only one restriction: ‘we do not allow joiners to have any large piece of timber’.⁸² Those shopkeepers who gained permission to live in the Rules of course could hope to attract general custom. Printers, journalists, and poets committed to the prison (sometimes for seditious libel) quite often continued their work within the walls, sometimes selling pamphlets and newspapers from their rooms.⁸³ The prison thus contained indigenous shopkeepers, artisans, servants, and professional men. It also contained indigenous landlords, for there was a lively market in rented accommodation in the prison.⁸⁴ By old custom the right to ⁸¹ For the account of a prisoner doctor, see CJ xlvii, 660. For a prisoner lawyer, see the testimony relating to Paul Patrician Carne in the collection of documents headed ‘Original affidavits of the prisoners complaining of the marshal’s treatment 24 July 1750’, Guildhall MS 659.1. An act of 1729 (2 Geo. II c.23) forbade attorneys in prison to sue out writs or prosecute suits on pain of being struck off the roll; legal knowledge was at a premium in the prison, however, and was a highly marketable commodity. See also n. 16. ⁸² PP (1814–15) iv, 595. ⁸³ William Bingley, petitioning the court in 1769, suggested that it was the responsibility of those running the prison to facilitate his carrying on his business as a bookseller and stationer, either by making a large room available to him, or by giving him the liberty of the Rules: TNA KB 1/17/5 Hil. 1769, no. 1, unnumbered, and KB 1/18/1 Mich. 1769, 26 (affidavits of William Bingley). For Bingley see J. Brewer, ‘The Wilkites and the Law’ in Brewer and Styles eds, Ungovernable People, 135, 145, 162–3. ⁸⁴ The remarks on the prison market in rooms in the 1815 report are not a reliable guide to practice in the earlier period, as is indeed suggested by the report: see, for example, PP (1814–15)


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a room in the prison was determined by seniority. The prisoner thus assigned a room was responsible for paying rent to the marshal. New prisoners were, in theory, parcelled out among the old as ‘chums’, one to a room until all were double-occupied, then again till all were triple-occupied, and so forth, the most junior prisoner with a room of his own being the most eligible to receive a chum. In practice, the fact that prisoners had money to spend and that they had spending money in different quantities, combined with the fact that the set rent of 1s. was far below the market price for a room, gave rise to what might be termed a black market in accommodation. The property rights upon which this market was based were, of course, conventional and had no standing in law, but the prisoners saw room rights as tantamount to a freehold property which could be used to make an income. This income could be obtained in various ways. A wealthy prisoner, or one who wanted his room for a shop or work-place might prefer to be the sole occupant. In that case he could dispose of any chums assigned to him by paying the chum a small pension of perhaps 5s. a week. But a prisoner who was not wealthy, or who could not otherwise make use of his space in a profitable way, might choose to set himself up as a landlord. He might take in a paying tenant—perhaps offering his services as a servant, perhaps even vacating his room for his tenant—or alternatively, aiming for the lower end of the market, he might set up a kind of lodging house for dispossessed chums or other stray prisoners. Such lodging houses might contain half a dozen or even more poor prisoners—each paying 20s. or even 30s. a week. Room renting was obviously a very profitable activity. Prisoners were not the only ones to attempt to get into the market. Turnkeys rented rooms. The keeper of the tap regularly allowed prisoners to sleep on his tables for a small charge. So valuable was the possession of a prison room that some prisoners attempted to continue their claims after leaving prison. It seems likely that a large number of prisoners made some income from the market in accommodation. On the other hand, the cost of lodging must have been a very large item in most prisoners’ budgets. And the fact that wealthy prisoners were able to command more than their equitable share of space can only have exacerbated the housing crisis. Employments within the prison obviously offered a variety of opportunities, but what proportion of prisoners was engaged in some form of profitable activity? The Commons committee of 1791 reported that, of 570 prisoners, 470 were completely idle.⁸⁵ But this report must almost certainly be qualified. In the first place, it seems probable that prisoners drawing an income from the market in accommodation were not reckoned among the industrious. Second, there is a qualification built into the report: ‘There are indeed instances of much industry iv, 567–8. For the late-eighteenth-century practice see especially TNA KB 1/21/6 Trin. 1779, no. 1, 79 (two petitions: Thomas Phillips). ⁸⁵ CJ xlvii, 652.

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amongst many of the prisoners; but their industry is generally employed in smuggling, usury, lottery insurances, and all other modes of gambling’. The list of illegal or disapproved activities is not exhausted here. Quite a number of prisoners sold spirits in their room. At one time there were said to be as many as forty ‘whistling shops’ (places where spirits were sold) in the prison—the name ‘whistling shop’ referring to the whistle prisoners gave to obtain entry. In the early part of the century there were many reports of coining being carried on in the prison; it is not clear whether that activity survived into this period.⁸⁶ The number of prisoners engaged in some form of profitable activity, then, was almost certainly greater than the meagre total suggested by the 1791 commission, even if not all the activities were considered meritorious. A 1793 guide to London debtors’ prisons reported that ‘the greatest number’ of King’s Bench prisoners ‘carry on some trade or business, as regularly as if they had been born and bred within the walls’.⁸⁷ Since prisoners had to pay their own way, of course, some kind of income was essential. There was, in fact, another alternative: a certain number of charities had been set up for poor prisoners by pious benefactors; there was, moreover, a constant stream of casual charitable gifts—an alms box by the prison gate appealed to visitors and passers-by.⁸⁸ Any prisoner who took an oath before a magistrate that he was worth no more than £5 in the world was entitled to a share of these charities.⁸⁹ The pauper prisoners also took it in turns to go about the prison with a begging box. Scorn of charity, however, seems increasingly to have prevented needy prisoners from falling back on such resources, since by 1815 there were only two prisoners ‘on the box’; even fifty years earlier there rarely seem to have been more than about thirty.⁹⁰ Gainfully employed or not, all prisoners were in some manner implicated in the prison economy. A web of economic relationships bound together the prison community, which thus came closely to resemble society beyond the walls. Even the problems of debt and credit that bedevilled the country at large were echoed within the prison. Many prisoners were chronically in debt to the shopkeepers within the prison.⁹¹ One of the officers in 1815 described how prisoners would vary their eating habits, moving between public kitchen, coffeeshop and tap: ‘when they are in debt at one place they go to another; and when they are able ⁸⁶ On gambling and smuggling, see nn. 67 and 68 above. For ‘whistling shops’ see The Debtor and Creditor’s Assistant, 50. On coining in prisons, see J.Styles, ‘Our traitorous money makers’, in Brewer and Styles eds, Ungovernable People n. 148. ⁸⁷ The Debtor and Creditor’s Assistant, 42. ⁸⁸ Some prison charities (those whose payment was in arrears) are listed in [Penrice], The Extraordinary Case, 43. ⁸⁹ CJ xlvii, 657. ⁹⁰ For numbers of poor prisoners earlier, see their various petitions, e.g. PP (1814–15) iv, 539. KB 1/20/3 Trin. 1775, no. 1, 56 (petition of commonside prisoners). ⁹¹ The Debtor and Creditor’s Assistant, 47–8.


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to pay off the debt, they come back again’.⁹² So the very process which brought so many debtors there was repeated even inside the prison. The network of economic relationships within the prison sustained a system of social relationships closely resembling that which prevailed beyond the walls. Prison society was quite as hierarchical as free society: it included labourers and mechanics, a middle class of shopkeepers, and ‘freeholders’, a pseudogentry class of lawyers, doctors, clergymen, authors, and army officers, and an e´lite of wealthy prisoners, landowners, or merchants. These different classes of prisoner were distinguished in several ways. They had different living conditions, purchasing power, and social habits. The gentleman’s world centred on the prison coffeehouse, that of the lower classes on the tap.⁹³ But if prison society was hierarchically structured, it was also knit together with bonds of community and mutual aid. Prisoners banded together to form drinking clubs such as those common in taverns outside the prison. There is a record, from the early 1750s, of a masonic lodge within the prison, later removed to the Rules.⁹⁴ Prisoners combined their funds and set up subscriptions for charitable purposes or to finance improvements to the prison. Sometime before 1776, for example, lights were erected in the main street and yard of the prison by subscription of the prisoners.⁹⁵ The inmates also pooled their resources to celebrate public festivities. National events such as royal birthdays or occurrences of special importance to the prisoners, such as the passage of an insolvency act, were sure to be enthusiastically celebrated.⁹⁶ Such displays of mutual good feeling were sometimes sponsored by the wealthier prisoners who, for all their sense of superiority and distinctiveness, still recognized their obligations as patrons and leaders of the prison community.⁹⁷ But the most important manifestations of the prisoners’ sense of community were the corporate bodies established among the prison population. Prison communities in debtors’ prisons had developed certain organs of self-government as early as the sixteenth century.⁹⁸ In organizing themselves as self-governing communities, debtors evidently borrowed administrative and ⁹² PP (1814–15) iv, 60. ⁹³ ‘The lower sort of prisoners’ is a phrase which crops up frequently in all accounts of the prison: see The Debtor and Creditor’s Assistant, 48, and TNA KB 1/23/6 Trin. 1784, no. 4, 51 (affidavit of James Spragg). ⁹⁴ J. Lane, Masonic Records (London, 1895), 32, 33, 62. ⁹⁵ Smith, State of the Gaols, 61. On charitable dealings between prisoners see, for example, CJ xlvii, 657, 660. ⁹⁶ For example, Public Advertiser, 14 August 1783; Middlesex Journal, 17 June 1769. ⁹⁷ For example, for an entertainment sponsored by John Wilkes, on his release from the King’s Bench prison: London Chronicle, 19 April 1770. ⁹⁸ For early accounts of prisoner self-government, see C. Dobb, ‘Life and Conditions in London Prisons, 1553–1643, with Special Reference to Contemporary Literature’ (unpublished BLitt thesis, Oxford, 1952), 192–201, 216, 277–83. W. J. Sheehan discusses eighteenth-century prisoner selfgovernment in Newgate briefly in his essay, ‘Finding Solace in Eighteenth Century Newgate’, in J. S. Cockburn ed., Crime in England 1550–1800 (London, 1977), 233–4. His account is marred,

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disciplinary structures and a technical vocabulary from such social organizations as municipal corporations, guilds, and convivial societies. Prisoners seem to have regarded themselves as a kind of corporation or fellowship, appointing officers from their own number, perhaps by rotation, to discharge certain duties of common concern. The King’s Bench prison community spawned not one but two such corporations. The smaller, the corporation of commonside prisoners, concerned itself especially with the supervision of prison charities. The larger, the corporation of master’s side prisoners, concerned itself with numerous other aspects of prisoners’ welfare. The commonside corporation consisted of the twenty or so prisoners ‘on the box’, that is, in receipt of charity.⁹⁹ Two or three of these were appointed as ‘assistants’; their chief duty was to supervise the charities. This comprised the organization of prison begging, collaboration with a ‘steward’ who was the receiver of prison charitable endowments, and the distribution of charitable proceeds. The court of King’s Bench encouraged the prisoners to supervise prison charities, according formal recognition to the assistants in its 1729 code of rules.¹⁰⁰ The steward, appointed by the court, was always nominated by the prisoners, whose recommendation the court accepted, subject to the approval of the marshal. In the later eighteenth century, the prisoners usually nominated the clerk of the papers as their steward.¹⁰¹ The 1729 rules also ordered that the prisoners should be provided with a common room for ‘devotion or conversation, and a fire to be kept therein as the season requires’.¹⁰² This room, in which the 1729 rules were exhibited, was the venue of meetings held to settle affairs of common concern. Its title, ‘the court room’, designated it as the proper meeting place for the officers of the prisoners’ corporation—just as, say, the Bank of England had a court room where its governors assembled. The assistants not only regulated charities but exercised certain powers of government over their fellow prisoners, though these lacked any formal approval by the court of King’s Bench. One of their number was designated ‘mayor’ and the other(s) were known as clerk or deputy. They arbitrated quarrels, checked however, by his failure to distinguish between debtors and felons: he runs together, in a misleading way, accounts of their very different experiences and activities. ⁹⁹ This account of the commonside corporation is based mainly on affidavits and petitions in TNA KB 1; especially for this period KB 1/19/3 Hil. 1774, no. 1, 74 (petition of King’s Bench prisoners). The richest documentation of the affairs of commonside prisoners dates from the first half of the century, especially from the period 1727–34: a period marked by strife and contention and giving rise to an extraordinary number of affidavits and petitions. ¹⁰⁰ These rules are reprinted in summary form in PP (1814–15) iv, 774, and in full in The Debtor’s Pocket Guide, 45–9. ¹⁰¹ For documents relating to the appointment of stewards see TNA KB 1/20/2 Trin. 1775, no. 2, 24 (petition of poor prisoners); 1/20/4 Ea. 1776, no. 1, 20 (election and approbation of steward). ¹⁰² Rule 14 (see n. 100).


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brawling, and penalized debauchery or immorality. The most powerful sanction at their disposal was that of excluding offenders from the charities, though this punishment was invariably revoked on appeal to the judges. Prisoners serving as assistants were sometimes accused by their fellows of behaving in an overbearing and oppressive manner, and even of enriching themselves by appropriating an excessive portion of the charities. It does seem, however, that they were usually zealous in two areas of general interest: in attempting to maximize charitable funds, and in attempting to restrict numbers in receipt of charities. Unlike the commonside corporation, the master’s side corporation, much the larger of the two bodies, enjoyed no kind of recognition from the court of King’s Bench. This did not prevent the prisoners from feeling, that their organization had a high degree of legitimacy. The master’s side corporation was called by its members the ‘King’s Bench college’, and each member a ‘collegian’. The college originated no later than the late seventeenth century.¹⁰³ In the first half of the eighteenth century custom was adduced as an argument for the legitimacy of the college on several occasions when its authority was challenged. On one occasion an ancient prisoner was called in from the Rules to testify that the college had existed as long as his memory served him.¹⁰⁴ In the second half of the century justifications were more often functional and utilitarian. The college was praised for its contribution to the welfare of the prisoners and for its services in preserving peace and harmony within the prison.¹⁰⁵ A very abstract essay in justification, aimed primarily at members of the college, appeared in the preamble to a rule book of the college, printed in 1782: Whereas it is requisite for all communities to have rules for the promotion of good order and harmony amongst themselves; so it is necessary that such regulations should ¹⁰³ ‘S.S.’, author of The Prisoner’s Complaint to the King’s Most Excellent Majestie or the Cries of the King’s Bench, a pamphlet published in London in 1673, describes himself as ‘a Fellow of King’s College in Southwark’. It seems likely, however, that the college was already old at that time. Use of the term ‘college’ in this context calls for some brief comment: it was apparently a common joke to speak of prisons as ‘colleges’ at this time (see 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (Illinois, 1971), entries ‘college’ and ‘Whittington’s College’). In the King’s Bench prison, however, something more than a joke was involved, even if the name sometimes had overtones of parody. For contemporary applications of the term ‘college’ to workhouses and even small factories, illustrating the very wide range of its possible meanings, see, for example, M. Laithwaite, ‘The Buildings of Burford’, in A. Everitt ed., Perspectives in English Urban History (London, 1973), 88, and J. Hall, A History of the Town of Nantwich (Nantwich, 1883), 270. The account of the college provided here is based in part on surviving college rule books, of which there are three in the Guildhall Library, London (one at Pam 5339, two bound in MS 659.1), and on affidavits and petitions in TNA KB 1, especially KB 1/21/6 Trin. 1779, no. 1, 68 (petition of King’s Bench prisoners), 79 (two petitions: Thomas Phillips); KB 1/23/1 Ea. 1782, no. 1, 29 (case of John Dawer and John Frome against various prisoners), 38; and KB 1/24/4/1–2 Trin. 1785, no. 2, 45 (ex parte Harrington). For a brief notice of a very similar kind of organization existing in the Fleet prison, another London debtors’ prison, see Howard, State of the Prisons (1777), 164. ¹⁰⁴ See Guildhall MS 659.1 (affidavits of Joseph Wingrave et al., 28 November 1750). ¹⁰⁵ For example, TNA KB 1/21/6 Trin. 1779, no. 1, 79 (two petitions: Thomas Phillips).

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be established by the general consent, as shall be needful from time to time, with a view to alleviate the miseries and to obtain every convenience for the unfortunate members of the college.¹⁰⁶

The college, in other words, was a representative institution which, like other forms of authority in the prison, depended upon the consent of the prisoners. The corporation and its officers performed several functions. They facilitated ‘good order and harmony’ among the prison population by providing a formal mechanism for the resolution of the numerous minor disputes that occur within any community. They legislated and enforced petty regulations that ordered and eased day-to-day prison life. And they acted as the collective voice and the corporate representative of the prisoners when dealing with those outside the college community. The college consisted of the several hundred prisoners lodging in the master’s side rooms of the prison—the great majority of debtors—and the small minority of criminal prisoners who were barred from the benefit of the charities by a rule of the court. The officers of the college, who were elected by the prisoners in general assembly (in case of a disputed election, by ballot), are nowhere authoritatively listed, but the most important offices were clearly the president (also described as chairman, steward, and lord mayor), clerk or secretary, and treasurer. Other officers occasionally mentioned include sheriff, aldermen, and constables: whether these were elected or co-opted is unclear. Juries were convened as the need arose. A number of officers who performed fairly menial duties about the prison seem to have been paid for their work; they were probably appointed or hired rather than elected. They included a clerk of the chapel, scavengers, criers, and a cook. This body of officers closely paralleled those found in many small communities throughout the country. Local government clearly provided the model for the prisoners’ organization, and college officers mimicked their orthodox counterparts in many details: for example, prison constables, like parish constables, carried white staves as insignia of authority. The college in the broadest sense—the whole membership several hundred prisoners strong—occasionally met in general assembly. Since the master’s side prisoners, unlike the commonside prisoners, had no court room, large meetings had to be held in the open air, in the main yard of the prison. Any prisoner could summon a meeting at any time, on payment of a special fee if for some private purpose, or without charge if for ‘the Public Good’. A general meeting had a quorum of thirty. Rules made by a properly constituted meeting were binding. (The printed rule books, drawn up by committees, were presumably approved ¹⁰⁶ Guildhall MS 659.1, ‘Rules to be obeyed and observed by every member of this college’, c.1782, 1–2. Compare the declaration in the eighteenth-century Lawbook of the Crowley Ironworks, ed. M. W. Flinn (London, 1951), 8. This book affords several interesting contrasts and comparisons with the material presented here. See also, for example, ibid., 159.


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at general meetings.) Large general meetings were probably infrequent, and most of the routine work of the college was dealt with by the college officers. Unlike the corporation of the commonside, the college had no outside source of finance. It was therefore the practice to charge new members of the college—incoming prisoners—dues, called variously ‘inside fees’, ‘strummage money’, or ‘garnish’. The treasurer, who received these dues, disbursed them on such utilities as the commonside prisoners provided for themselves from their charity money: mops, brooms, and oil for lamps. He had to keep accounts of all monies received and expended, and to display his books to any prisoner on demand. The clerk kept the minutes of all general meetings and was responsible for supervising the traffic in rooms. Room vacancies had to be announced at general meetings, so that the next most senior prisoner without a room might know of his right of possession. The clerk was supposed to keep a list of lodgings available, with their prices, for the information of new prisoners. He also had to witness and register all contracts for the exchange or leasing of rooms. The work of the criers and scavengers within the prison was very like that of their counterparts in municipal government. Criers, armed with bells, made announcements of general meetings. For a fee of 1d. they would also announce matters of private concern: for example, they would cry out lost property. They also sought out prisoners when requested by visitors to the prison. The scavengers swept the streets of the prison and passageways of the dormitory buildings, cleaned out the water cisterns and ‘necessary houses’, and lit the lamps. They were responsible for preventing the obstruction of passageways with ‘lumber’. These services entitled them to claim 1d. a week from each prison room. They also made a profit from the sale of urine—which was collected in large tubs in the main street of the prison—to local manufacturers, for use in the processing of leather. The judicial work of the college was transacted in courts which were probably also general meetings, though they might not have been attended by more than a fraction of the prisoners. Here the president presided, reaching his decisions with the aid of a formally constituted jury, or sometimes by means of a more informal consensus procedure. Problems arising from the administrative work of the college could be brought up in these courts: scavengers, for instance, could call to account any who refused to pay their wages, or could denounce any who had wantonly thrown water or filth from their windows (at a penalty of 1s. for a first offence, 2s. 6d . thereafter). The court claimed jurisdiction over various kinds of problem arising from the prison economy. Shopkeepers using false weights and measures were subject to a fine of 5s. for a first offence, 10s. thereafter ‘and no mitigation of fines’. Servants might sue for their wages, or creditors for debts; the college was specifically empowered to make ‘legal and binding’ settlement in cases of debt. More generally the college claimed jurisdiction over all nuisances and matters of complaint. There is evidence that the courts punished contempts,

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and there was a specific provision in the rules for the presentment of prisoners who accosted visitors to the prison and demanded pints of beer. There is little good evidence of punishments other than fines inflicted by the court, but it seems that shaming punishments, such as ducking under the prison pumps, were used, that some matters of complaint were settled by a public apology, and that contending parties were encouraged to reconcile their differences.¹⁰⁷ Generally the college courts did much the same work as any court leet or petty borough court, providing the kind of petty regulation and arbitration which was regarded as a vital contribution to social order and harmony in the eighteenth century.¹⁰⁸ The King’s Bench college also resembled other corporations in providing an authoritative voice by which the community it encompassed might address the greater world. By proposing a motion in assembly, a prisoner might promote a petition which would be issued in the name of ‘the prisoners of the King’s Bench prison’. Applications in the name of the prisoners without the approval of an assembly were not permitted for, as the college rules observed, ‘the Dignity and Importance of every Society depends on a strict union among the members’.¹⁰⁹ The requirement that petitions be submitted for general discussion was designed both ‘to prevent all absurd and ill complaints’ and to ensure ‘that the whole strength and influence of the college in support of every reasonable application may be employed’. Several petitions which must have been drawn up by this procedure, signed by several hundred prisoners, survive among the archives of the court of King’s Bench.¹¹⁰ The evidence concerning college personnel is sketchy but suggestive. Repeatedly the president and those closest to him prefix their names with such titles as ‘Captain’ or ‘Reverend’ or claim the suffix ‘Esquire’.¹¹¹ In other words it seems that the college was headed by the prison e´lite, the upper-class prisoners who ¹⁰⁷ See TNA KB 1/23/1 Ea. 1782, no. 1, 29 (case of John Dawer and John Frome against various prisoners); KB 1/24/4/1–2 Trin. 1785, no. 2. 45 (ex parte Harrington). ¹⁰⁸ On the work of leet and manorial courts in the eighteenth century, see S. Webb and B. Webb, The Manor and the Borough (London, 1908), passim. The part which petty courts and informal arbitration played and were perceived to play in late-eighteenth-century English society deserves historical attention. Governmental paraphernalia and ritual were also frequently adopted by artisanal associations, and experience of self-government in such groups as these may well have provided another source for prisoners’ practices. See for this I. Prothero, Artisans and Politics (Folkestone, Kent, 1979), 34–5, and R. A. Leeson, Travelling Brothers (London, 1979), 143–4. In the latter the use of the term ‘garnish’ among the hatters is noted. See also N. Ward, A Compleat and Humorous Account of all the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the Cities of London and Westminster, (7th edn London, 1756), 2. ¹⁰⁹ Guildhall MS 659.1, ‘Rules to be obeyed and observed by every member of this college’, c.1779, rule 37. ¹¹⁰ For example, TNA KB 1/19/5 Ea. 1774, no. 2, 42 (complaint of prisoners and petition of William Penrice). ¹¹¹ Namely Captain Phillips, Captain Campbell, Sir Alexander Hay, Philip Dormer Stanhope Esq. etc. The affidavits collected at TNA KB 1/23/1 Ea. 1782, no. 1, 29 (case of John Dawer and John Frome against various prisoners) and 38, suggest very strongly that office in the prison, as in society, was a function of rank.


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frequented the coffeehouse. This is not to say that college government was not rule by consent, nor that the leaders did not command wide general support. In 1779 when a small group of prisoners denounced the college as tyrannical, more than 300 signed a petition testifying to their belief that ‘any alteration in the internal management of this prison would most materially affect the peace and harmony of the whole’.¹¹² Maintenance of peace and harmony was an important function of the college officers. Violence was not uncommon in the prison. Insults and slights between prisoners quickly gave rise to blows. Various forms of cheating or treachery or offences against the customs of the prison (particularly in matters relating to the allocation of rooms) were avenged by small mob actions. The task of the college officers, in these circumstances, was to act as missionaries of order—to intervene, attempt to mediate, and reconcile, and to provide minimally violent ways of accomplishing whatever seemed to be a socially desirable end.¹¹³ Justice as administered by the college, then, was designed to defuse tensions and resolve conflicts. Punishments, when they were enforced, were most likely to be visited upon those perceived as troublemakers, breakers of commonly accepted norms and customs. Justice in all cases had to be seen to be done, so that prisoners would get no support if they wished to exact further vengeance. The kind of order which the college officers sought, commonly described as a state of ‘peace and harmony’, was very largely defined by the desires and inclinations of the prisoners. The college was the most important association in the prison. It went beyond all the little clubs and societies that the prisoners founded in providing an image of community. When the prisoners gathered together to send off a petition, they took pride in the spectacle of their united strength. As members of the college they were not just prisoners, they were ‘collegians’. They were able to demonstrate within the prison those civic virtues which were so highly esteemed in the eighteenth century, and to feel themselves to be (as, indeed, they were) people to some extent in command of their own lives. If the college had all these virtues, why was it denounced by some prisoners as tyrannical? On at least two occasions in this period, in 1750 and again in 1779–80, small groups of prisoners waged energetic campaigns against the college and its authority.¹¹⁴ In each case the motives for the ‘revolts’ were complex, but certain general grievances stand out. There must have been at all times a certain number of prisoners who felt themselves to be put upon by the college officers, perhaps because they had been penalized for some misdeed, or ¹¹² TNA KB 1/21/6 Trin. 1779, no. 1, 68 (petition of King’s Bench prisoners). ¹¹³ See especially TNA KB 1/24/4/1–2 Trin. 1789, no. 2, 45 (ex parte Harrington). ¹¹⁴ See Affidavits headed ‘Original affidavits of prisoners complaining of the marshal’s treatment’, Guildhall MS 659.1; TNA KB 1/21/6 Trin. 1779, no. 1, 68 (petition of King’s Bench prisoners), 79 (two petitions: Thomas Phillips); and documents in Guildhall MS 659.1 relating to the troubles of 1779.

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because they were unable to obtain justice to their own satisfaction. Moreover, a certain number of prisoners probably set their faces against the whole idea of the college, some because they saw it as legitimating popular forms of punishment and questionable moral and legal practices, some because they held the college responsible for such features of prison life as the trade in rooms, or even the lax government of the prison officers. The notion that there was some kind of corrupt bargain between the marshal and the college officers was by no means uncommon. When such prisoners found powerful, articulate leaders, they might coalesce into a discontented faction. On the whole, however, prisoners seem to have accepted the authority of the college and its officials. They did so because its operation conferred on them important benefits and advantages. The college did much to fill the vacuum left by the indolence of the prison officers. College officials contributed as much as anyone to making the prison a livable environment. Moreover, when the mass of prisoners were moved by great passions against the prison regime or against the law of debt, the college provided them with a forum and with certain traditions of collective action which helped to shape their behaviour.

H A R M O N Y A N D C O N F L I C T: T H E P R I S O N O F F I C E R S , T H E C O U RT, A N D T H E C O L L E G E We have seen that the King’s Bench prison was governed by three separate forms of authority: the prison officers, the court of King’s Bench, and the prisoners’ college. All three needed, to a remarkable degree, to secure the support of the prisoners, in order to wield authority effectively. Each served different though related functions: the prison officers guarded prison security, the college organized much of the day-to-day life of the prison, and the judges acted as (admittedly infrequently invoked) arbiters of prison government. All of them, in their different ways, were committed to the maintenance of order and harmony within the prison walls. This was true even of the college, for although it represented prisoners with an undoubted sense of grievance, its members were well aware of the advantages of maintaining a working relationship with prison staff. The three sources of authority in the prison did not altogether and invariably agree on how order and harmony were to be maintained, however, and this was a persistent source of friction in the gaol. In the main, the attitude of the marshal and his officers to the prisoners’ college was one of easy tolerance, even encouragement, for reasons which are easy to discern. Since the marshal and his officers wished there to be order in the prison, and since they neither wished nor were able to obtain it by direct intervention, the college officers usually appeared to them as useful allies. Even if the prison officers did not approve of all college activities, they were


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ill-advised to interfere as long as the college had the support of the majority of the prisoners.¹¹⁵ The King’s Bench judges’ attitude was, by contrast, disapproving and, on occasion, downright hostile. One step further removed from the actual problems of prison government, the judges—possibly because of reformist pressures—attempted in the second half of the eighteenth century to push the prison officers into playing a more conscientious and assertive role in the organization of prison life. With the aim of preventing the college from undertaking tasks that they felt to be the proper duty of the prison officers, the judges adopted a twofold strategy: on the one hand they tried to suppress the college and to restrict its activities by including in their prison rules (notably those of 1759) provisions explicitly confining powers to the marshal and his officers that were customarily exercised by the college;¹¹⁶ on the other hand, in a more positive vein, they sought to cajole the officers into greater activity.¹¹⁷ Both tactics foundered, however, because they depended for their execution on the zeal of the prison officers, who repeatedly demonstrated their capacity to ignore orders from above. The prison officers disregarded the judges because they knew that inaction was in their best interests. The judges rarely punished them for their recalcitrance, while renewed interference in prison life would almost certainly have upset the delicate series of calculations, concessions, and compromises upon which the officers’ rule of the prison was based. There was little point in seeking to enforce rules whose enactment would only have provoked unrest and a general deterioration of the relations between the prison officers and the prisoners. Thus in 1781 the judges’ rule that henceforth wives and children were not to be allowed to stay in the prison overnight, and that the turnkeys had to ring a bell at closing time every evening as a signal for visitors to leave, was of little avail. Prisoners with families disliked the rule and prison officers saw no good reason to antagonize them. The officers therefore contented themselves with ringing the bell as ordered, leaving to visitors and families the responsibility of ejecting themselves. Thirty years later, when the old rule was brought to the judges’ attention, it was remarked that the prison was as full of women and children as ever.¹¹⁸ No rule that assigned a more active role to prison officers in the second half of the century was unambiguously enforced. As long as there was tacit agreement among the prisoners and officers about the extent of the officers’ powers and the ¹¹⁵ For an example of formal co-operation between the prison officers and the college see TNA KB 1/21/6 Trin. 1779, no. 1, 79 (two petitions: Thomas Phillips). ¹¹⁶ Annual Register 1779, 18 June, 22 June; TNA KB 1/23/1 Ea. 1782, no. 2, 78 (petition of Charles Rapley). ¹¹⁷ See especially the rules of court of 1759 ( TNA KB 21/38, ff. 225–6, summarized in PP (1814–15) iv, 775). ¹¹⁸ For the rule, see PP (1814–15) iv, 777. For subsequent admission of its ineffectiveness, see TNA KB 1/39/5 Trin. 1816, no. 2, 69 (rule containing regulations for the King’s Bench prison).

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nature of order and harmony in the prison, there was little that the judges could do to affect life inside. Nevertheless there does seem to have been a minor revolution in the prison government in the early 1780s.¹¹⁹ Possibly the marshal was responding to pressure from the judges, or perhaps he felt that the reopening of the King’s Bench prison (which had been closed to repair the damage wrought by the Gordon rioters) provided him with the opportunity to start prison government on a fresh footing. For whatever reason, the marshal began to claim the right to appoint the criers and scavengers who had previously been appointed by the college. Apparently a minor change—for the marshal did not break with the college custom of appointing prisoners to these posts—this development was nevertheless seen as significant and stirred up considerable ill feeling among the prisoners. For the marshal gained for himself a piece of patronage previously in the hands of the prisoners (both criers and scavengers made a fair income from their work) and simultaneously established his power a little more firmly in the heart of the prison by adding to the number of officers whose responsibility was primarily to himself. This attempt to alter the balance within the prison provoked an outbreak of violence, for the college did not at once surrender its right to make the same appointments. Marshal’s scavengers and criers, and college scavengers and criers, roamed the prison, falling upon each other when they met. The marshal was moved to complain to the court of King’s Bench against the college officers, securing, as might be expected, permission to lock them in the prison strong room for a few weeks. The court judges seem to have hoped that the college might be altogether suppressed as a result of their disciplinary action. If so, they were only to experience one more in a long run of disappointments. The clash of 1782, however, did have some long-term consequences. The marshal does not seem to have surrendered his claim to appoint criers and scavengers henceforth, and the beginnings of a slight shift in the balance of power within the prison might be dated from this year. By the end of the century prison officers were evidently taking a greater share in the internal management of the prison than they had fifty years before: some effort was being made, for example, to implement the judges’ directive of 1759 requiring the marshal to be responsible for the allocation of rooms.¹²⁰ And yet the implications of this shift in power were not very profound. The college, albeit shorn of one piece of its powers, continued to flourish well into ¹¹⁹ TNA KB 1/23/1 Ea. 1782, no. 1, 29 (case of John Dawer and John Frome against various prisoners), 38. ¹²⁰ King’s Bench, Fleet, Marshalsea &c. (PP (1814–15) iv.), passim. Howard, noting the existence of the college for the first time in the 1784 edition of State of the Prisons (p. 284), remarked that the college rules were in many cases ‘arbitrary and improper’. ‘But’, he added, ‘they are now abolished.’ He also announced the suppression of the prisoners’ laws in the Fleet at this time.


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the nineteenth century.¹²¹ And if the criers and scavengers were now marshal’s men, they did not discharge their duties in any innovative way. Even their appointment may well have involved an accommodation between the marshal and the prisoners. Though the college officers naturally resented and opposed the marshal’s attempts to erode their powers, they frequently collaborated with the marshal because in most circumstances their idea of a harmonious prison community corresponded with the marshal’s aspirations for an orderly prison. Formal and informal authority therefore frequently presented a united front. Prisoners who complained of the college to the marshal usually received short shrift; college officers deprecated disorderly outbursts against the marshal. Marshal and college officers were agreed that there were ‘troublemakers’ in the prison—the drunk, the quarrelsome, and those who resented all forms of authority—whom they both felt it was their task to order and control. Such an account may seem to imply that the college was little more than an appendage of the prison establishment. This indeed was the view of Dr William Smith, who visited many London prisons in the 1770s. Smith wrote of the King’s Bench, The visitor is kept ignorant of the state of the prison by a certificate fabricated in the lobby vouching for the marshal and turnkeys good conduct in the government of the prison, signed by as many of the prisoners as the keepers can influence, who always retain a party of the prisoners to intimidate the rest, and prevent their making any complaints; and who ever expects a favour at the lobby; or is afraid of being insulted is obliged to sign whether he approves or not.¹²²

There is reason to believe, however, that Smith’s interpretation was rather crude, for he overlooked two important considerations. First, there was a substantial number of prisoners, not just a small kept party, who wished to cultivate good relations with the prison officers. The college officers, whose authority rested upon the support of the prison body, would not have been able to work with the marshal and his men unless most prisoners had thought this desirable. And the prisoners backed the college officers and the marshal, not because they feared official reprisals, but because they looked on the prison establishment as the ultimate guarantors of order in the gaol. Thus in 1783, when a group of prisoners known as the ‘Liberty Boys’ challenged the marshal’s monopoly by setting up their own tap in prison and defied the turnkeys by importing large beer barrels into the prison, the other prisoners helped suppress the Liberty Boys’ activities.¹²³ ¹²¹ See the account of the mock election held in the King’s Bench prison in 1827: Explanation of the Picture of Chairing the Members, a Scene in the Mock Election which took place at the King’s Bench Prison (London, 1828), Guildhall Library, London, Pam 3949. ¹²² Smith, State of the Gaols, 59. ¹²³ TNA KB 1/23/5 Mich. 1783, 23 (affidavit of James Campbell et al.), 38 (affidavit of Noel et al.).

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Prisoners and prison officers alike agreed that certain elements were disorderly and should be suppressed. Dedication to order and harmony, which the preamble of the college rule book enjoined, could thus be interpreted as militating against protest. This did not mean, however, that the majority of prisoners never protested, nor that the ideals of order and harmony were invariably seen as incompatible with the challenging of the official prison hierarchy. This was Smith’s second misapprehension: he failed to realize that the college sometimes acted, not as an instrument of the prison officers, but as a channel for discontent. In these circumstances, exhortations to unanimity and order were sometimes employed in an attempt to bind prisoners together into a more effective protesting force: harmony came to mean solidarity. And the very college officers and orderly minded prisoners who had so strongly aided the prison officers became their most intractable and determined opponents. In other words, the college’s notion of harmony ceased to be compatible with the marshal’s idea of good order. T H E C A M PA I G N AG A I N S T I M P R I S O N M E N T F O R D E BT Conflicts between the college and the marshal arose for a variety of reasons, but they were usually resolved and some sort of harmony re-established in the prison. In the later eighteenth century, however, a new and altogether more intractable set of circumstances arose: the prisoners within the King’s Bench were affected by ‘the contagion of liberty’ and began in an explicitly radical way to challenge the constitutionality of imprisonment for debt. Not only were new arguments advanced against imprisonment for debt, but new and legally dubious tactics were employed by radicals who believed in direct action to secure redress of grievances. This created something of a crisis in prison life, for it produced a widely supported protest movement within the prison which could not easily be pacified or compromised with in the usual ways. Prisoners who had previously accepted the authority of the marshal and his minions, even if they had not necessarily regarded that authority as legitimate except when it commanded their consent, now withdrew their support in its entirety. Prison officers had to bear the brunt of the prisoners’ protests, but they were not in a position to pacify them. The prison officers, after all, did not have the power to grant the prisoners’ wishes and release all debtors from gaol. When they came to challenge the very practice of imprisonment for debt, the prisoners were of course brought up against not only the prison officials but also against higher and more powerful organs of government—the institutions that ultimately sanctioned the policies which prison officers merely put into effect. Over the last few decades of the century, the prisoners’ notions about how to challenge authority at these higher levels clearly progressed through several stages of development. Initially, they directed their demands for change


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chiefly at the courts; when this strategy proved futile they turned their attentions to Parliament, and finally when Parliament proved not merely indifferent but actively hostile—ceasing altogether to pass even temporary insolvency acts between 1781 and 1793—many prisoners came to rest their hopes in the crusade for parliamentary reform. By the 1790s, some prisoners were welcoming the French Revolution as an event of immediate relevance to their own needs.¹²⁴ Lack of space unfortunately makes it impossible to discuss here the conflict over the debt law at this higher level. Some account of the impact of the ‘radicalization’ of debtors upon the confined world of the prison will, however, illuminate many of the themes earlier explored in this essay. To this end, we may focus upon one relatively brief but well-documented set of events: those which surrounded the first well-orchestrated campaign against imprisonment for debt, which erupted in the prison in 1770. The arguments which inspired the prisoners in that year were comprehensively set out in a pamphlet written by one of them entitled Considerations on Imprisonment for Debt.¹²⁵ Characteristically legalistic in its approach, this pamphlet argued that the debt law had the unambiguous sanction of neither common nor statute law, but had simply been thrust upon an unwary people by unscrupulous lawyers. Invoking Magna Charta as the fundamental guarantee of English liberty, the pamphlet urged that existing ‘law’ should immediately be recognized as invalid.¹²⁶ The author of this pamphlet, a Scots e´migré named James Stephen, was evidently a man of forceful personality, whose personal beliefs played an important part in shaping the course of events. A former estate steward, apparently without legal training, Stephen seems to have worked out his theories on the basis of legal studies conducted after his commitment to the King’s Bench prison in August 1769. When he propagated his ideas among his fellow prisoners in 1770 he began a period of prolonged prison agitation.¹²⁷ Unlike some later converts to the theory ¹²⁴ Only events of 1770–1 are discussed here. For other disturbances in the King’s Bench associated with the notion that imprisonment for debt was unconstitutional, see especially TNA KB 1/23/6 Trin. 1784, no. 4, item 51 (affidavit of James Spragg), 52 (Kings’ Bench prisoners’ affidavits); London Chronicle, 12–14 August 1784; KB 1/24/4 Mich. 1785, no. 1 69, 71, 72; Gentleman’s Magazine, 10 February 1786; London Chronicle, 11 February 1786; The King against Burgh, TNA TS 11/2506/780; KB 1/27/6 Hil. 1793, no. 2, 80 (affidavit in mitigation for Thomas Townley Macan); Annual Register, 26 November 1792. For the cessation of the insolvency acts in 1780s to 1790s, see above, p. 237. ¹²⁵ J. Stephen, Considerations on Imprisonment for Debt (London, 1770). For comparable later pamphlets, see E. Farley, Imprisonment for Debt Unconstitutional and Oppressive (London, 1788), and The Trial of P. W. Duffin and Thomas Lloyd (London, 1793), reprinted in A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T. J. Howell, (London, 1817), xxii, 317–48. Both Stephen and Duffin and Lloyd were prisoners at the time their pamphlets were published; Edward Farley had been a prisoner for debt in the King’s Bench in 1785 (see TNA PRIS 4/10, f. 1881). ¹²⁶ [Delamayne], The Rise and Practice of Imprisonment, is a sympathetic but critical response by a professional lawyer to these radical claims. Delamayne was a prisoner for debt in the King’s Bench from November 1767 to January 1769 (see TNA PRIS 4/4, ff. 124–5). ¹²⁷ For the campaign of James Stephen, and the troubles he precipitated, see especially Stephen’s own account in Considerations on Imprisonment; Middlesex Journal, 22 November 1770; 127 TNA

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of the unconstitutionality of imprisonment for debt, who thought that suffering under unconstitutional oppression must be patiently borne until the authorities could be induced to bring about change, Stephen was a believer in direct action. It is probably significant that his period of imprisonment coincided with the peak of enthusiasm for the great ‘friend of liberty’, John Wilkes, who had in fact spent eighteen months in the King’s Bench prison before his release in April 1770. Certainly the tactics that Stephen used bore a remarkable resemblance to those employed by Wilkes in the general warrants affair: he had himself brought before the King’s Bench by writ of habeas corpus, and challenged the judges to point to the statute that might justify their recommitting him, arguing that since there was no statute he, as well as every other debtor who chose to go through the same process, must be discharged. Stephen’s quest for instant legal redress of grievances was, however, doomed to failure. Irritated but by no means perturbed by his arguments, the judges ordered him to be recommitted to prison. Stephen interpreted his frustration as evidence of deep-seated corruption in the legal profession. He submitted (with appropriate protests) to authority whose legal judgment he doubted, returning to the King’s Bench prison as, in his own words, a ‘voluntary prisoner’, but he also persisted in his stubborn search for some legal avenue of redress. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1770 he explored most of the channels of complaint open to prisoners, applying to the master of the Crown Office, the court of Common Pleas, even to the King. In a pamphlet entitled Address to the Twelve Judges of England, reproduced in the Wilkite newspaper, the Middlesex Journal, he also laid his case before the public, to whom he appealed for financial support.¹²⁸ By November, when Stephen made a new appearance before the court of King’s Bench, most of the London and provincial papers were reporting his progress. The support of Wilkes himself had been sought for his final application.¹²⁹ But the last application was no more successful than the first. Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, with the brief comment that ‘it was not in his power to comply with his request’, ordered the marshal to return him to prison. Stephen’s next move may again have been inspired by the recent Wilkite remonstrances. Immediately upon his return to the prison from the court, Stephen, announcing his intention to remonstrate before Parliament, pushed his way past the turnkeys into the street. Almost instantly recaptured, he submitted to a punitive transfer to the New Gaol. KB 1/18/2 Mich. 1770, 21 (affidavit of Burleigh and Boddington) and 1/18/3 Trin. 1771, 42 (affidavit on behalf of marshal: Thomas Fletcher), 51 (affidavit of prisoners against marshal and others), and the account provided by Stephen’s son: The Memoirs of James Stephen ed. Merle M. Bevington (London, 1954), 93–106. For the campaign which Stephen conducted even after his release, see London Chronicle, November 1770–February 1771, passim. ¹²⁸ Middlesex Journal, 7, 9 August 1770. I have not been able to find a copy of the original pamphlet. It is advertised, however, in London Chronicle, 4 August 1770. ¹²⁹ BL Add. MS 30871, f. 96.


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Stephen’s doctrines may have been flawed in the eyes of contemporary legal scholars, but what alarmed the prison officers was the fact that he commanded an enthusiastic following within the prison. Stephen, of course, had always discussed his ideas with his friends, several of whom were his warmest supporters: men such as William Thompson, a portrait painter and member of the Royal Academy; John Mein, a Scots bookseller and newspaper editor hounded from the American colonies in 1767 for loyalist sympathies; and W. F. Jackson, a vituperative journalist.¹³⁰ But Stephen had also convened special meetings of the college in support of his campaign, had issued his various petitions and letters of complaint in the name of the whole body of prisoners, and had appeared before the courts as a delegate of the college.¹³¹ He had been able, in other words, to exploit the representative institutions of the prisoners to publicize his cause within the prison and to involve the body of prisoners in his campaign. The extent of his support was shown when he attempted his remonstrance. Large numbers of prisoners rushed the turnkeys with him, and helped him take the main door of the lodge off its hinges, while others tried to break their way out through the windows of the coffee room. (A few took advantage of the confusion to escape.) After Stephen’s recapture and removal some forty prisoners ‘assembled for several hours outside the lodge in a riotous manner’ and at night, announcing their determination to release him, they began to hack their way through the prison wall. The number of prisoners involved in this venture was evidently quite sufficient to overawe the marshal and turnkeys who remained cowering in the lodge, sending word for a party of footguards, whose timely arrival narrowly foiled the prisoners of success.¹³² In a deposition after this incident, two of the turnkeys claimed to believe that ‘about one hundred [prisoners] have entered into a combination to break the said prison and say they are in great danger of losing their lives and are apprehensive the prison will be again broke’.¹³³ A prosecution was initiated against Stephen and several other prisoners on the basis of the turnkeys’ account, but was not ultimately pressed. It was intended perhaps as a salutary warning.¹³⁴ If so, it failed in its purpose, for when Stephen and his would-be rescuers (who had also been moved to the New Gaol) returned to the King’s Bench in January, several months of disruption ensued. ¹³⁰ For Stephen’s friends, see [Stephen], The Memoirs, 89–90, and notes; F. Luther Mott, American Journalism (New York, 1962), 79–80; L. Werkmeister, The London Daily Press 1772–1792 (Lincoln, NE, 1962), 80–2; Complete Baronetage, 1707–1800 (Exeter, 1906), 35–7. ¹³¹ For indications that Stephen used the formal machinery of the college to organize his campaign see Stephen, Considerations on Imprisonment, 5–20; TNA KB 1/18/3 Trin. 1771, 42 (affidavit on behalf of marshal: Thomas Fletcher). ¹³² TNA KB 1/18/2 Mich. 1770, 21 (affidavit of Burleigh and Boddington); [Stephen], The Memoirs, 97–8. ¹³³ TNA KB 1/18/2 Mich. 1770, 21 (affidavit of Burleigh and Boddington). ¹³⁴ TNA KB 11/47, 20, and [Stephen], The Memoirs, 101. The statement of Stephen’s son that the prisoners indicted the marshal on this occasion seems to arise from a confusion with a later incident.

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The conflicts that arose on Stephen’s return were of two kinds. First, there was the struggle between prisoners intent on breaking out of prison and prison officers dedicated to stopping them. It is important to emphasize that attempts to break out were not really attempts to escape. Such actions by the prisoners were neither furtive nor surreptitious, designed to avoid detection; on the contrary, they were symbolic acts, a form of demonstration, intended to show how prisoners felt about imprisonment for debt. They were a bid for freedom only inasmuch as they were designed to secure a change in the law. The second sort of conflict arose between prisoners made newly sensitive to all infractions of their rights and prison officers more than usually inclined to lay down restrictions. The campaign exacerbated the tensions of everyday prison life which might normally have been resolved, and made the maintenance of order and harmony in the prison much more difficult. Plans to break out of prison seem to have been encouraged by Stephen himself. Not only did he continue to lecture to assemblies of prisoners on the iniquity of imprisonment for debt, but he also came up with specific plans of action. Thus at one time it seemed to him best that prisoners should march off to Westminster Hall in a body to plead their case; on another occasion he was reported as saying ‘that in case they the prisoners were inclinable to break out of the said prison and would give him notice and fix the day and hour of their intention, he would write to all the prisons in England and would engage that all the prisons should be broke on such a day’.¹³⁵ When Stephen transferred himself to the Fleet prison in May (where, judging by reports of turmoil, he must also have propagated his doctrines)¹³⁶ his dreams seem not to have departed with him: in the same month the newspapers carried a story that a dozen or more prisoners had actually succeeded in breaking out of the King’s Bench, but had since voluntarily surrendered themselves to the marshal.¹³⁷ Apart from the gaol-breaks, the prisoners manifested a general militancy that led to outbreaks of violence.¹³⁸ A complaint about the quality of beer, for example, was expressed by the large-scale destruction of beer barrels; a new building in the prison yard, said to take up air and space, was levelled to the ground; turnkeys and prisoners employed by the marshal who opposed such mob actions were dragged about the prison garden at the end of ropes, or ducked in tubs of urine. Security precautions which the marshal had undertaken because of the threat of mass escapes also served as provocation for several violent incidents. ¹³⁵ TNA KB 1/18/3 Trin. 1771, 42 (affidavit on behalf of marshal: Thomas Fletcher). ¹³⁶ For Stephen’s transfer to the Fleet prison, see TNA PRIS 4/4, f. 260; PRIS 2/21. For disturbances there, London Chronicle, 23 November 1770, 12, 14 March, 2 April 1771. ¹³⁷ Farley’s Bristol Journal, 18 May 1771. ¹³⁸ TNA KB 1/18/3 Trin. 1771, 42 (affidavit on behalf of marshal: Thomas Fletcher), 51 (affidavit of prisoners against marshal and others); London Chronicle, 2 May 1771; Farley’s Bristol Journal, 1 June 1771.


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Stephen’s friends—W. F. Jackson and others—played an ambivalent part in these more generalized disturbances in which the ambiguities and complexities of their conception of order were clearly revealed. According to the account of the marshal and prison officers, they were the ringleaders throughout; but according to Jackson and his allies, all their activities were inspired by a firm commitment to order. These apparently conflicting accounts both contain an element of truth; they merely represent different perceptions of the same set of circumstances. Being sympathetic to the prisoners at large, and understanding how their sense of grievance was aroused by their daily experiences, Jackson and his friends not only did not condemn their tumultuous activities, but at times set themselves at the head of campaigns of destruction, directing the prisoners’ endeavours and acting as their agents in the case of any negotiations with the authorities. To the marshal there could have been no clearer indication that these prisoners were troublemakers and that responsibility for all the disturbances in the prison rested on their shoulders. But Jackson and his allies did not believe that they were actively fomenting trouble. By their account they were playing the traditional role of prisoners’ leaders—the college authorities: economizing on violence, attempting to direct the energies of an angry body of men into minimally disruptive channels. The roots of disorder, as far as they were concerned, lay not in the prison population but in the prison government. It was the prison government and, indeed, the law itself which had to be reordered and reformed if there was to be order among the governed. So excited were the prisoners by the extraordinary hopes aroused by radical propaganda, and so unwilling the prisoners’ leaders to suppress disorder that they believed to be a natural response to repression, that for several months the prison lay almost completely outside the prison officers’ control. The marshal attempted to reassert his authority, throughout this period, by a series of tentative approaches, sometimes through the prisoners’ leaders—Jackson and others were unquestionably figures of authority in the prison and powerful potential allies—sometimes with the help of Surrey magistrates, who went into the prison and tried to reason with the prisoners. The magistrates’ approach was characteristically conciliatory: they inquired into prisoners’ grievances and drew up ‘conventions’ to regulate prison government, charging both the prisoners and prison officers to abide by them. Experience with this tactic, however, was frustrating. Prisoners quickly relapsed into disorderly ways, accusing the marshal of having contravened his part of the agreement. One of the last magistrates to go into the prison—one who was determined to get to the bottom of the troubles—later gave this account of his mission: he went into the prison and in the room where great part of the prisoners were assembled and enquired of them the cause of their complaints and proceedings when after some trifling suggestions respecting the Marshal and his officers one of them stood up and sayd that they had not any material complaint against him nor his officers but that

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their complaint was being illegally confined or against Magna Charta and that they were determined not to suffer confinement in that prison for debt any longer and on this deponents asking if those were the sentiments of them all they unanimously answered that they were.¹³⁹

A brief experiment with the stationing of troops in the prison was scarcely more encouraging: not only were the prisoners hotly opposed to the introduction of military force, but some of the troops were more inclined to side with the prisoners than with the marshal. The troubles were not put down until June. In that month a secondary from the Crown Office went over to the prison to investigate some complaints regarding pumps and bulldogs. Thomas Bradley accosted him at the outer door of the prison with a pistol in one hand and a cutlass in the other and told him they knew the occasion of his coming But they had appointed a committee to act for them and that they should Trust their complaints to them and did not want his assistance and one of the prisoners said . . . we don’t want to hear of pumps and dogs and (shewing a pistol) said these are our bulldogs.¹⁴⁰

At this point the court of King’s Bench intervened. While the prisoners dispatched their committee to the court with a memorial that explained that they could scarcely be orderly when so inflamed with a sense of their wrongs, the judges began collecting depositions for prosecution of the ringleaders. Eighteen prisoners were indicted at the Surrey summer assizes for conspiracy and misdemeanour. The prisoners responded with a prosecution of their own against the marshal, several soldiers, and turnkeys for riot and assault, but the grand jury did not find for their indictment.¹⁴¹ Characteristically, the prosecution it seems, was, finally abandoned in favour of a negotiated solution. The prisoners agreed to lay down their arms, and to appeal to Parliament for redress.¹⁴² Fortunately for the court and for the marshal, the majority of those who had played a key role in the disturbances were released under an insolvency act in the following year.¹⁴³ In terms of the prisoners’ campaign against the debt law—which was to last for several more decades—the significance of the events of 1770–1 lay chiefly in their contribution to the prisoners’ political education. Disillusioned by their long battle of any hope that the courts might be induced to reform the law themselves, the prisoners finally came to rest their hopes in Parliament. It was from Parliament that they were subsequently to demand radical redress of their ¹³⁹ TNA KB 1/18/3 Trin. 1771, 42 (affidavit on behalf of marshal: Thomas Fletcher). ¹⁴⁰ TNA KB 21/40 (entry for Monday after three weeks after Trinity 1771). There is also a copy of the report in Guildhall MS 659.1. ¹⁴¹ TNA ASSI 31/10 (Surrey Summer Assizes 1771). ¹⁴² TNA KB 1/18/4 Mich. 1771, no. 1, unnumbered (memorial of King’s Bench prisoners). There is no indication in the Commons Journals that they made anything other than the ordinary application for an insolvency act (xxxiii, 447). ¹⁴³ See TNA PRIS 4/4, under names of individual prisoners, and London Gazette (1772) passim.


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grievances; the corruption of Parliament that they were to blame for the survival of the practice of imprisonment for debt. An episode which served in its own time to educate the prisoners into a sharper awareness of their political environment serves the more modest purpose in this chapter of illustrating points previously made about the balance of power in the prison, and about the nature of the prisoners’ attitudes towards law and authority. As the previous discussion should have made clear, in normal circumstances the debtors, though they saw themselves as an aggrieved and wronged group, did not seek to challenge the authority of King’s Bench, nor of the marshal and his officers. On the contrary, prisoners frequently collaborated with, or at least made use of, the prison authorities. In so doing, however (it has been argued here), they never resigned themselves to a purely passive role. Far from it: prisoners imbued with a strong notion of what powers authority could legitimately exercise over them were able to play a significant part in determining the nature and limits of authority within the prison. They were able to assert themselves successfully in this sphere in part because a prison government weak in manpower and resources was inevitably heavily dependent on prisoner co-operation—and in part because the public attitude towards debtors was sufficiently ambivalent that brutal exercise of force was not the preferred tactic of prison officers and would almost certainly have been politically impractical. In the events of 1770–1 we see the endemic conflicts of prison life raised to a pitch of unusual intensity. The troubles of this period starkly revealed the weakness of the prison government and the routine dependence of prison officers on prisoner collaboration. They revealed also the potential strength of the prisoners within the prison—maximized, and given shape, by their traditions of collective action. If the events of 1770–1 lay bare deep-rooted tensions; however, they also suggest what were some of the bases for reconciliation and accommodation. The prisoners, even when they behaved disruptively, were never entirely ‘lawless’. Their acts of violence were limited and discriminatory; they had a strong notion of justice; and they had not entirely lost confidence in the ability and willingness of the established authorities to deliver justice to them. Even their breaches of the law were commonly not gestures of blind defiance, but rather attempts to elicit a response from some legal agency or authority. The prisoners’ concern for legitimacy, their acceptance of the necessity of rules and government, their adherence to values of ‘order’ and ‘harmony’ clearly provided the essential foundations for the re-establishment of ‘normal’ rule. In the light of the events of 1770–1, however, it is scarcely that note on which we should conclude. For what the disturbances of these years most dramatically evidence is that adherence to such values did not necessarily entail a passive relationship with authority. And in the particular circumstances of the King’s Bench prison, the authorities were certainly very far from having established

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a monopolistic claim to represent ‘the law’. Far from being above conflict, or counterposed to conflict, notions of legality and orderliness, in the King’s Bench prison, were themselves inextricably caught up in conflict. That law, justice, and order should prevail could, with very little difficulty, become the watchword of revolt.

7 The Protestant carpenter—William Payne of Bell Yard (c.1718–82): the life and times of a London informing constable How fit it is that some should make a noble stand against immorality and breach of public laws. Moses Browne, The Causes that obstruct the Progress of Reformation . . . A Sermon Preached to the Society for Reformation of Manners (London, 1765) Lost to every just and tender feeling, destitute of any means of sensibility, and destitute of any knowledge of the nature and consequence of an oath; he kisses the book with as much apathy and unconcern as he would do any indifferent thing whatsoever. Little credit will be paid to a man noticed as a common informer. George Barrington, defendant at the Old Bailey (1777)

Let us start with two glimpses of our subject at the most dramatic point in his career. It is a Friday early in June 1780. In St George’s Fields, just south of the Thames, members of the Protestant Association are assembling, amidst heat and dust, to protest against an act for the relief of Catholics passed two years before. A total of 45,000 have signed a petition asking Parliament to repeal the act—but it is feared that opponents may argue that some of the signatures have been forged. The men have assembled to demonstrate just how numerous they really are. Most of the thousands gathering are from the metropolitan area, but among them is a substantial contingent of Scots: Scotland has been from the beginning a storm centre of opposition to the act. At eleven in the morning, Lord George Gordon, President of the Protestant Association, arrives and addresses the crowd, many of whom sit, kneel, or stand in a great ring around him. The plan is that they should muster into four divisions: a London division (meaning the City of London), a Westminster division, a Southwark division, and a Scottish division, though these do not materialize quite as planned. Lord George departs for the Commons by coach; a small contingent travels behind him, by the short route over Westminster Bridge to the House of Commons—but a much larger group, thousands strong, marches over London Bridge and processes through the City.

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This group, at whose core is the London division, bears the great petition with it. Flag bearers advance with the procession. One of the flag bearers is a man called William Payne.¹ A week later the Privy Council meets to order the arrest of Lord George Gordon and to enquire into the origins and course of the riots that have raged in the metropolis since the break-up of the original demonstration. Among the witnesses called before the Privy Council is a magistrate called George Reid. Reid had attended at the House of Commons the previous Tuesday—five days after the Protestant Association’s march. On that day the House of Commons had sat, very briefly, for the first time since the riots began. A large crowd had gathered outside Parliament to see if they would act on the petition and move to repeal the offending bill, also to demand the release of prisoners taken in the course of the riots. Among the questions which the Privy Councillors put to Reid when they question him at the end of the week is this: Did you see Payne the carpenter in the riot?—that is, in the assembly outside Parliament. Reid answers, ‘that he did; that he [Payne] was very active; that he encouraged the mob and exhorted them to have the bill repealed; that he [Payne] told him that their forefathers had been persecuted and massacred by Papists and hoped it would not happen again; that he told him [Mr Reid] that he hoped that he [Mr Reid] was as zealous in the cause as himself . . .’² At the time of this episode, William Payne was sixty-two years old—though evidently none the worse for that. He was nearing the end of a life spent largely, if not entirely, in the metropolitan area. He had been a working carpenter for almost fifty years. He had also spent over twenty years pursuing a successful, though intermittently controversial, secondary career in the London police, such as it then was. In 1778, two years before the riots, he had been overwhelmingly elected by the Common Council of the City to the post of marshalman: to be one of six assistants to the two City marshals, who oversaw City policing. To the Earl of Shelburne, Payne was ‘the lowest and most despicable of mankind . . . a common informing constable of the city of London’,³ but in his own milieu he was a man of substance, and the several causes he championed were dear to the hearts of many of the capital’s trading classes: to several tens of thousands of families in the middle strata of the metropolitan population. Payne’s exceptionally well-documented career provides us with a variety of insights into the concerns of townsmen at this level, and into the opportunities and the difficulties that ¹ For the sequence of events, J. P. De Castro, The Gordon Riots (London, 1926), and C. Hibbert, King Mob (London, 1956). Gordon’s account (BL Add ms 42,129, also transcribed at Guildhall Library ms. 10460) vividly evokes the heat, dust, and confusion prevailing as the marchers assembled: ff. 10–14. Both sympathetic and hostile accounts were given at his trial: A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T. B. Howell (35 vols, London, 1816–28), xxi, 485–647. 519 has a defence lawyer, Kenyon, interrogating the witness William Hay: ‘You said one of the persons carrying flags in St George’s Fields was a constable—How do you know he was a constable?’ Hay: ‘The man was very remarkable; his name is Payne, he is a City constable.’ ² TNA: PC 1/3097. ³ Shelburne: Parliamentary History, xix, 1145.

The Protestant carpenter

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a man of this kind might confront when he set out to promote causes popular among his peers, but less so among his betters.⁴

THE NEIGHBOURHOOD William Payne was born around 1718.⁵ His origins are obscure, but, by his own later account, he served his apprenticeship (presumably to a carpenter) in Bell Yard, Temple Bar, on the borders between the City of London and the City of Westminster. His apprentice years probably started in the 1730s.⁶ Later, he set up in business and brought up a family in the same street; his son, also called William and also a carpenter, died there in 1833. By that time there had been Paynes in Bell Yard for a century.⁷ Bell Yard itself was a street of about three-dozen houses. At the time of the first census in 1801, it had a little over 300 inhabitants.⁸ Francis Place, later renowned as the ‘radical tailor of Charing Cross’, was apprenticed to a breeches maker in Bell Yard a few years after Payne’s death. He described it as ‘as perfect a sample of second-rate tradesmen’s families as any place could be.’⁹ Memories of Bell Yard play an important part in the argument of the autobiography which Place composed in the 1820s. Place invoked the ways of ⁴ Payne has long attracted attention from historians of Catholicism and anti-Catholicism: see E. Burton, Life and Times of the Rt. Rev. Bishop Challoner (London, 1909) ii, 85–96; J. Le Sourd, Les catholiques dans la société anglaise 1765–1865 (Lille, 1978), i, p.21ff.; C. Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester, 1993), esp. 172–3. More recently, his work as a constable has been noted: J. Oldham, The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols, Chapel Hill, NC, 1992), ii, 870–2, 930 n. 30; A. Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 1999), 121–4, 131–2. For drawing my attention to relevant sources during several decades, I am grateful to Donna Andrew, John Brewer, Sue Brown, Fara Dabhoiwala, Andy Federer, Drew Grey, Colin Haydon, Tony Henderson, Jim Oldham, Ruth Paley, Nick Rogers, and John Seed; also to John Walsh for numerous suggestions, and to Tim Hitchcock and Bob Shoemaker, whose on-line version of the Old Bailey Whole Proceedings () greatly aided the completion of my research on Payne’s policing activities. Since the Whole Proceedings are now most easily accessed on-line, I will henceforth cite cases in this form: OBP: date, defendant(s)’s name(s) (website reference number). ⁵ LMA: MJ/O/C/10A (Middlesex Quarter Sessions, General Orders 1774–83), July 1774, gives his age at that time as 56. ⁶ OBP: February 1767, William Thompson Gilliard (t17670218-52). Payne testified that he has known the prisoner twenty years because he served his time to a pastry cook at the bottom of Bell Yard, as did Payne also. Unless the age cited in n. 5 is mistaken, Payne would not have been ‘serving time’, i.e. been an apprentice in 1747, aged 29 or so, though he may have been in Bell Yard; ‘twenty years’ may be a loose estimate. I have not found Payne’s apprenticeship in Inland Revenue records. ⁷ William Payne Jr’s death in Bell Yard in 1833 is noted under his name in the index to the Carpenters’ Co. records, Corp. of London archives. ⁸ For Bell Yard, H. Phillips, Mid-Georgian London (London, 1964), 186–7. For photographs of Temple Bar and Bell Yard at the building of the new Law Courts, G. Stamp, The Changing Metropolis: Earliest Photographs of London 1839–79 (Frome, 1984), 49–51. For census returns see n. 22. ⁹ Autobiography of Francis Place, ed. M. Thale (Cambridge, 1972), 72.

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old Bell Yard to illustrate the great transformation in popular manners and morals that (in his view) had taken place since his boyhood. According to Place, ‘[l]ike all such places at that time, [Bell Yard] contained much that was low, vulgar and dissolute . . . Most of the youths were loose characters [and] . . . want of chastity in the girls was common.’ Of his own master’s five children, Place asserted that all the daughters were either prostitutes or kept by men, and both the sons were criminals.¹⁰ While this may have been true of that household, the fact that the street had until recently housed that sturdy foe of ‘vice’, William Payne, and continued to house his widow—who at just this time pronounced herself confident that ‘noone on earth can arraign my conduct in any way’—certainly complicates Place’s monotone picture.¹¹ Bell Yard today runs north at the point where the Strand becomes Fleet Street, along the side of the Law Courts. Its northern end abuts Lincoln’s Inn. The Law Courts are a nineteenth-century construction; in Payne’s day the high courts met in Westminster Hall, alongside the two Houses of Parliament (though City cases that came to the court of King’s Bench were heard at the City Guildhall). Yet, situated as it was amidst the inns of court, Bell Yard was even then central to lawyers’ London. As a law student in the 1760s, Lloyd Kenyon (later Lord Chief Justice) had lodgings there.¹² In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Strand had been a street of nobleman’s palaces. Since that time the nobility and polite classes had moved westwards. The eighteenth-century Strand served chiefly as a shopping street and transport artery. Running eastwards from Charing Cross to the gateway of Temple Bar (at which point it became Fleet Street), it was a major thoroughfare between Westminster and the City. Many high-class milliners had shops along this stretch of road, and there were also cheaper clothing warehouses. Its continuation, Fleet Street and, beyond that street’s eastern end, St Paul’s churchyard, were noted for their printers and booksellers.¹³ Several of the City’s major produce markets lay just north of Fleet Street, including Smithfield, Newgate, and Fleet markets.¹⁴ North of the Strand lay the Covent Garden theatre and entertainment district, ensuring that the area had a lively nightlife. It was well equipped with taverns, alehouse, and inns—and also with brothels. Throngs of passers-by attracted those who sought to make a living on the street: costermongers, ballad singers, ¹⁰ Place, Autobiography, 72–3. ¹¹ Corp. of London archives: COL/CC/01/01/067 ( Journals of the Common Council, 1783–6), f. 9b. ¹² G. T. Kenyon, Life of Lloyd, First Lord Kenyon (London, 1873), 15. ¹³ C. S. Sykes, Private Palaces (London, 1989), 14, 41. For trade in the Fleet Street area, A. Buck, Dress in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1979), 158, 162, 166; H. Atherton, Political Prints in the Age of Hogarth (Oxford, 1974) ch. 1. For pickpocketing of people looking at prints: OBP: February 1772, William Davis (t17730217-27); April 1774, Thomas Jones (t17740413-72); April 1777, John Powell (t17770409-80). ¹⁴ C. S. Smith, ‘The Market Place and the Market’s Place in London, c.1660–1840’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, London, 1999).


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beggars, and prostitutes; for the poorest class of prostitute, Ludgate hill and Fleet Street were favourite places in which to pick up men.¹⁵ In the 1760s Payne claimed that, near Temple Bar, prostitutes and their bullies were ‘so numerous that the shopkeepers could hardly get to their doors’.¹⁶ Payne’s carpentry business may have taken him further afield, but, during most of his years policing the City, he seems to have operated chiefly within the limited though busy district that ran from Temple Bar eastwards along Fleet Street, up Ludgate hill, through St Paul’s churchyard, along Cheapside to the Mansion House and the Guildhall. Here he swept up loose women and pounced upon pickpockets. Wood Street Compter, which lay in a street parallel to the Guildhall, was his local nick. Bridewell, to which prostitutes were consigned, lay just south of Fleet Street, towards the river. All the districts outside the old City walls were more populous and poorer than the inner wards: great merchants more commonly lived in the central district around the Royal Exchange. Payne lived on the westernmost edge of Farringdon Without, a populous ward—kept relatively prosperous, among the outer wards, by the great shopping artery running through it.¹⁷ Here the radical John Wilkes was elected alderman in 1769.¹⁸ Occasionally, Payne travelled westwards: to the magistrates’ office in Bow Street, to Westminster Hall and Parliament. Even his special campaigns did not take him very far afield: only westwards to the fields at Knightsbridge where graziers and cattle jobbers met to bargain, and around the edges of the City to scattered Catholic chapels: amidst the Irish populations around Seven Dials, in Moorfields north-east of the city, in the east end, and Southwark. Payne lived an intense and active life in a small physical compass (Figure 7.1, overleaf).

FA M I LY A N D S TAT U S Payne must have finished his apprenticeship in the 1740s, then served as a journeyman. We might speculate that he served the same master until, in the early 1750s, this man died or retired, and Payne, by then in his early thirties, was finally able to bring to an end his years of subordination. He set himself up ¹⁵ Henderson, Disorderly Women, ch. 3, for prostitution; for beggars T. Hitchcock, ‘The Publicity of Poverty in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, in J. F. Merritt ed., Imagining Early Modern London (Cambridge, 2001), 170. See also OBP: April 1768, William Booth (t17680413-18). ¹⁶ Corp. of London archives: COL/CA/05/01/0156 (Court of Aldermen papers, January–April 1766), petition of William Payne and John Emmerton 15 January 1766. ¹⁷ Farringdon Without is placed in context by J. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660–1750 (Oxford, 2001), 140; N. Rogers, Whigs and Cities, Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989), 148–50; and S. E. Brown, ‘Politics, Commerce and Social Policy in the City of London, 1782–1802’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1992), 16–27. ¹⁸ For Wilkes and the City, see G. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty (Oxford, 1962), ch. 9; P. D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Oxford, 1996), ch. 7, 9; and J. Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots: The Pro-Americans of London (Gloucester, 1987).

Figure 7.1. Payne’s London.


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in business in Bell Yard (perhaps in his master’s old house), and acquired for the first time the coveted status of householder. It may have been at about this time that he married; his wife Elizabeth was five years younger than himself and, if this was the time of their marriage, would then have been in her late twenties, which seems plausible. Their son William was born in 1754 or early 1755. At least four other children, daughters, were also born to their marriage.¹⁹ What information we have about these children derives largely from a petition their mother wrote after her husband’s death. It is worth looking ahead to consider the picture presented there because of the light it sheds on Payne’s family circumstances. In May 1783, five months after Payne’s death, his widow, then fifty-eight years old, reported to the Common Council that her husband’s death had left her in a most ‘Distressed Situation’. Of her five living children, her son William, then about twenty-eight, had taken over his father’s business (having served an apprenticeship under him). However, the business had suffered from Payne’s preoccupation with other things, and offered only a poor living. Despite this, William Jr had to support not only his mother but also a crippled sister who would be forever incapable of earning her own livelihood. Of the three other daughters, two others were also as yet entirely dependent. She asked for support in recognition of her husband’s efforts.²⁰ When the Council investigated five years later, all that had changed was that one of the daughters was married but not in a position to help; the other two, not apparently living at home, were working for milliners, but making ‘but a small livelihood’.²¹ William Payne was not a poor man, by common metropolitan standards. His house (that is, the house of which he was principal tenant) had a rateable value of around £30 per annum. Apparently one of the most substantial houses in the street, it would appear from this figure to have withstood comparison with most substantial middle-class houses (though probably the Payne family shared it with lodgers).²² However, these snapshots of his family remind us that to ¹⁹ Payne’s name does not appear in the 1750 scavenger’s rate book, but he was certainly resident in Bell Yard in 1755, when he purchased membership of the Carpenter’s Company: see Guildhall Library microfilm MF 451/2 and MS 4335/4. I have been unable to trace his marriage, his children’s baptisms, or his own burial in the St Dunstan’s in the West registers. In 1761, he was described as having a wife and ‘three small children’ (KB 1/14/6 Hil. 1761, King against Payne.) His wife’s age is given as 58 in 1783 in Corp. of London archives: COL/CC/01/01/067 ( Journals of the Common Council, 1783–6), f. 9b (where one son and four daughters are mentioned); the rate books suggest that she survived, and remained the ratepayer, through 1794. His son’s age is given as 78 in 1833 in the Carpenter’s Co. index. ²⁰ Corp. of London archives: COL/CC/01/01/067 ( Journals of the Common Council, 1783–6), f. 9b. For William Jr’s apprenticeship to his father see Carpenter’s Co. records as above MF 451/2 and 4337/5. I have not succeeded in tracing a will. ²¹ Corp. of London archives: COL/CC/01/01/069 ( Journals of the Common Council, 1787–9) f. 204b. It is unclear why they delayed investigating for so long. Ultimately, they gave her the not ungenerous £31.10.6, though no doubt she would have appreciated prompter payment. ²² For the house’s rateable value see rate books in n. 49; cf L. D. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation (Cambridge, 1992), 50. The 1801 census return (Westminster City Library, K432), shows the house, then occupied by William Payne Jr, containing two families, comprising

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be a substantial small tradesman was not to have escaped continuous economic pressure and the threat of poverty.²³ A young man from this milieu could expect to spend an extended portion of his early manhood in a subordinate position in someone else’s house. Whether or not he ever set up his own business might well depend in part on luck: on a master conveniently dying, on a windfall access of capital, or a well-timed offer of credit. Such men were likely to marry late, delaying until they had a prospect of setting up an independent household. There was in consequence a substantial chance that they might die or fall chronically ill before their children could support themselves in comfort. The family might well then experience a period of hardship. At worst this period of hardship might make it necessary to interrupt the children’s training, perhaps irreparably damaging their chance of attaining what had once been their parents’ station in life. Success of course was not merely a prize in a lottery. Boys with different family backgrounds within this milieu had different life chances, and awareness of this from an early age shaped their expectations and behaviour. Francis Place recalled that, as the son of a householder, he had scorned to associate with those of his fellow apprentices whose fathers were less well placed.²⁴ In fact, after a period of hardship, Payne’s son would make a success of his life, and die a liveryman of the Carpenters’ Company (a status his father had never attained). His children in their turn would continue in the City’s service, some rising to further heights, serving for example as municipal judges.²⁵ Where did Payne himself stand within metropolitan social hierarchies? Since he never attained the status of liveryman he was not one of the City’s top 8,000 or so householders: not one of the men who made up the relatively democratic City electorate. As a freeman and £10 householder, he would nonetheless have been eligible to vote in local elections within the City, and to turn up at wardmote meetings. As such, he was one of perhaps 20,000 men. In Payne’s lifetime, the City—gradually losing population—cannot have contained in all more than some 35,000 households. Payne was a middling householder, a man of real though modest standing.²⁶ four males including children and seven females including children, some probably lodgers. For lodgers in the house the year after Payne’s death: OBP: April 1783, Ann Webb (t17830430-50). ²³ Relatively little work has been done on this milieu. M. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and Family in England 1680–1780 (Berkeley, 1996), comes closest, though her focus is avowedly (16–17) on the 20 per cent or so of the London population who constituted the ‘solid’ middle class—not extending towards the ‘lower middle class’ beneath them. For an account with an emphasis on apprentices, journeymen, and servants, P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged (Harmondsworth, 1991), chs 3, 7–8. ²⁴ Autobiography, 73. ²⁵ For descendants of Payne, Guildhall Library, Prints and Drawings collection, Noble Collection C36: miscellanea relating to City offices; an early twentieth-century newspaper report, filed under ‘City Chamberlain’ (I owe this reference to Sue Brown). ²⁶ For metropolitan social structure: Schwarz, London, 51–73. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, 5, suggests that there were about 8,000 liverymen and 12–15,000 freemen in the 1760s; Brown, ‘Politics, Commerce’, 15, 29, says that recruitments to the freedom remained buoyant to the end


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The City as a whole, however, and particularly the inner city, was a relatively prosperous part of the metropolis, surrounded on all sides by a poorer mix—until, on the far side of Westminster, in what would later be termed the ‘West End’, the social gradient rose to aristocratic heights. Living on the western fringe of the City, among many poor householders, lodgers, and slumdwellers scraping by, though still at best (as Place expressed it) a ‘second-rate tradesman’, not comparing with the great retailers of Fleet Street, Payne nonetheless cut a more substantial figure than he would have done in some more elevated neighbourhood. In the metropolis as a whole, it has been suggested that the solid middle classes may have made up some 20 per cent of the population, the struggling ‘lower middle classes’, with some skills but little capital, at most perhaps another 10 per cent.²⁷ Payne ranked somewhere in the broad margin between the two groups, tending towards the more solid. In Westminster, with its especially democratic, ratepayer franchise, men like him voted in parliamentary elections (though, perhaps because his house lay within the ‘Liberty of the Rolls’, Payne seems not to have qualified as a Westminster voter).²⁸ Payne occupied an ambiguous social position. A hundred and fifty years later, he might have been typed as a non-commissioned officer: a man who represented the most familiar face of authority to his underlings—but who, to his social superiors, was himself clearly an underling. Men like Payne held some of the lowest ranks in the machinery of eighteenth-century government. Lord Chief Justice Mansfield derided him as ‘a very illiterate man, who knows nothing of Latin, the language in which the Mass is said’ (thus seeking to undermine his credentials as a priest-taker).²⁹ But in English Payne was securely literate, writing in a fluent hand (though with erratic capitalization).³⁰ He read the newspapers, sometimes wrote to the newspapers, and published a pamphlet of his own. Mansfield called him ‘Payne’, but to witnesses at the Old Bailey he was normally ‘Mr Payne’. of the century, by which time liverymen were 10,000—despite declining population. (Not all liverymen or freemen lived in the City.) ²⁷ Schwarz, London, 51–7. He offers several estimates, which do not add up neatly. This one aims to include all who paid income tax at the end of the century as elements of a broad middle class; the ‘lower middle class’ component within it comprises small shopkeepers and self-employed artisans. Schwarz suggests that adding in employed artisans would bring the total of the propertied and skilled working population up to about 45 per cent of the whole. ²⁸ For this jurisdictional unit, see n. 49. There are some Bell Yard voters in Westminster poll books, but the boundary between city and Liberty seems to have run through the street. I am grateful to Alice Hill for information about Westminster poll books, and for discussing the point with me. ²⁹ See n. 240. ³⁰ Papers in what is presumably Payne’s own hand survive in HLRO: HL main series, 19 March 1765, Dearness of provision papers, f. 79, reproduced as Figure 7.3, and Corp. of London archives: COL/CA/01/01/174 (Repertories of Court of Aldermen, November 1765–November 1766), f. 75: petition and order for William Payne and John Emmerton to be appointed constables for a year, January 1766; COL/AC/06/008 (Alchin papers Box 17/118 no. 8).

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In Payne’s immediate milieu he earned respect for traits that in high society did not clearly distinguish him from the mass. The different standards of respect operating at different social levels can be effectively brought out if we reflect on the differing significance attached at different levels to Payne’s sobriquet: ‘the carpenter’. Payne always termed himself ‘the carpenter’ or ‘the Little English Carpenter’. That name appeared in his obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine. When he published an anti-popery pamphlet in 1767, he did so under this transparent pseudonym.³¹ For him the title was presumably a badge of pride: reflecting his mastery of a trade, and membership of a City company (though very possibly there was an element of defiance about it too: he made a point of not claiming to be other than he was). To gentlemen, by contrast, or to anyone with genteel pretensions, a self-proclaimed carpenter who pronounced on public affairs condemned himself out of his own mouth: tradesman-politicians were archetypal figures of fun. Payne’s pamphlet thus attracted a riposte, purporting to be by a journeyman shoemaker: A letter to a Member of Parliament concerning the effects of the growth of Popery on the price of provisions: an extended satire on tradesmen with the gall to take on government (including, for good measure, the ‘untutored’ jurymen who had recently defied the instructions of a judge and found verdicts against the government and for John Wilkes and his associates).³² Though Payne’s law-enforcement activities are well documented, his carpentry business is not.³³ It must have suffered from his increasing absorption with other matters. In fact, he was accused of having abandoned carpentry as early as 1768. The accusation came from a barrister acting as defence counsel for a Catholic priest whom Payne was prosecuting. In the course of a speech designed to discredit Payne, the barrister stated that ‘he has left off his carpenter’s trade to become Informer’. Payne hotly rebutted this, crying out ‘I deny it, I’ll prove that false, I have several men at work at this time’.³⁴ Scattered indications suggest that, indeed, he never entirely left off the business. In 1768, he was en route ‘to my workmen’ on Snow Hill when the sight of a pickpocket distracted him.³⁵ In 1770, he apprenticed his son to himself to learn the trade of a carpenter.³⁶ In 1772, he offered a reward for the apprehension of some miscreant who had sent ³¹ Gentleman’s Magazine, 1782, November obituaries; Cry Aloud and Spare Not, or an Alarm to all the Protestants of Great Britain and Ireland . . . Humbly Addressed to the Clergy of the Church of England by a True Born Englishman or the Little English Carpenter (London, 1767). (Copy in Bodleian at Vet A5 e1117.) It is unquestionable from internal evidence that this pamphlet is by Payne. ³² Bound with the Payne pamphlet and others in Bodleian. Because Payne was not a voter, we have no clues to his political preferences. He attended a number of political meetings—but chiefly to catch pickpockets. ³³ Though see OBP: April 1759, William Burch (t17590425-2), and TNA: E 133/96/64–5, further discussed below. ³⁴ R. v. Webb, quoted in James Barnard, Life of the Rt. Rev. Richard Challoner (London, 1784), 173. ³⁵ OBP: May 1768, George Walker, John Tramer (t17680518-3). ³⁶ See Carpenter’s Co. records as in n. 20.


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him a letter, threatening to burn down his carpenter’s workshop.³⁷ In 1774, he applied for (though was not awarded) the newly created post of District Surveyor for Middlesex.³⁸ In his later years, he sometimes appeared at the Old Bailey in the status of carpenter, as expert witness on material evidence.³⁹ By the age of forty, Payne had attained full adult and independent status. He was husband and father, householder and master. The scene was set for his emergence onto the public stage. Although he seems to have continued his carpentry business, and although, as we have noted, his status as ‘carpenter’ remained crucial to his sense of identity, henceforth, carpentry’s claims on his time would be challenged by other commitments.

RELIGION Religious ideas clearly crucially shaped Payne’s world view. We do have some evidence about his religious affiliations. Though it is tantalizingly sparse, it suggests that he stood somewhere on the Calvinistic fringe of Anglicanism. There is good evidence for his having sometimes attended the evening ‘lectures’ of a man who may have been a formative influence: William Romaine.⁴⁰ Romaine held a lectureship at Payne’s parish church, St Dunstan’s in the West, from 1749 (Payne’s thirty-second year) until his own death in 1795. Romaine was much impressed by the teachings of the two men who emerged as leaders of evangelical religion in England from the 1730s, John Wesley and George Whitefield, but ultimately (from the mid-1750s) inclined more towards Whitefield’s Calvinistic camp. He preached the Christian’s need to seek a ‘new birth’; God’s imputation of Christ’s righteousness to man without the least merit on the part of men themselves; the possibility of believers knowing themselves to be saved, and (against Wesley’s notion of the attainability of a form of ‘Christian perfection’), the existence of two natures, one depraved, one regenerated, forever at war even within the regenerate. The 1750s and early 1760s, the years of Payne’s emergence into public life, were years of high excitement among evangelicals, partly because ³⁷ London Gazette, 28 July 1768. ³⁸ LMA: MJ/O/C/10A (Middlesex Quarter Sessions, General Orders 1774–83), July 1774. The office of district surveyor was created under the Building Act of 1774 (14 Geo. III c.78), to secure the more systematic discharge of functions previously entrusted to informers: Payne would have been qualified for the post on more than one count. For further context see n. 123. ³⁹ OBP: April 1779, Thomas Hilliard (t17790404-36). ⁴⁰ For Payne’s attendance, see OBP: April 1767, John Mitchell, Thomas Anderson (t1767042959v); December 1767, James Peel, James Furver (t17671209-79); April 1769, William Houten (t17690405-34). For Romaine: W. Bromley Cadogan, Life of the Rev. William Romaine (London, 1796). More modern accounts include Rev. G. T. Cox, The Life and Doctrines of Romaine (London, 1870); D. N. Samuel, A Winnowing Ministry: Romaine, Huntingdon and Experimental Preaching (Lewes, n.d.); G. Carter, ‘Romaine, William (1714–1795)’, ODNB. Romaine was clearly well connected in the City: at his funeral, City marshals on horseback with their men rode before the hearse to the church (Cadogan, Life, 95).

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of what were taken to be portents in the greater world, but also because these years saw much fluidity and innovation in evangelical thought and practice.⁴¹ Romaine’s fiery preaching began to attract so many ‘ragged, unsavoury’ seekers after salvation to St Dunstan’s that some parishioners were moved to complain, and the rector took to law in an unsuccessful attempt to drive him from his post.⁴² Payne also had connections with Whitefield himself. In December 1756 he was at Whitefield’s chapel in Longacre when he happened to witness a pickpocket in action—an event that led to his first recorded appearance at the Old Bailey.⁴³ At around the same time and for a decade thereafter, he was extensively employed by Whitefield, helping to construct his new ‘tabernacle’ in Tottenham Court Road and making alterations to his house in Moorfields. Though this relationship ended in mutual recrimination, when Whitefield refused to pay Payne’s costs in full, Payne evidently became well acquainted with both Whitefield and his wife. According to Payne’s attorney, Whitefield told him that he believed ‘friend Payne to be a very honest fair dealing man’.⁴⁴ (One interesting feature of this dispute is that it reminds us that some of Payne’s early acquaintance with courts and legal procedures must have arisen from his position as a small businessman, contracting for work, and having debts to collect. Around 1760, Whitefield expostulated with Payne’s attorney about Payne having arrested one Lambert for debt, exclaiming that Payne would be arresting him next!⁴⁵) Rounding off the picture of Payne’s religious affiliations: most tantalizing and puzzling are references to his involvement, around 1760, with a congregation of ‘Protestant Dissenters’ at Uxbridge (some twenty miles westwards of London, on the Oxford road—walkable in a day by a fit man, or reachable by coach, but still, some distance from his usual haunts). The group attracted the riotous attention of some of their neighbours, and Payne was among those who claimed to have been assaulted. He also seems to have tried (though in vain) to use his developing knowledge of law and the courts to turn the attack upon the assailants. In October of that year, in the capacity of ‘preacher or teacher to an assembly of Protestant Dissenters’, he notified Middlesex magistrates of the ⁴¹ H. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast (London, 1989), 334–42; A. Harding, The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion (Oxford, 2003), 240–1—esp. for tensions over Calvinism. ⁴² An Apology for the Parishioners of St Dunstan’s (London, 1759). Monthly Review, xxi (1759), 271–2, reviewed several pamphlets on the controversy. ⁴³ OBP: December 1756, Ann Saunders (t17561208-41). The recognizance establishes that the ‘William Pain’ mentioned here was of Bell Yard, carpenter: LMA OB/SR/008, roll for December 1756. ⁴⁴ TNA: E 133/96/64–5—depositions in the case that Payne brought against Whitefield’s heirs. One deponent, Elizabeth Cox, claimed to have known the Whitefields intimately from the mid-1740s, and Payne from about the same time, so Payne’s connections with Whitefield may go further back, though other deponents who knew Whitefield well said they had come to know Payne only in the mid-1750s. ⁴⁵ Payne’s attorney, Dodding Jonathan Bruce of the Inner Temple, said in 1775 that he had known Payne 23 years, and for 20 years past had been particularly intimate with him: E 133/96/65. See also OBP: December 1775, Abraham Dugard and Richard Banfield (t17750111-5).


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removal of the assembly to a new meeting place elsewhere in Uxbridge.⁴⁶ Possibly these Dissenters were Calvinistic Methodists, and possibly Payne had some kind of lay-preaching role among them—though it also seems possible that they may not have initially conceived of themselves as ‘Dissenters’, and only been moved to register themselves as such by the violence directed against them. As registered Dissenters, they may have hoped that they would obtain more protection at law.⁴⁷ There exists no further evidence either of Payne’s links with this group or of his having otherwise filled a preaching or teaching role—but documentation of this fluid, improvisational fringe of religious practice is so poor that we can draw no safe conclusions from this silence.⁴⁸

PAY N E ’ S E M E RG E N C E Payne’s first emergence into public life took place, prosaically enough, as a result of his emergence as a householder. In 1759, aged about forty-one, he was asked to serve his turn as ‘headborough’ of the jurisdictional unit in which he lived: the Rolls Liberty. No more than a few hundred yards long and wide, the Rolls Liberty comprised the eastern side of Bell Yard, Chancery Lane, and a few adjoining streets. For tax purposes it seems to have formed a part of the county of Middlesex, but it had its own petty sessions, staffed by Westminster justices. It was reckoned part of the City parish of St Dunstan’s in the West (the church which, as we have noted, Payne attended). But inhabitants of the Liberty organized their own poor relief. They had two organs of self-government, the general meeting of inhabitants, held about once a month, and the twelve-member workhouse committee, meeting at similar intervals. The workhouse committee, annually elected at a general meeting, oversaw the government of the Liberty’s workhouse. By convention it was composed half of tradesmen, half of ‘gentlemen’ (the latter perhaps mainly lawyers).⁴⁹ ⁴⁶ LMA: Middlesex sessions papers, May 1760: MJ/SP/1760/05/22; October 1760: MJ/SP/ 1760/10/69, 80. Payne is described in the first of these documents—a release from an assault charge—as William Payne of the Liberty of the Rolls, carpenter; the signature on the application matches his signature on other documents. ⁴⁷ Harding, Countess of Huntingdon, 317, and 314–17, for a discussion of evangelical attitudes to licensing meeting houses more generally. ⁴⁸ We know, for example, little about Anglican ‘religious societies’ in the mid-eighteenth century. These had flourished earlier, and would again later: see Hunt, Middling Sort, 104–14; John Walsh, ‘Religious Societies: Methodist and Evangelical 1738–1800’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood eds, Voluntary Religion (Studies in Church History, xxiii) (Oxford, 1986), 279–302. Their existence in the century’s mid-decades is attested by W. Dodd, Unity Recommended. A Sermon (London, 1759), including an appendix addressed to the ‘Twelve Stewards of the Religious Societies’ on their current state. ⁴⁹ Many of the records of the Liberty of the Rolls are in the Westminster City Archives. I have examined K 162 (scavenger’s rate book, 1750), E 1726 (paving rate collector’s book, 1771), E 1828

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The headborough was the junior partner to the constable. Their joint duty was to preserve the peace of the Liberty, execute search or arrest warrants if called upon to do so, and assist in the collection of the land tax. The office was regarded as burdensome: the constable and headborough could recoup expenses from their fellow inhabitants, but were not paid a salary, nor compensated for loss of time. In being elected to this office, Payne was in effect being made to bear his share of local duties.⁵⁰ The experience seems to have drawn him into neighbourhood affairs. Before 1760, he had never put in an appearance at one of the Liberty’s monthly general meetings (which, though called ‘general meetings of inhabitants’, were probably assemblies of householders). After 1760, he generally showed up once or twice a year. He came most commonly for the meetings at which officers were elected, but sometimes when some other matter was afoot: for example, in 1767 he attended when the inhabitants debated whether or not the Liberty should ask to be included in a paving bill shortly to come before Parliament.⁵¹ It was as headborough that Payne was first drawn into policing—though the climate of the times, and his own temperament, combined to make this, from the start as forever after, much more than a routine job.

PAY N E A N D T H E M O R A L R E F O R M E R S Payne became master of his own affairs in the interval between two wars, in a period which, for a complex of reasons, saw a heightening of concern about both crime and immorality. The ending of the War of the Austrian Succession, in 1748, had brought the usual post-war rise in prosecuted crimes. The contemporary perception was that violent crime and murder especially ran at a worryingly high level.⁵² In the Temple Bar area, disgruntled sailors (perhaps angry at having been cheated or mistreated) attacked and demolished a number of brothels (the supposed ringleader, Bosavern Penlez, was captured in Bell Yard).⁵³ The King’s speech urged parliamentary action against crime, and several new statutes were proposed, and some passed, (paving rate ledger, 1772), K 2 (poor rate book, 1775)—each the first of their kind; K 324–6 (minutes of meetings of inhabitants and workhouse committee also includes petty sessions minutes 1737–44, 1750–68, 1768–85); and K 432 (householders’ census returns, 1801). Land tax books from 1781 are in LMA: MR/PLT 4510 etc. St Dunstan’s in the West parish registers are at the Guildhall Library. ⁵⁰ Westminster City Archives K 325, minutes of general meetings of inhabitants 1750–68. ⁵¹ As above, K 325–6. ⁵² N. Rogers, ‘Confronting the Crime Wave: the Debate over Social Reform and Regulation’, in L. Davison et al. eds, Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England 1689–1750 (New York, 1992), 77–98. ⁵³ P. Linebaugh, ‘The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons’, in Douglas Hay et al. eds, Albion’s Fatal Tree (London, 1975), 89–99; for the capture of Penlez, 93.


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targeting both violent crime, and the ‘disorderly’ world of urban entertainment. Henry Fielding, playwright and novelist, who had connections with the ministry, was appointed to the Westminster bench with the expectation that he would liaise with government and spearhead efforts to promote law and order. He set up office at Bow Street, near Covent Garden, where his half-brother John (later Sir John) succeeded him from 1754. The brothers generated a stream of innovations in policing over the next few decades.⁵⁴ Crime was a matter of concern for pragmatic, material reasons—but it could also be seen as sin and lamented as such. In 1754, Romaine preached a sermon setting forth ‘a method for preventing the frequency of robberies and murders’. Romaine’s suggested method was for sinners to recognize Christ as their saviour: in his view, people could not hope to struggle unaided against their own depravity.⁵⁵ How did the secular power’s fight against crime and the religious war on sin interact? Though preachers like Romaine stressed the spiritual side of the problem, they did not suggest that magistrates had no part to play. Some had it that the pious should exert themselves to police and punish ‘vice’: only in this way (it might be urged) could they hope to stave off God’s judgement upon a sinful nation. The government for its part saw merit in discouraging ‘immorality’ more generally: in 1754, the Lord Chancellor assembled the Assize judges in the name of the King and asked them to communicate to local magistrates the need to deal firmly with both crime and vice.⁵⁶ The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 provided a devastating reminder (in the eyes of many) of God’s destructive power, especially when it was followed shortly after by a very minor London earthquake.⁵⁷ France’s seizure of Minorca, on the renewal of war in 1756, sent shock waves through the nation. That event too could be interpreted as a warning from God, or, in less explicitly religious vein, as evidence of decay in moral values and manly virtue. There arose a plangent chorus of lamentation about the sorry state of the nation.⁵⁸ Against this background, in August 1757, a group of Londoners who had come together for prayer and religious conversation fell to complaining about widespread profanation of the Lord’s Day, especially in and about Moorfields, an open space to the north-east of the City which was a favourite place of resort. Resolving to move beyond complaint to action, some members of the group applied to John Fielding for advice as to how to proceed. Fielding suggested ⁵⁴ For the Fieldings, Sir Leon Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750 (5 vols, London, 1948–86), i, ch. 12; iii, Part I. ⁵⁵ W. Romaine, A Method for Preventing the Frequency of Robberies and Murders, Proposed in a Discourse delivered at St George’s Hanover Square, at St Dunstan’s in the West, and at several other places in Britain (London, 1754). ⁵⁶ London Gazette, 26 February–2 March 1754. ⁵⁷ Thus W. Romaine, An Alarm to a Careless World. A Discourse Occasioned by the Late Earthquakes. Preached November 30 1755 . . . at St Dunstan’s in the West (London, 1755). ⁵⁸ B. Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002), ch. 7.

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that they might establish a reformation of manners society, on the model of those that had flourished from the 1690s to the 1730s: banding together to encourage and finance the prosecution of moral offences. After seeking and receiving approval also from some of the City’s aldermanic magistrates, this the applicants proceeded to do.⁵⁹ They set up a programme of weekly meetings at the Old Bailey, publicized their purpose, printed off supportive tracts and ‘dissuasives’, and set about the business of prosecuting vice. Initially they targeted chiefly Sabbath breaking, blasphemy, and gaming; later they extended their efforts to obscene prints, disorderly houses, prostitutes, and homosexuals.⁶⁰ From the early 1760s, the Court of Aldermen aided their efforts by swearing in some of their members as extra constables with authority to act throughout the City.⁶¹ Members of the Society are said to have been a mixed bag of Anglicans, Dissenters, and both Calvinistic and Wesleyan Methodists. Their eclectic choice of preachers to deliver occasional sermons supports this view: including as they did not only London parish clergy, but also the aged and eminent Dissenter Samuel Chandler, and the itinerant evangelical John Wesley.⁶² Unlike the societies of the early and late eighteenth century, this mid-century effort did not receive forceful backing from either the governmental or ecclesiastical e´lite: a reflection perhaps ⁵⁹ The best account is F. Dabhoiwala, ‘Prostitution and Police in London c.1660–1760’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1995), 203–7; see also scattered references in his ‘Sex and Societies for Moral Reform’, Journal of British Studies, lxvi (2007), 290–319, whose n. 137 lists sermons to the society, published with accounts of its proceedings. For earlier societies see inter alia D. Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven, 1957), R. B. Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex c.1660–1725 (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 9; Hunt, Middling Sort, 114–24; T. Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge, 1996). ⁶⁰ See accounts attached to the sermons noted above for changing targets. For sodomy as target also Corp. of London archives: COL/CA.05/01/0153 (Court of Aldermen papers, November–December 1764), petition of William Welsh et al., 4 December 1764, and for a general survey of homosexual prosecutions, noting the society’s efforts, A. E. Simpson, ‘Masculinity and Control: the Prosecution of Sex Offences in Eighteenth-Century Courts’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 1984), ch. 8. ⁶¹ For admission of reforming constables in 1761, Corp. of London archives: COL/CA/ 01/01/170 (Repertories of Court of Aldermen November 1761–November 1762) f. 129, and COL/CA/05/01/0141 (Court of Aldermen Papers, July–December 1761), petition of Charles Maynard et al., 8 December 1761. For the 1762 application see COL/CA/01/01/171 (Repertories November 1762–November 1763), f. 34. 1764 (the first time Payne appears), COL/CA/01/01/173 (Repertories November 1764–November 1765), f. 85, and Court of Aldermen Papers, 4 December 1764, petition of William Welsh et al. (as cited above, n. 60). These entries are inconsistently indexed in the Repertories index and I may have missed some. However, London Chronicle, 7–9 January 1762, speaks of the efforts of the ‘new constables belonging to the Reformation Society’, adding credibility to December 1761 as start date. ⁶² See n. 60. Among members who were sworn in as constables was Benjamin Forfitt, a young Baptist, who in the same period launched the similarly interdenominational Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, for which see I. Rivers, ‘The First Evangelical Tract Society’, Historical Journal l (2007), 1–22. I’m grateful to John Seed for bringing this article to my attention. It’s of interest that Payne did not subscribe to this society: with a minimum subscription of a guinea a year, it was probably beyond his reach.


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of the wariness of ‘enthusiasm’ and religiosity that was especially pronounced in the decades of Whig oligarchy. But it clearly received enough support from metropolitan magistrates to flourish for some years, as well as enough in the way of contributions to finance both its prosecution and its publication programmes. By 1765, the Society claimed to have brought more than 10,000 prosecutions; on these and on its publications it had expended more than £1,000.⁶³ Payne joined the ranks of the Society’s extra constables in the autumn of 1764.⁶⁴ But he was clearly active long before that, probably initially while serving as headborough. It was as headborough, acting on a warrant from John Fielding, that he was involved, in 1760, in a raid on the Sun Tavern, which brought upon him a suit for assault and false imprisonment.⁶⁵ After the tavern keeper had been acquitted of the charge of keeping a disorderly house at the Middlesex sessions, Payne found himself accused of having planted an almost naked man and girl there.⁶⁶ Later he was involved in a subsequently notorious raid on another brothel in his immediate neighbourhood, the ‘Rummer tavern’ in Chancery Lane.⁶⁷ The jurisdictional complexities of the area made it necessary for the reformers to obtain warrants from both Middlesex and City magistrates. Initially they filed into the tavern as if they were ordinary customers, then produced their bludgeons. The survival of a couple of City magistrates’ minute books, from the autumn of 1761 and spring of 1762, shows Payne, even after he had finished his term as headborough, actively engaged in assisting reforming constables. On the evidence of these books, prostitutes on the streets and people found in brothels were his chief targets, though in 1764–5 he added homosexuality to his concerns, charging several men with assault with intent to commit buggery.⁶⁸ By 1762 he was already an acknowledged expert on the streetwalkers of the Fleet Street area: the fact that Payne recognized a woman as an old offender was enough to ensure that she was not let off with a reprimand but instead sent to Bridewell.⁶⁹ ⁶³ M. Browne, The Causes that Obstruct the Progress of Reformation (London, 1765), 30–1. ⁶⁴ See n. 61. ⁶⁵ For problems in regulating ‘disorderly houses’, Henderson, Disorderly Women, ch. 6. The Disorderly Houses Act of 1752 failed greatly to strengthen the magistracy—though it did encourage Fielding and other Bow Street magistrates briefly to intensify regulatory efforts: Dabhoiwala, ‘Prostitution’, 200–1. ⁶⁶ TNA: KB 1/14/6 (new numbering), Hilary 1761, King against William Payne, including affidavit of Mrs Kesia Pepys. ⁶⁷ The raid on the Rummer tavern and its consequences are discussed further below. ⁶⁸ Payne’s activities are noted in Simpson, ‘Masculinity and Control’, 488–95, 517. His efforts in 1764–6 apparently focused on Moorfields, a favoured pick-up spot; among his victims was a Methodist preacher, William Tolley, who was acquitted after a highly exceptional eight-hour trial. ⁶⁹ Corp. of London archives: CLA/005/01/002-3 (Guildhall justice room minute books 13 October–27 November 1761; 19 April–14 May 1762). A rough search of the City indictment files 1760–3 has not turned him up as a witness to indictable offences at this date though he quite frequently appears after his appointment as a constable: see Corp. of London archives: classes CLA/047/LJ/01 and CLA/047/LJ/04 (sessions files and minutes).

Figure 7.2. ‘Dr Squintum’s Exaltation, or the Reformation’, single-sheet engraving (London, 1763). Source: Reproduced from the copy held by the Library of Congress.


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That Payne quickly attained notoriety as a reformer is evident from a cartoon of 1763.⁷⁰ Entitled Dr Squintum’s Exaltation or the Reformation, this comprehensively attacks the reformers’ practices (Figure 7.2). A diabolically inspired Whitefield is represented as the reformers’ presiding genius. A dozen or so reformers are shown engaged in characteristic pursuits: accosting prostitutes, assaulting street hawkers, and doing battle with a Sabbath-breaking butcher. Doubt is cast on their own morals by the manner that they are shown to adopt with the prostitute, and by the fact that one elderly man (at the back on the left) is shown caressing a boy. (A reforming constable called Tristram did take flight at about this time under suspicion of having committed homosexual offences.⁷¹) Payne figures prominently. He is almost certainly the short man on the left (‘the Little Carpenter’) with a leather apron round his waist and a saw under his arm. He is mentioned several times in the verses printed below: Bell Yard is mentioned in the first line; two verses on comes a joke about pleasure being inconsistent with PAIN, and the whole of the eighth verse is put into his mouth, thus: We may do what we please, quoth the Carpenter bold, We may take up the young, and imprison the old, On Sundays we’ll kick all the fruit about the street And punish the butchers for selling their meat Derry down etc.

It is easy to see why prostitutes, street hawkers, and butchers should have lacked enthusiasm for ‘reformation’: the cartoon dramatizes the hostility of such victims. Yet the fact of its publication testifies to more broad-based and principled opposition, from both middle and higher classes. In fact, reformers met with savage criticism in the press; they were also disliked by at least some members of the judiciary. The anti-reforming line taken by critics in the press was essentially that the reformers were a set of self-righteous busybodies who would be better employed minding their own affairs. Only a self-important bullying instinct, critics suggested, induced reformers to spend their time persecuting poor people, who were perhaps no better than they ought to be, but nonetheless did not deserve and would not profit from such merciless harassment.⁷² Proponents of reform were worried by such charges, and took steps from time to time to justify themselves. The fact that some of their number sometimes erred did not vitiate their whole project, they argued in their own defence. Sometimes ⁷⁰ BM Prints and Drawings collection: Personal and Political Satires no. 4005—reference from John Brewer. The catalogue is unevenly helpful on the subject matter of this print—thus, it suggests, wrongly, that ‘Bell Yard’ was the site of Whitefield’s Tabernacle. Whitefield was dubbed ‘Dr Squintum’ by Samuel Foote in his anti-Methodist play of 1760, The Minor. ⁷¹ For Tristram, see Pratt’s judgment, n. 75 below. Tristram had been sworn in as a reforming constable in 1761. ⁷² For example, London Chronicle, 9 December 1764–1 January 1765, letter from ‘No admirer of imposition’; 21–4 September 1765, letter from ‘Persius’.

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they responded more assertively, claiming that they were in fact doing a great and insufficiently appreciated service to the public, for which people should be thankful. A letter written in June 1762 and published in the London Chronicle argued that while people in all ranks of life might feel a need to make some contribution to the public welfare, prosecuting moral offences offered ‘almost the only way by which persons in the lower ranks of life can do any considerable service to the public’.⁷³ Criticism in the press, or on the streets, might wound reformers’ self-esteem, and make it more difficult for them to win new recruits. Hostility from the judiciary was a more serious matter. Problems arose because of the tendency of those in the vice industry to counter-litigate. Raids on brothels in particular provoked countersuits; several of these dragged through the high courts for some years.⁷⁴ Particularly fierce battles ensued from the Society’s 1761 raid on the Rummer tavern. In 1763, after a trial before the court of Common Pleas, a jury awarded £300 damages against the Society for assault and imprisonment of the tavern’s mistress, on the grounds that ‘about 20 witnesses proved the house to be a house of good repute’ and that one of the defendants had reportedly struck her. Lord Chief Justice Camden, in the face of the Society’s protests, refused to set the fine aside as excessive, and, to add insult to injury, announced himself happy to have the chance to manifest his ‘dislike towards these reformers’.⁷⁵ The fine was hailed by the Society’s critics—the cartoon was in fact produced to celebrate its discomfiture. The penalty proved a death blow. Over and above the £1,000 the Society had spent on its routine operations, it had by this point spent more than that much again combating ‘malicious prosecutions’. For a little longer it staggered on under a load of debt; late in 1764 Wesley proposed to his followers that money might be found for its aid, but was told that the financial needs of his own societies made this impossible. Some time in 1765, the Society finally disintegrated.⁷⁶ What made all of this particularly galling was that the Rummer was indeed a notorious brothel, a fact upon whose denial the case against the constables had hinged. In February 1765 the Society succeeded in securing from Lord Chief Justice Mansfield at the King’s Bench a conviction for perjury against the chief prosecution witness. However, as Wesley observed, this was a barren victory, ⁷³ London Chronicle, 3–5 June 1762. The printer of the London Chronicle was on the whole in favour of the reforming effort—see his response to Persius in the note above—yet felt it necessary to admit criticism onto his pages, since his readers wished to express it. ⁷⁴ See thus TNA: KB 1/14/6, Hil. 1761 (King against William Payne, affidavit of Mrs Pepys). ⁷⁵ For Pratt’s judgment: Leeman v Allen and others English Reports 2 Wils KB 180, (Easter Term 1763). ⁷⁶ For growing debts, exacerbated by the costs of combating malicious prosecutions, Browne, The Causes that Obstruct, 31; J. Wesley, Journal, ed. T. Jackson (London, 1901), iii, 190, 230 (entries for 4 November 1764, 2 February 1766).


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for ‘they never could recover the expense of that suit. Lord, how long shall the ungodly triumph?’⁷⁷

CITY POLICING Though the Society may have collapsed, Payne’s career in policing, which had blossomed under its auspices, had only just begun. It was to run another seventeen years, ending only with his death (he made his last arrest in September 1782, his last Old Bailey appearance in October, and died the following month).⁷⁸ Though he maintained links with John Fielding at Westminster (in 1761, he was sent by Fielding to investigate a particularly gory murder case in Leicester Fields),⁷⁹ the City provided his primary scene of action for the remainder of his career. Its tighter policing structures helped to make it an attractive environment for him. Westminster, though formally a city, lacked a governing corporation. Responsibility for policing was divided between its several parishes. Fielding and his Bow Street ‘runners’ strove chiefly to co-ordinate action against serious crime: robberies and burglaries.⁸⁰ The City, by contrast, like many another corporate town, sustained a dense network of regulatory institutions, some oriented to the neighbourhood, others to trade.⁸¹ In 1789, the German traveller Archenholz noted the difference in atmosphere between the two jurisdictions. In the City, he said, the government ‘is more severe and exact; the love of order and industry is also more perceptible’.⁸² In the City of London there had been since the sixteenth century two officers called marshals, jointly served by six assistants, the marshalmen. Marshals and marshalmen were responsible for certain aspects of the good ordering of the City. They policed its ceremonial occasions, its fairs and markets; they were supposed to see that its streets were kept clear of vagrants, unlicensed hawkers, and prostitutes, that its public houses did not operate as gambling dens or ⁷⁷ Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, ii, 955–6, 1092–3. Mansfield was unimpressed by the 1761 evidence of a Mr Brackstone in aid of a suit against constables, including Payne; in 1764, Brackstone was convicted of perjury, and sentenced to one hour in the pillory, and transportation. It is interesting that Mansfield’s court was more favourable to the reformers, given his later tussles with Payne. ⁷⁸ Last arrest: Corp. of London archives: CLA/005/01/018 (Guildhall justice room minute book, September 1782). Death: Gentleman’s Magazine, obituary Nov 1782. ⁷⁹ OBP: April 1761, Theodore Gardelle (t17610401-27); LMA: OB/SP/1761/4/15–23. 15 recounts evidence from the inquest, including Payne’s. 22 is Payne’s deposition. ⁸⁰ For general policing in Westminster, E. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies (Basingstoke, 1998), esp. ch. 3; for policing prostitution in both the City and Westminster, Henderson, Disorderly Women, ch. 5. ⁸¹ Beattie, Policing and Punishment focuses on the City; see also Brown, ‘Politics, Commerce’, esp. Parts II and III. ⁸² Archenholz, Picture of England (2 vols, London, 1789), i, 123.

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brothels, and that Sunday trading laws were not breached. City constables were to some extent subject to their orders: when they needed help, or wanted to delegate responsibility, the marshals could mobilize a greater or lesser number of constables to assist them.⁸³ Constables, for their part, were appointed for each city ward or, in the outer wards, for each parish (though they had authority to operate anywhere in the City).⁸⁴ The constable’s job was a part-time one: constables were supposed to execute search or arrest warrants, or to assist householders in distress. At night, they took it in turns to serve as ‘constables of the night’, basing themselves in neighbourhood ‘roundhouses’ while watchmen patrolled the streets. Disorderly or suspicious characters arrested overnight were lodged in these roundhouses or the City compters, and brought forth the next day, or after the weekend, to be examined by magistrates, released, summarily sentenced, or committed to await formal trial. In former times, both constables and watchmen had been recruited from among ordinary householders, taking their turn at discharging their civic duties. In the early eighteenth century, the corporation had however approved the levying of a tax to finance paid watchmen. In practice, householders chosen to serve as constable also—when they could afford it—appointed paid deputies. The City’s police forces were, accordingly, a mixture of ordinary (usually poorer) householders and salaried men.⁸⁵ In addition to the ordinary constables there were also some special constables: for example, men employed to see to the security of goods on the quays. Finally there were a range of more or less independent operators on the fringes of the formal policing system: ‘assistants to constables’, freelance ‘thieftakers’, and ‘common informers’, who worked on a more entrepreneurial basis.⁸⁶ Though both magistrates and marshals exercised a measure of directive power over these policing forces, and watchmen were relatively tightly supervised, most of these agents had considerable autonomy. Their working relationships were partly formally constituted by the system, but also drew upon more informally ⁸³ Marshals and marshalmen are briefly discussed in D. Rumbelow, I Spy Blue: The Police and Crime in the City of London from Elizabeth I to Victoria (London, 1971), and, with an accent on their earlier history but some attention to later developments, in Beattie, Policing and Punishment, 154–63. Much information is collected in Corp. of London archives: COL/OF/02/078, 080, 085, 086. See also COL/CC/01/01/065 ( Journals of the Common Council, 1776–9) for a review of the duties of marshals and marshalmen undertaken in March 1779. For marshals acting against houses of ill-fame, Henderson, Disorderly Women, 126. ⁸⁴ The best source on constables is Beattie, Policing and Punishment, chs 3 and 4. For contemporary accounts of their legal powers by Bow Street magistrates: S. Welch, The Office of Constable (new edn, London, 1758); J. Fielding, Extracts from the Penal Laws (new edn, London, 1762). Shoemaker, Prosecution, 254–70, discusses controversy about their powers earlier in the century. ⁸⁵ Beattie, Policing and Punishment, 134–50. ⁸⁶ Thieftakers as such were less in evidence after they were domesticated as ‘runners’ by the Fieldings and their successors: see Beattie, Policing and Punishment, ch. 5 and 410–17.


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generated habits of mutual aid and trust within the complex networks of metropolitan policing. During his early years among the ‘reforming constables’, Payne developed some informal working relationships that would endure for the next two decades: thus with Thomas Gates, under-marshal and later marshal, and his brother Joseph, a marshalman; also with John Kirby, keeper of the Wood Street Compter.⁸⁷ His relationship with the marshals’ team especially helped to shape his course thereafter. The porous texture of City policing provided plenty of opportunities for a man keen to make himself useful on the streets to find bases from which to do this. I may not have traced all the offices Payne held, but it seems that his 1764 special appointment as constable for the City was protracted for several years, that in 1771 he was appointed a deputy constable for Farringdon Without, and in 1775 and 1776 on applications from inhabitants of the same ward, made an ‘extra constable’. It seems that there were periods when Payne lacked office: in 1768, he stated at the Old Bailey that he had been a city constable two years since; in 1770 a petition for his appointment from inhabitants of the district between Temple Bar and St Paul’s churchyard (who ‘look[ed] back with pleasure on the time Mr William Payne was constable’) was turned down by the Court of Aldermen, who recommended them to ‘propose some other person’.⁸⁸ Yet there was no year in which he was inactive. In fact, the years 1768 and 1774 marked peaks in the number of his reported appearances at the Old Bailey.⁸⁹ The fact that numerous of the arrests he made were made while he was supervising some ⁸⁷ For Gates, see sources listed at n. 83 and numerous reports in the press, e.g. London Chronicle, 2–5 February 1765, 7–9 May 1765, 13–16 March 1779. In December 1765, Gates and Payne acted together against the keeper of a bawdy house (CLA/047/LJ/01/0971: City sessions files December 1765). In May 1766, Thomas Gates (‘of Chiswell St., Gent.’) stood surety for Payne and a Yeoman from Wood St Compter, Ralph Barron, who stood jointly accused of assaulting a man they had charged with homosexual assault on themselves—they were found guilty and fined £3 (Corp. of London archives: CLA/047/LJ/04/133: City sessions minutes December 65–October 66; CLA/047/LJ/01/0974, 0975, 0977: City sessions files April, May, and September 1766). Payne would have met Kirby and his staff through bringing prisoners to the Compter; later, he became close enough to Kirby to ask him to stand surety to a bond relating to his carpentry business: TNA E133/96/64, Christopher Hobson’s response to interrogatories. ⁸⁸ Corp. of London archives: COL/CA/01/01/174 (Repertories of Court of Aldermen, November 1765–November 1766), f. 75, and papers of same date: petition and order for William Payne and John Emmerton to be appointed constables for a year, January 1766; Middlesex Journal, 21 December 1769, report of inhabitants of St Martin’s Ludgate rejecting Payne’s application to serve as constable’s assistant (subsequently denied, 28 December 1769); COL/CA/01/01/178 (Repertories of Court of Aldermen, November 1769–November 1770), ff. 128–9, February 1770, and papers of same date: petition of inhabitants of district from St Paul’s Churchyard to Temple Bar for Payne’s appointment as extra constable for the City—rejected; Corp. of London archives: COL/WD/02/011 Box 2 (Wardmote papers from 1771: Farringdon Without, 1771–7); COL/CA/01/01/184 (Repertories of Court of Aldermen, November 1775–November 1776), f. 86, January 1776, and papers of same date: petition of some of common councilmen and inhabitants of Farringdon Without for reappointment of Payne as extra constable. ⁸⁹ I have traced over 100 cases in which Payne is reported as having given evidence at the Old Bailey (variously spelt Pain, Paine, and Payne, but increasingly in the latter form, which he himself mainly used).

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public event at the Guildhall (once, he specifically notes, at the request of the Lord Mayor) suggests that he had some official role.⁹⁰ Perhaps he acted as some form of assistant to the marshals.⁹¹ His special campaigns apart (which I will turn to shortly) Payne’s policing career fell into four broad phases.⁹² First, until 1765, almost all the prosecutions he was involved with related to or may well have arisen from the policing of morals: he arrested prostitutes, gave evidence against bawdy-house keepers, accused men of assaults with intent to commit buggery, and was himself in turn accused of assaults. He was not normally involved in policing felonies and did not appear as an Old Bailey witness.⁹³ During 1765, while he held his appointment as city constable, the nature of his activity broadened: we find him acting with marshal Gates in dealing with silkweavers’ riots, and at the behest of aldermen investigating gambling games and thefts. He began to appear in the Old Bailey as a witness—as he would continue to do thenceforth until his death.⁹⁴ During the third phase (c.1767–74), when he perhaps only briefly held office as a deputy, he was chiefly active on the public streets, but on a broader front than in his reformation society days. He continued to arrest large numbers of prostitutes, but also began to turn in pickpockets he observed at work along his beat.⁹⁵ Much of this activity clearly took place in the night and at weekends, and would not have been incompatible with maintaining his carpentry business during ordinary working hours. But we also know that he attended at Guildhall on numerous public occasions: sometimes during the day; he also seized one pickpocket amidst a crowd gathered to see an execution.⁹⁶ Several times in the late 1760s and early 1770s he attended Bartholomew Fair (the City’s late summer ⁹⁰ For example, OBP: April 1768, John Hayward, John Elrey (t17680413-19); December 1768, John Dodson (t17681207-59); January 1769, Walter Webb (t17690112-43); January 1770, Daniel Bateman (t17700117-18). ⁹¹ It appears from Corp. of London archives: COL/CC/CLC/01/059 (City Lands committee March 1775–December 1775), f.17b–18b, 57–98b, and COL/OF/02/080 (formerly Misc. ms. 135.4), that before Gates’ appointment, 1764, marshalmen had discharged mainly ceremonial duties. Gates complained that he had to hire assistants to help in policing, and tried to get the marshalmen subordinated to him. The fact that they had purchased their offices however made this hard to achieve, and, on reflection, the City Lands committee also hesitated to give the marshals alone power to appoint. ⁹² Apart from surveying Old Bailey reports as described n. 88 above, I have sampled City, Westminster, and Middlesex Gaol Delivery and Sessions Rolls, records arising from the Oyer and Terminer jurisdiction of the Court of King’s Bench, and City Guildhall Justice Room minute books to build up a picture of the general shape of Payne’s career. This research has not been exhaustive. ⁹³ OBP: July 1765, Samuel Priest (t17650710-62); October 1765, John Jones (t17651016-32). ⁹⁴ His first recorded appearance, after the 1756 pickpocketing case referred to above n. 43, was OBP: February 1765, William Batty (t17650227-44). For the other cases mentioned: July 1765, Samuel Priest (t17650710-62); October 1765, John Jones (t17651016-32). ⁹⁵ OBP: December 1767, James Peel, James Furver (t17671209-79); February 1768, William Shepherd, William Johnson (t17680224-29); April 1768, William Booth (t17680413-18), and many more similar. ⁹⁶ See n. 90. OBP: April 1770, George Roberts (t17700425-52).


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fair, held on the site of Smithfield market, and notoriously a scene of temptation for wayward youth)—once in company with Joseph Gates.⁹⁷ Though all this may suggest that he continued to act as some form of assistant to the marshals, in this phase, he is reported as appearing at the Old Bailey only when he had apprehended a pickpocket red-handed, something he could legally do without holding office.⁹⁸ Finally, from 1775, when Payne was reappointed extra constable, the mix of his activities shifted again. He did not cease to walk the streets and haul in prostitutes. But he made fewer arrests at Guildhall, and played a more prominent part in more serious, investigative, and sometimes brutal police work. That pattern merely intensified from 1778, when he was elected to the post of marshalman, and as such became responsible for taking his turn in ‘waiting’ upon the Lord Mayor when he acted as magistrate, and doing his bidding.⁹⁹ In this last period we find Payne investigating the suspicions of victims of theft, and helping to locate, search, and take charge of suspects. We find him too doing his duty at the Mansion House and being approached there by people who wanted to turn evidence against their former accomplices; also being sent by the mayor to investigate and take inventories of suspect goods, to explore what had become of goods rescued from a sunken ship, and to rescue a young woman who had eloped with an Irish adventurer (whom Payne turned over to the press gang). He was also involved in several raids upon coiners.¹⁰⁰ Throughout these various phases, a notable feature of Payne’s police work was the extraordinary vigour and commitment he brought to it. His powers and responsibilities shifted from time to time, but whatever role he played, he always played it with more determination than any of his notional colleagues. His record of arresting prostitutes was extraordinary. According to one historian’s ⁹⁷ OBP: September 1769, Thomas Law (t17690906-98); September 1772, Joseph Brown, Thomas Litners (t17720909-34). ⁹⁸ As a private citizen, he could still legally make citizen’s arrests, of people committing crimes within his view, but could not execute warrants or arrest on suspicion. ⁹⁹ Corp. of London archives: COL/CC/01/01/065 ( Journals of Common Council, September 1776–December 1779), f. 136. See also COL/CC/CLC/04/064, (Common Council papers August 1777–September 1778), 10 April 1778 for the petitions of the candidates and tally of votes. ¹⁰⁰ OBP: April 1779, John Harris and others (t17790404-6); July 1779, Richard Harper (t17790707-41); October 1782, William Storey, Mary Jones (t17821016-44); Corp. of London archives: COL/CA/01/01/187 (Repertories of Court of Aldermen, November 1778–November 1779) f. 105, 146, 175; COL/CA/01/01/188 (Repertories, November 1779–November 1780) f. 22, 101ff. See also Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, ii, 1019, 1213–14. As a constable Payne could arrest on mere suspicion, without a warrant, and was clearly prepared to respond on his own initiative to victims’ requests: see esp. OBP: February 1775, Sophia O’Neal (t17750218-63), but also April 1775, Mary Junque and Mary Smith (t17790404-40); April 1776, John Furr (t17760417-91); December 1781, Sarah Davis (t17811205-53). Samuel v. Payne became a classic case establishing the right to arrest without a warrant in certain circumstances: J. Hall, ‘Legal and Social Aspects of Arrest without a Warrant’, Harvard Law Review, xlix (1935–6), 566–92, for this and two other formally reported cases involving marshalmen.

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calculations, between 1775 and 1780, three-quarters of all prostitutes charged from the western half of the City were charged by Payne.¹⁰¹ Though he may not have been the arresting agent in all cases—his role may have been to escort those accumulated overnight or over the weekend to the Guildhall sitting in the morning—it seems likely that he had some degree of active involvement: no one would play the same role after his death and, as we have seen, local residents hailed him as an extraordinarily vigorous officer.¹⁰² Similarly, in the years when Payne policed Guildhall, he appeared at the Old Bailey at least two dozen times charging pickpockets he had caught operating there; when he ceased to do that job, prosecutions fell almost to nothing. And although, throughout his career, he seems to have acted in close association with the City marshals and marshalmen, none of them came close to his record for Old Bailey appearances.¹⁰³ Payne’s chosen course must have required considerable physical stamina. He was avowedly a small man (a ‘little English carpenter’). Through much of his career, his chief targets were women and pickpocketing boys, who could perhaps be tackled without great physical exertion: on several occasions, Payne describes holding a pickpocket by the collar while retrieving a stolen handkerchief with his other hand; on one occasion, he was able to secure two young pickpockets with one hand.¹⁰⁴ Yet he must have possessed a certain wiry strength and nerve. He was not afraid to try to retrieve a stolen object that a woman had secreted in her mouth, when a fellow constable feared to get his fingers bitten; nor, after watching and waiting for an opportunity, was he afraid to wade into a crowd of angry men and boys stoning the Mansion House to apprehend one among their number (using the ruse of accusing his target of theft to extricate him unmolested).¹⁰⁵ In later years, at least, he must have dealt with more offenders of his own size. In pursuit of coiners, he broke down doors and entered houses whose occupants might have fought back.¹⁰⁶ Unlike traditional thieftakers, he did not go out of his way to pursue highway robbers and the like; marshalmen sometimes wore cutlasses when in pursuit of coiners, but there is no record of Payne being involved in any affray involving guns; rarely can he have supposed ¹⁰¹ Henderson, Disorderly Women, 122. ¹⁰² There are lively portraits of a constable clearly based on Payne in The Midnight Spy (London, 1766), ch. 5, and The Midnight Rambler; or New Nocturnal Spy (London, 1772), ch. 6. He is shown presiding over a roundhouse as ‘constable of the night’, haranguing on the necessity of enforcing the laws, and doing his best to intimidate those brought before him, with a parade of formality, and by ‘bawl[ing] his muscles into most puritanical form’. In the 1766 account, arrests are made by beadles, who (when not smoking and drinking, and ‘disputing about their vigilance in their duty’) prey upon amorous couples ‘to the joint emolument of [themselves] and the constable, who has long practised this oppression conjunctively’. ¹⁰³ These negative conclusions reflect the result of searches in the Old Bailey Whole Proceedings. ¹⁰⁴ OBP: January 1770, James Harris, Daniel Trigg (t17700117-25). ¹⁰⁵ OBP: May 1780, Abigail Perfect (t17800405-38); May 1768, Daniel Saxton (t17680518– 23). ¹⁰⁶ OBP: July 1779, Richard Harper (t17790707-41); October 1782, William Storer, Mary Jones (t17821016-44).


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that his life was on the line. Yet clearly he was not afraid of confrontation, nor unwilling to resort to force.¹⁰⁷ He must nonetheless have spent more time being attentive than using force. By his own account, he would trail suspects for half an hour or more, waiting for them to pick a pocket so he could pounce. He was clearly alert to the movements—even mannerisms—that identified a suspect: ‘I saw directly by his eye that he was a pickpocket’, he once informed the court.¹⁰⁸ He clearly prided himself on his knowledge of low-life, and his ability to locate suspects. He was methodical, persistent, and painstaking, advertising goods stolen from persons unknown by handbills and in local papers; following up lines of enquiry from one informant to another.¹⁰⁹ He must have kept notes of his operations as a basis for giving evidence in court: it is hard to believe that he could otherwise have kept track of the necessary detail. As constable, he was responsible for keeping stolen goods securely, so that the train of evidence was not broken, producing them in court, and subsequently returning them to victim or defendant, as the case might be.¹¹⁰ Trial records provide a wealth of information about Payne. Yet they may exaggerate the extent to which he acted alone. Sometimes we learn the names and roles of men who acted with him.¹¹¹ Newspaper reports suggest that, when he attended public gatherings, he was routinely accompanied by ‘his men’.¹¹² These ‘men’ or ‘assistants’ were apparently sometimes formally his peers: Payne must have had a commanding presence.¹¹³ Others may have been drawn from the miscellaneous pool of bailiffs’ followers, prison runners, and the like.¹¹⁴ ¹⁰⁷ For an incident in which two marshals and four marshalmen, including Payne, went with others to a public house in search of some robbers, in the course of which both marshals and Joseph Gates were injured, see London Chronicle, 13–16 March 1779. For use of cutlasses in pursuit of coiners, London Chronicle, 15 June 1781. ¹⁰⁸ OBP: April 1777, John Powell (t17770409-80). ¹⁰⁹ For example, OBP: May 1766, Susanna Garrett (t17660514-10); July 1766, Sarah Smith (t17660702-28); February 1767, John Bottom (t17670218-19); April 1777, George Barrington (t17780429-103). ¹¹⁰ OBP: January 1770, Daniel Bateman (t17700117-18); January 1781, Ann Martin (t178 10110-23); January 1782, John Hevey (t17820109-22). Welch, Office of Constable, 38–9, emphasizes constables’ responsibilities in this connection. ¹¹¹ Simpson notes that his anti-homosexual policing activity in the mid-1760s was commonly carried out in the company of a Francis Cary: ‘Masculinity and Control’, 491, 495. ¹¹² Barnard, Challoner, 168, speaks of Payne and his ‘understrappers’. ¹¹³ In January 1766 (Corp. of London archives: COL/CA/01/01/174 (Repertories of Court of Aldermen, November 1765–November 1766), f. 75), Payne wrote patronisingly of John Emmerton ‘who has been a good officer last year’—but Emmerton appears to have been at least nominally of equal status, i.e. a constable. In Samuel v. Payne and others (1780), English Reports, 1 Dougl 359, one of Payne’s co-defendants was ‘an assistant of Payne’s’. But from LMA COL/CA/01/01/188 (Repertories of Court of Aldermen, November 1779–November 1780), f. 101ff., this ‘assistant’ seems to have been Joseph Gates, brother of Thomas and himself a marshalman. ¹¹⁴ For Payne’s collaboration with Ralph Barron, on the staff of Wood St Compter, see n. 87. Payne and Barron also collaborated in prosecuting the keeper of a disorderly house in 1764–5: Corp. of London archives: CLA/047/LJ/01/975 (City sessions files, May 1766).

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One man, whom Payne tried to use as a witness in some of his anti-Catholic cases, claimed that he had assisted Payne only because ‘I was, and am, under pecuniary obligations to him’.¹¹⁵ It is possible that Payne shepherded some young hopefuls into a career in policing as he had once been shepherded himself: William Brockholes, who emerged as a fairly diligent officer in the years following Payne’s death, in his earlier years often acted alongside Payne.¹¹⁶ What motivated Payne? According to genteel pickpocket George Barrington he was a man of ‘black and cruel imagination’, who ‘in his convivial hours’ had claimed that he would catch and hang him, ‘and boasted his influence with the citizens of London’.¹¹⁷ It was often suggested that he was motivated by hope of reward. A man returned from transportation, charged by Payne among others, told the court ‘they are determined to have my life for the reward, it don’t signify opposing them’.¹¹⁸ When Payne told a neighbour who had gone with him to observe a riot at Guildhall that he had in the end arrested one of the rioters, the neighbour said ‘I suppose you are going to get £50’.¹¹⁹ Yet, as Payne told him, no reward was offered in that instance, nor in most of the cases that he prosecuted. For those seeking ‘blood money’, highway robbers were the best game—but they were not Payne’s chosen target.¹²⁰ He did not even target the vagrants whom some other constables harassed—from whose arrest a trickle of shillings could be obtained.¹²¹ This is not to say that his work brought him no income at all. The marshals were also able in some instances to draw on city funds to pay extra constables.¹²² In his early years as marshals’ aide, Payne no doubt received some such payments, and some other profits probably rubbed off on him. Some of the offences he prosecuted may have brought him income from rewards: thus, charging rule-breaking hackney coachmen, keepers of disorderly houses, offenders against Metropolitan Building Acts, and coiners (to say nothing ¹¹⁵ OBP: February 1771, James Talbot (t17710220-81). Saunders had already appeared as one of Payne’s witnesses in November 1770 (R v. Jones), when he had shown a similar inclination to discredit the prosecution: Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, ii, 879. ¹¹⁶ I owe this suggestion and information to Drew Grey. ¹¹⁷ OBP: April 1777, George Barrington (t17780429-103). In fact, very few of Payne’s prosecutions terminated in executions: death sentences were pronounced in only six of over 100 cases in which he appeared at the Old Bailey, and some of these convicts were probably pardoned; none of his appearances before other courts will have led to executions. ¹¹⁸ OBP: June 1772, James Hancock (t17720603-43). ¹¹⁹ OBP: May 1768, Daniel Saxton (t17680518-23). ¹²⁰ When he dealt with some other sort of felony, he often obtained the lead by arresting a pickpocket. See, for example, OBP: February 1767, John Bottom (t17670218-19), or October 1774, William Lane and Samuel Trotman (t17741019-8). He was involved in several coining cases, but coining was a felony against which marshals were esp. active. ¹²¹ There was a 5s. reward for prosecuting beggars, 10s. for prosecuting rogues and vagabonds under 17 Geo. II c.5. Drew Grey has confirmed to me Payne’s apparent lack of interest in this form of policing. ¹²² Corp. of London archives: OL/OF/02/080 (formerly Misc. ms 135.4 f. 58), f. 53.


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of priests and forestallers, of whom more shortly).¹²³ No doubt he was given tips and private rewards by some crime victims. Shopkeepers who appreciated his presence in their streets may have tipped him handsomely. Shadier pay-offs cannot be ruled out. Obviously there were opportunities to make money as a marshalman, for, until the late 1770s, these posts were sold to bidders: John Bradley, in 1771, paid £500 for the place of marshalman (probably implying an expected return in tens but not hundreds of pounds).¹²⁴ In the context of efforts to rein back fee-taking, and make these officers more accountable, the City in the 1770s discontinued the sale of these posts.¹²⁵ Payne was the first marshalman to be elected on the new basis, yet it is improbable that all opportunities to profit from the job thereafter ceased. Payne was surely not rich enough to have been able to contemplate merely donating his time to public service: there had to be some financial return. But financial concerns seem insufficient to explain either the patterns or the unique vigour of Payne’s exertions.¹²⁶ He must have gained other forms of satisfaction from the work. There was surely an element of challenge, even of sport in it. There may have been elements of camaraderie. A deposition from a woman arrested on suspicion of prostitution who protested her innocence offers a plausible glimpse of the man at work. As he ‘dragg’d’ her off, she protesting all the while that she was the wife of a man of credit, and insisting that if he did not let her go he would certainly be punished, he retorted that she had ‘a fine Strong Arm to beat hemp’, and then told the keeper of Covent Garden roundhouse, where ¹²³ For example, for various misdeeds on the part of hackney coach drivers (9 Ann c.23 and subsequent acts); and under the Disorderly Houses Act 25 Geo. II c.36. Rewards of £25 were payable to those reporting breaches of building acts 7 Ann c.17 and 11 Geo. I c.28. For prosecutions by Payne under building acts: KB/10/37 Easter 1770; also Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, ii, 914, 930, 982. London Chronicle, 4–6 June 1772, reported that Payne would have stood to make £350 if one of his building prosecutions had held good, but it failed on a technicality. The Building Act of 1774 (14 Geo. III c.78) had as one of its purposes ending harassment made possible under former laws which held out incentives to informers. Payne appears only twice in TNA: T 60/24 in receipt of statutory rewards for aiding the prosecution of certain felons. ¹²⁴ Corp. of London archives: COL/OF/02/080 (formerly Misc. ms 135.4 f. 58), f. 58; COL/CC/CLC/01/060 (City Lands committee minutes, February 1776–January 1777), f. 228–9. In 1774, marshalmen complaining about recent restrictions reported having paid between £320 and £500 for their posts, for which the official return was £28.16.8 a year (comprising a salary of £18.5.0, £8.6.8 each from the court of aldermen, and 45s. each for clothes), ‘besides several small perquisites allowed to be taken’, plus ‘victualling’ at the Lord Mayor’s table. Accounts from marshals submitted in the context of the same enquiry suggest that fees were paid for attendance at a variety of events, including the swearing-in of new sheriffs, Bartholomew Fair, the ‘Welch feast’, the anniversary of charity children, the ‘lady mayoress’ rout’ etc.; this marshal also reported a ‘Christmas box from the brewers’ valued at £12.2.0. ¹²⁵ As above, and Rumbelow, I Spy Blue, 88–91. ¹²⁶ Nor did he hang on to all the money he received. Westminster City Archives, K326 (minutes of the Liberty of the Rolls committee) notes that in September 1778 when ‘gift money’ was distributed, presumably to the poor, ‘Mr Payne made a voluntary gift of £5, being part of a penalty paid to him’.

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he deposited her, ‘that he had brought him a Lark’.¹²⁷ Payne probably valued being good at what he did, and the renown it brought him, and seems to have developed a hard-bitten, street-wise demeanour. Yet somewhere in the mix too, surely, was a steely conviction of his own rectitude, a sense that in clearing the streets and tracking villains to their lairs he not only displayed skill but discharged a righteous mission. Payne always had his critics, at all social levels. Energetic policing of vice was itself controversial, as we have seen,—though it is noteworthy that, when the question was put to the test, in 1776 (when the ‘Society for Free Debate’ of Newgate Street debated whether ‘those Constables who are remarkable for their vigilance, in apprehending the unfortunate women of the town, deserve censure or applause?’) ‘a great majority’ favoured such diligent constables.¹²⁸ Payne’s anti-Catholic exploits in the 1760s earned him particular criticism, and probably account for the difficulty he had securing further policing appointments in the late 1760s and early 1770s. Nonetheless his exceptional vigour was clearly valued by significant sections of the City’s trading classes.¹²⁹ That support was resoundingly manifest in 1778, when he stood for election as marshalman, in the first free contest for that post. The electorate was the Common Council, a body more than 200 strong, chiefly composed of wealthy traders, elected by their fellow citizens on a ward-by-ward basis. They elected Payne by ninety-six votes to twenty-eight—the twenty-eight residual votes being divided between two other candidates.¹³⁰ Eighteenth-century English government had its occasional democratic patches (not usually meaning anything more than householder democracy). But much authority was wielded on the basis of purchase, patronage, or inheritance. As someone who could plausibly claim to have risen by his own merits, and because his fellow citizens supported him, Payne was in a relatively unusual position—not in the context of the City of London, whose government had many democratic features, but in the wider national context. The sense of being the representative, spokesman, or smiting arm of a powerful current of popular feeling must have helped to fuel Payne with some of the moral energy which powered his confrontations with the legal and political establishment. ¹²⁷ TNA: KB 1/14/6, Hil. 1761 (King against William Payne, affidavit of Mrs Pepys). ¹²⁸ London Debating Societies 1776–1799, ed. D. Andrew (London Record Society, Chippenham, 1994), 5. ¹²⁹ See petitions drawn up in his favour on several occasions, n. 88. His death was noticed not only in the Gentlemen’s Magazine, but also in other newspapers: e.g. Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 2 December 1782, where he was praised for his law-keeping activities. (I owe this reference to Donna Andrew.) Some long afterwards lamented that none like him had since emerged: Letter to the Rt. Hon. The Lord Bishop of London, containing a Statement of the Immoral and Disgraceful Scenes which are Every Evening exhibited in the Public Streets (London, 1808). (I owe this reference to Tony Henderson.) ¹³⁰ Corp. of London archives: COL/CC/06/01/0229 (Common Council papers, April 1778), Petitions for candidates for post of marshalman and tally of votes. For the social status of common councilmen, Brown, ‘Politics, Commerce’, 29–36.


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PAY N E A N D T H E M O R A L E C O N O M Y Historians of debates about market regulation in eighteenth-century Britain have tended to focus upon the market in grain.¹³¹ But to meat-eating Londoners, meat was just as much an object of concern. In 1764, the price of meat rose particularly high—the result, it would be suggested later, of low rainfall early in the decade raising the price of fodder, and in due course that of animals.¹³² Many Londoners however thought that the main source of the problem lay elsewhere: in the activities of middlemen who interposed between the graziers who raised cattle and the cutting butchers who prepared their carcases for sale. As they saw it, jobbers, salesmen, and ‘carcase butchers’ who bought cattle from farms or en route to London, then sold and resold beasts and meat in London markets, necessarily added to the final price, because they needed their own element of profit. Because such middlemen restricted the numbers of cattle coming onto the market, they were able to force retail ‘cutting butchers’ to buy through them, at inflated prices.¹³³ Cutting butchers were among the more vigorous proponents of this analysis—but it also persuaded many in other social ranks. Forestalling, engrossing, and regrating of cattle and meat had been subjected to penalties by sixteenthcentury legislation concerned with the marketing of all forms of ‘victuals’; further legislation specifically targeting cattle jobbing had passed in 1670; that statute had been renewed and made perpetual in 1707—though in practice this did little or nothing to restrain the jobbers, who found ever more employment as the metropolis and other cities grew.¹³⁴ In 1765, the House of Lords approved a new bill, further restricting carcase butchers’ freedom of action; however, the Commons let this bill lapse, and further initiatives in the next few years equally failed to produce new laws.¹³⁵ Instead, in 1772, the two houses moved to repeal ¹³¹ Thus E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, i (1971), 76–136, and many others. D. Hay, ‘Moral Economy, Political Economy and Law’, in A. Randall and A. Charlesworth eds, Moral Economy and Popular Protest (Basingstoke, 2000), 93–122, casts his net more broadly. ¹³² T. S. Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England, 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1959), 21–2. ¹³³ For the Commons initial enquiries into these matters, CJ, xxix, 797, 1046–7. They concluded (on 11 April) that problems arose both from the weather and from defects in the laws. For the organization of the meat trade, G. E. Fussell and C. Goodman, ‘Eighteenth-Century Traffic in Livestock’, Economic History, iii (1936), 214–36; R. Westerfield, Middlemen in English Business (orig. New Haven, 1915; reprinted Newton Abbott, 1968), ch. 3; J. A. Chartres, ‘The Marketing of Agricultural Produce’, in J. Thirsk ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales 5: 1640–1750 (2 parts, Cambridge, 1985), ii, 482–6; and Smith, ‘Market Place’, chs 3–5. ¹³⁴ General acts were 5 and 6 Ed. VI c.14 and 5 Eliz. I c.12; more specifically focusing on cattle jobbing were 22 & 23 Charles II c.19, amended by 25 Charles II c.4; 7 Anne c.6. These acts were supplemented in the hard year 1758 by a further act relating specifically to the metropolis 31 Geo. II c.40. For a contemporary summary, S. Browne, The Laws against Engrossing, Forestalling, Regrating and Monopolising (2nd edn, London, 1767). ¹³⁵ For the 1765 bill, nn. 147, 152.

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legislation against all forms of ‘engrossing and forestalling’. Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, was one of the more prominent advocates of repeal. This was consonant with the convictions that informed his general conduct as a judge, but it has also been suggested that he was moved by his experience of dealing with actions for these matters in his own court.¹³⁶ Among the most pertinacious of these prosecutors was William Payne. Payne’s engagement with this issue appears to date back to 1764, to a time when the reformation of manners movement was running into trouble in the courts, but his own star was rising, as he joined the ranks of those given the rights of constables by the City of London. The City maintained a general regulatory oversight over city markets: including the live cattle and carcase market at Smithfield, and the meat and produce markets of Newgate and Fleet, all in Payne’s immediate neighbourhood. Attending Smithfield was one of the duties of the marshalmen. It is possible that it was through his association with the marshals that Payne first became interested in the ways and means of market regulation.¹³⁷ High meat prices provided the immediate spur to action. In a letter to the House of Lords committee (Figure 7.3) Payne would later explain that he had been moved to act ‘not Only from the Complaints of Others, but from Experiance, haveing a Large family to maintain’ as well as by ‘the Little Zeal I have for My Country’s Cause’.¹³⁸ As usual where Payne was concerned, there are (and were) various ways of conceiving his motivations. The cause could be set in a religious frame. Traditionally, it was presumed that God would provide: as Payne wrote in the same letter, England, like Canaan, was a land ‘flowing with Milk & Honey[;] it may then be Justly Ask’d, why are the necessaries of Life so extravagantly Dear [?]’ In a controversial charge to the Westminster Grand Jury, John Fielding pronounced forestalling and engrossing to be not merely shameful to humanity but ‘insulting to Providence’.¹³⁹ As rising prices made the issue topical, preachers ¹³⁶ Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, ii, 932–3. Payne was not the only informer to come before Mansfield with such cases. ¹³⁷ See Smith, ‘Market Place’, 18–20, 24–46, for the specialties of the different markets. Given that butchers selling meat on Sundays had been among reformers’ targets, it may seem odd that Payne at this point emerged as, in effect, the retail butchers’ champion. Note however that there was some support within the trade for a ban on Sunday selling: thus Corp. of London archives: COL/CA/01/01/186 (Repertories of Court of Aldermen, November 1777–November 1778), ff. 298–9. ¹³⁸ HLRO: HL Main papers, 19 March 1765, Dearness of Provision Papers, f. 79. ¹³⁹ For belief that God would provide as context for denunciation of middlemen: R. Sheldon, ‘The Politics of Bread in Eighteenth-Century England: Debating the Subsistence Question c.1709– 1802’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1999), 51–2. Payne’s letter as above; Sir John Fielding, A Charge to the Grand Jury for the City and Liberty of Westminster . . . January 9 1766 (London, 1766), esp. 12. Fielding was reproached in Reflections on the Present High Price of Provisions and the Complaints and Disturbances arising therefrom (London, 1766), 40–1, as ‘one of the first champions that has opened the hunt after’ these traders.


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to the Reformation of Manners society began to include such activities in their lists of immoral actions calling for reforming attention.¹⁴⁰ There was also plenty to support the view that such prosecutions served the ‘country’s cause’. Concerns about prices were vigorously expressed in the press, the issue attracted the attention of both Houses of Parliament, and, in 1766, a royal proclamation encouraged the implementation of existing laws.¹⁴¹ Finally, there were material incentives to action. Informers against those who broke marketing laws were entitled to half the value of the goods in question. Moreover, in October 1764, a royal proclamation permitting the free importation of salted provisions from Ireland promised a £100 reward to anyone successfully prosecuting a combination to raise meat prices.¹⁴² Payne would solicit, though would not ultimately obtain, that reward. However Payne was motivated, his first moves preceded the offer of the reward. In May 1764 (by his own account) he sought out John Fielding and gained his approval for a plan to launch prosecutions against middlemen.¹⁴³ Fielding probably already had doubts of his own about the proposition (urged by those who favoured letting the middlemen be) that high prices reflected real deficiencies in food sources. In the following year, he set out his thoughts in a letter to the Lords committee.¹⁴⁴ He suggested then that the true extent of supplies might be ascertained by sending questionnaires to vicars of every parish, and by the study of Custom House lists. He recommended that all cattle dealers should be forced to do their buying and selling at Smithfield. Compliance could be checked if all graziers were required to obtain certificates from their rectors or churchwardens as to the number of cattle they had in hand. Fielding was in one sense a committed interventionist, insofar as he believed that the legislature should (as he put it) ‘constantly interpose’ to prevent extortion and monopoly in the necessities of life, though, like most contemporary interventionists, he identified the object of the exercise as the creation of a true market.¹⁴⁵ Having obtained Fielding’s blessing, Payne, with an assistant, set about collecting evidence on which to found prosecutions. Certain districts around the metropolis, such as Knightsbridge and Mile End, both then outside the main conurbation, were established meeting places for graziers and dealers. Early in the morning of 3 May 1764, Payne and his assistant went into the fields and ¹⁴⁰ Browne, The Causes that Obstruct, 15. ¹⁴¹ The London Chronicle carried many relevant news items and letters over a period of years; for encouragement to inform, see, for example, London Chronicle, 2–5 February, 13–16 June 1765; 24–6 June 1766. For parliamentary proceedings see Hay, ‘Moral economy’ and footnotes below; for the proclamation, n. 149. ¹⁴² See below, n. 154. ¹⁴³ HLRO: HL Main papers, 19 March 1765, Dearness of Provision Papers, f. 23ff. ¹⁴⁴ Dearness of Provision Papers, f. 42ff. ¹⁴⁵ London Chronicle, 16–18 April 1765, reported that some such plan would shortly be enacted into law. It was not unusual for the paper to carry false reports about forthcoming legislation. What is interesting is that this suggests that Fielding himself may have been seeding press comment.

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Figure 7.3 Letter from William Payne to members of the House of Lords ‘Dearness of Provisions’ committee, 12 February 1765. Source: Reproduced by permission of the Parliamentary Archives, ref HL Main papers, 19 March 1765, Dearness of Provision papers, f. 79.


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took note of several agreements made, involving dealers John Grainger, Charles Parsons, and John Edus.¹⁴⁶ For reasons that are unclear, Payne did not however proceed to prosecute at this time. Early the next year, 1765, the issue was taken up by the House of Lords.¹⁴⁷ The peer who chaired the committee had previously been in contact with a master cutting butcher, who helped organize witnesses to give evidence. Jobbers, salesmen, and carcase butchers were notably absent.¹⁴⁸ This left cutting butchers to hold the floor, where they were joined by Payne, who argued that what was wanted was action to enforce laws in being. He reported his own recent efforts to that end. Persuaded by the analysis that they heard, the committee drafted a ‘carcase butchers bill’, which proposed to reinstate a restrictive clause initially contained in legislation of 1670, but removed in 1672 (someone had clearly been studying the statute book). The proposal to reinstate the clause passed fairly rapidly through the upper chamber (though against some opposition), and on to the Commons for their approval. On 1 March the Lords also petitioned the King, asking him to direct magistrates to put existing laws into execution.¹⁴⁹ As the Lords proceedings unfolded, Payne pursued his case against dealers Grainger and Parsons, both of whom were convicted, fined, and sentenced to short terms in prison.¹⁵⁰ This success detonated a flurry of prosecutions throughout the metropolis, encouraged by Fielding and endorsed by sections of the press, and imitated in some provincial towns.¹⁵¹ Further convictions were obtained—one butcher was reported to have been fined £2,000; ‘proper persons’ were sent to prevent sales from taking place at traditional sites in Knightsbridge ¹⁴⁶ Dearness of Provision Papers, f. 23ff., TNA: KB 10/35, Box I, TT 64, and for his affidavits: TNA: KB 1/16/2, Hil. 1765 (affidavits of Payne against Grainger, Parsons, and Edus). ¹⁴⁷ LJ, xxxi, 18, 21, 35, 56–7, 62–3, 70, 73, 79, 85–7; Dearness of Provision Papers. The simple text of the bill as it reached the Commons is reprinted in Lambert, Sessional Papers, xxi, 113–14. ¹⁴⁸ See London Chronicle, 7–9 February 1765, for the rumour that one had been summoned by the Lords to answer charges; it is possible that large dealers regarded the Lords committee as excessively hostile to their case, and preferred to wait for the Commons. ¹⁴⁹ LJ, xxxi, 62b, 70b. ¹⁵⁰ TNA: KB 10/35, Box I, Trinity 1764 (indictments of Grainger and Parsons); PRIS 4/3 399f and v. London Chronicle, 2–5 February 1765, had observed. ¹⁵¹ The press does not report prosecutions before this date—though, probably not by coincidence, a few days before Grainger’s conviction, the London Chronicle, 2–5 February 1765, called for laws to be put into force, arguing that this would have a deterrent effect. The London Chronicle reported Grainger’s conviction at length (7–9 February 1765), and subsequent prosecutions throughout February, March, June, September, November, and recurrently through the following year; for plans for similar prosecutions in York, 30 April–2 May 1765. According to London Chronicle, 28–30 March 1765, there were about twenty-eight ‘carcase butchers’; if so, a considerable proportion must have experienced harassment. It seems that over twenty prosecutions were brought in 1765–1772; at least nine resulted in fines or terms of imprisonment. Also active from 1765 was Nehemiah Rogers, a butcher of Fleet market, who was himself subsequently prosecuted, and a Mr Robert Williams, who brought at least five prosecutions in ensuing years and for whom see also n. 155. For policing of salesgrounds, 19–21 February 1765; for falling prices, credited to the campaign, 9–12 March 1765.


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and Islington and—the press reported—meat prices gratifyingly began to fall. The House of Commons, nonetheless, failed to endorse the Lords’ strategy, and let the ‘carcase butchers bill’ drop.¹⁵² Critics of the middlemen persisted, and made some headway in the Commons during the next few years. In 1766, in response to petitions from Westminster and Spitalfields, a committee made enquiries and condemned their practices. In 1767–8, their critics (including now West Country graziers) and their parliamentary allies raised the issue once again, and another Commons resolution called for the strengthening of penal laws. In between these two enquiries, in the autumn of 1766 (amidst widespread clamour about the shortage of grain, seen to be flowing out of the country in pursuit of still higher prices that could be commanded abroad), a royal proclamation urged action against forestallers and engrossers of corn, under sixteenth-century laws of more general application. Yet still no new legislation emerged.¹⁵³ In the meantime—frustrated though he may have been by Parliament’s dilatoriness—Payne wrote to the Treasury, enclosing a certificate of Grainger’s conviction, and asking for his reward under the terms of the 1764 proclamation.¹⁵⁴ Here he met with a sceptical response. Might the action might not be collusive (the Board wondered): cooked up between Payne and Grainger with the object of splitting the reward (though one might wonder in turn why Grainger should have been willing to undergo two months’ imprisonment to get his share). Detailed to investigate, the Treasury Solicitor did not report until March 1767 (by which time, as we shall see, Payne had won notoriety in another connection). He then reported that he had interviewed Payne, who had sworn that there was no element of collusion; he said that he had prosecuted ‘for the sake of justice’, despite approaches from the defendants, who had offered to settle out of court. In the Treasury Solicitor’s view, nonetheless, the action did not fall within the terms of the proclamation, which had focused upon the buying and reselling of live cattle; there was no evidence that Grainger had sold his cattle live. The Treasury Board therefore declined to reward Payne. Payne and others continued to bring exemplary prosecutions in the following years.¹⁵⁵ After 1768, however, the weather was for some years more favourable ¹⁵² CJ, xxx, 279, 290, 295–6, 304, 326, 378, 380. ¹⁵³ CJ, xxx, 714, 751, 787, 831; xxxi, 525, 526, 587, 626. For the proclamation, see London Gazette, 9–13 September 1766, and W. J. Shelton, English Hunger and Industrial Disorders (London, 1973), 119. Public policy in this period is also explored in P. Lawson, ‘Parliament, the Constitution and Corn: the Embargo Crisis of 1766’, Parliamentary History, v (1986), 17–37. ¹⁵⁴ TNA: T 1/456 ff. 206–16 for all relevant documents, including a copy of the proclamation. ¹⁵⁵ Payne pursued cases against Thomas Bartholomew and John Edus, on the basis of evidence arising from his 1764 excursion, in 1765–6: HLRO: Dearness of Provision Papers, 23ff., evidence of William Payne; TNA: KB 10/35 part 2, Hil. 1765; KB 1/16/4, Ea. 1766 (King v. Edus). For other reports of prosecutions, see London Chronicle, March, April, May, June 1766 and April, May 1767. Oldham has two 1770 cases, Mansfield Manuscripts, ii, 978, 984. Robert Williams prosecuted in two important cases: one in King’s Bench in 1766, described as being ‘prosecuted by the trade’;

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to farming, and the price of food fell. Yet this respite proved brief, for in 1771 poor yields of grass and turnips affected the animals they nourished.¹⁵⁶ By the autumn of 1771, Payne was back in action. In late August and in early September, he and an assistant attended Newgate market to spy on the activities of butter dealers. There, at ‘break of day’, they noted large quantities of butter being forestalled: transferred from wagons fresh out of the country into dealers’ vans, without ever coming into the market itself.¹⁵⁷ In October, Payne witnessed and noted the purchase and prompt resale of cattle by a local carcase butcher. The following spring, he set in train in the court of King’s Bench nine actions against four butter and cheesemongers, for forestalling several hundredweight of butter, worth in total over £300, and in parallel, at the City sessions, an action against the butcher, in relation to stock worth £100.¹⁵⁸ Though he succeeded in convicting the butcher,¹⁵⁹ in the King’s Bench he met with less success than theretofore. In the case that went furthest, against the cheesemonger Henry Capel, the jury, probably under judicial direction, returned a ‘special verdict’, delaying resolution.¹⁶⁰ At the end of the month, Payne was reported in the press to have presented a memorial to the House of Lords with ‘a new scheme for reducing the price of all sorts of provisions’.¹⁶¹ For some years, there had been rumours in the press that concerned gentlemen and merchants might explore an alternative approach: by subscribing to a fund which would in effect allow them to enter the provisioning business themselves, on a ‘not for profit’ basis. The cleric and reformer James Burgh advocated this and a City case, described in the press as ‘the great cause’ for forestalling Smithfield market; both were argued at length by counsel. In the first, the defendant was let off on pleading ignorance of the law and promising to abide by it henceforth; in the other, the information was suppressed on a technicality: London Chronicle, 28 June–2 July 1766, 7–9, 21–3 May 1767; thanks to Jim Oldham for identifying Williams as prosecutor in the King’s Bench case from the brief report in Mansfield’s notebooks. For another Williams case, TNA: T 1/464. If Williams was acting for ‘the trade’, it is possible that Payne was also in some sense an agent—but I have found no clear indication of that. The fact that he refocused on butter in the early 1770s in any case suggests that he was more than just a footsoldier in the butchers’ war. For ‘the trade’ as an actor here, see n. 182. ¹⁵⁶ Ashton, Economic Fluctuations, 23. ¹⁵⁷ Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, ii, 988–9. For the butter trade, G. E. Fussell, The English Dairy Farmer 1500–1900 (London, 1966), 270–83; Westerfield, Middlemen, 204–8. ¹⁵⁸ For the buttermongers, TNA: KB 10/38 Box 2, Hilary 1772; for the butcher, Corp. of London archives: CLA/047/LJ/13/1772/003 (City sessions papers, April 1772). ¹⁵⁹ So unusual were such prosecutions that the City retained in its precedent book the form of summons employed: Corp. of London archives: CLA/047/LA/02/012 (City sessions miscellaneous, forms, and precedents). ¹⁶⁰ Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, ii, 989. For a press report, probably of the Cullum case, London Chronicle, 3–5 March 1772: it is there described as a long trial, in which many learned arguments were used on both sides—not apparent from Mansfield’s notes, which always focused on evidence. ¹⁶¹ London Chronicle, 31 March–2 April 1772. Internal evidence suggests this is not the pamphlet by ‘W.P.’, published later that year: Forestallers and Engrossers Detected, with a Plan for Restoring Plenty to Old England! (London, 1772). According to the London Chronicle, 16–18 April 1772, already by that date, no fewer than twenty-six plans for reducing the price of provisions had been received by the premier.


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course in a pamphlet of 1766.¹⁶² In 1772, the scheme finally got off the ground. During March of that year, some £10,000 was raised, and the fund managers set about establishing a slaughterhouse, in Chiswell Street, Moorfields (though the enterprise failed to prosper).¹⁶³ Interestingly, the Liberty of the Rolls ran its own mini-version of this scheme: purchasing and slaughtering cattle to sell at cost price to the poor.¹⁶⁴ The subscribers did not reject the tactic of prosecution: on the contrary, it was reported that part of their fund would be employed in encouraging prosecutions. But in Parliament, opinion for the first time swung decisively against that course. Between 1766 and 1768, debates associated with bad harvests, high corn prices, and outbreaks of rioting across southern England had cast doubt on the wisdom of blaming middlemen; instead, there emerged a corps of free-trade advocates in Parliament. As they saw it, not middlemen but rather laws against middlemen raised prices, by obstructing those men’s useful activities. In 1767, against that background, a bill was prepared to modify or repeal laws against forestalling and regrating, though it did not then pass.¹⁶⁵ When poor weather in 1771 raised prices for a variety of foodstuffs once again, the repeal project was revived. In March 1772, resolutions agreed by the committee of 1767 were read in the House of Commons, and leave was given to bring in a bill to put them into effect. In May, the bill was introduced, being championed in the Commons by Edmund Burke, in the Lords by Lord Mansfield. This bill received the royal assent in June.¹⁶⁶ Although it had started in the Commons (as most bills on such matters did), some contemporaries attributed it particularly to Lord Mansfield.¹⁶⁷ Clearly there was much more at stake than the stymieing of one metropolitan informer. Yet the timing suggests that Payne’s actions against the buttermongers may have provided a catalyst. The motion to re-read the resolutions of the 1767 committee immediately followed the grand jury’s finding that Payne’s indictments were ‘true bills’. In 1800, when a similar issue was being argued ¹⁶² Proposals for an Association against the Iniquitous Practices of Engrossers . . . Forestallers, Jobbers etc and for reducing the Price of Provisions, esp. Butcher’s Meat (London, 1766) [attributed to James Burgh in the Guildhall Library copy]; also excerpted in the press: London Chronicle, 3–6 May 1766. ¹⁶³ London Chronicle, 27–9 February, reports through March and April to 19–21 May 1772. ¹⁶⁴ London Chronicle, 19–21, 24–6 March 1772. ¹⁶⁵ Shelton, English Hunger, Part I; Hay, ‘Moral Economy’, 96–8. See CJ, xxxi, 275, 291. For a 1766 pamphlet arguing that recent prosecutions under ‘almost forgotten’ statutes had caused many inconveniences to traders and farmers, suggesting the need for a fresh look at the legislation, Reflections on The Present High Price of Provisions. ¹⁶⁶ CJ, xxxiii, 590, 591, 732, 736, 754, 759, 774, 953, 957; 12 Geo. III c.71. It repealed six named acts, passed between the reigns of Edward VI and Anne, ‘and all acts made for the better enforcing of the same’. Lord Mayor Thomas Harley initially took the lead (he ended his term as mayor while the bill was in progress). There was no early warning in the press that the bill would reverse established policy: see London Chronicle, 7–9, 14–16 May 1772. ¹⁶⁷ History, Debates and Proceedings of Both Houses of Parliament, ed. J. Debrett (45 vols, London, 1782–6), xxii, 366.

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before Lord Chief Justice Kenyon (who was much more sympathetic to the regulators’ case), barrister Edmund Law recalled that an action brought before Mansfield in the early 1770s had so revolted him, given ‘the judgment which, under the statute, he was obliged to pronounce; that he . . . let the matter stand over, postponing his judgment . . . until the statute itself . . . had been repealed’.¹⁶⁸ It should be plain that Payne’s commitment to the regulatory approach was in no way peculiar. Indeed, though the preamble to the 1772 repeal statute asserted that laws against forestalling and engrossing threatened the effective provisioning of the cities of London and Westminster, city authorities for many years following continued to favour regulation. In 1787, they went so far as to call for the reinstatement of laws against ‘regrating’ (buying in the hope of reselling in the same market at a higher price), with special emphasis on abuses at Smithfield. City aldermen serving as MPs spoke in favour of the measure, claiming to have consulted widely among other urban authorities and received substantial support.¹⁶⁹ That approach probably also continued to commend itself to many poor consumers—and indeed to wider sections of the public.¹⁷⁰ Yet if regulation was widely supported in principle, there remained an inseparable and yet distinct issue: how was regulation to be effected? If rules were broken, should individuals be prosecuted? Who should be targeted? Who was to collect evidence and bring charges? How might regulators best be motivated and compensated for their efforts? In the country at large, there were no obvious official enforcement agencies. Ordinary constables might indeed if they chose bring charges under regulatory statutes—but the ordinary constable was a part-time, unsalaried public servant: why should he so exert himself? The traditional approach had been to build material incentives into statutes, in the hope of spurring ‘informers’ (who might or might not be constables) to action. Informers, acting in the hope of private gain, however often attracted suspicion and dislike. Even the ‘principled’ informer was easily denigrated as an interfering busybody.¹⁷¹ This was a conundrum that ¹⁶⁸ Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, ii, 933, and see also Inquiry into the Causes of the Late and Present Scarcity (2nd edn, London, 1800), 60–1. Sheldon, ‘Politics of Bread’, 270–1, identifies a larger pattern, in which an enlightened elite increasingly distanced themselves from supposedly ill-informed, even superstitious popular beliefs. With Payne in mind, it is notable that Adam Smith compared popular beliefs about regulating provisioning and religion: ‘The people feel themselves so much interested in what relates either to their subsistence in this life, or to their happiness in a life to come, that government must yield to their prejudices, and . . . establish that system which they approve of ’, A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations (London, 1776), 126 (iv, ch. 5), cited by Sheldon. ¹⁶⁹ Debrett, Debates, xxii, 366–70, and see also Hay, ‘Moral Economy’, 102–3; Brown, ‘Politics, Commerce’, 147. ¹⁷⁰ D. Hay, ‘The State and the Market in 1800: Lord Kenyon and Mr Waddington’, Past and Present, clxii (1999), 101–62. ¹⁷¹ A letter in the London Chronicle, 6–8 November 1766, suggested that, since few were willing to be informers, the laws against forestalling and engrossing could not be made to work; it proposed that inspectors be appointed.


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lay at the heart of what E. P. Thompson famously termed the ‘moral economy’, the worm in its bud: how to legitimate particular ‘moral’ regulatory acts? How was the regulator to avoid charges of greed, malice, or puritanical officiousness? How might it affect one’s feeling about what, by the nature of things, had to be a discretionary regulatory code if in practice the discretion was exercised by someone like Payne?¹⁷² For Mansfield, Payne’s initiative seems to have been the last straw. Though Payne played a prominent—and, it seems, a precipitating—role in the anti-forestalling campaign, he did not act alone. He clearly enjoyed Fielding’s support, and accordingly co-operation from other law enforcement officers; it is possible that he acted in systematic collaboration with retail butchers.¹⁷³ Less clear is the attitude of City authorities. Given the extent of concern about high prices, and the intensity of popular feeling about the issue, we might have expected them to have wished both to act and be seen to act. Like other urban corporations, they had more regulatory tools and agents at their disposal than had county magistrates. We might wonder how it was that initiative came to fall to freelancers such as Payne. The City body chiefly charged with overseeing markets was the City Lands Committee. At mid-century, the City markets had been leased out; from the late 1750s, the committee began to revert to a regime of direct management.¹⁷⁴ Under both regimes, it maintained certain supervisory responsibilities. Its twin objects were to ensure that markets served inhabitants’ needs and turned a profit. It was consequently always inclined to attend to complaints, either about market traders’ misconduct or about the removal of trade from market places (entailing loss of revenue). In the face of complaints, the committee nonetheless had to first assess both the merits of action and its power to act. If it saw reason to act, it could instruct the City solicitor to open proceedings. If it found existing law inadequate, it could make application to Parliament for new law (though of course, without any guarantee of success, as the failure of the 1787 application shows). The City Lands committee did show concern about the kinds of issue that preoccupied Payne—but the record of its activity illustrates both the limits of its powers and uncertainty and drift in official attitudes.¹⁷⁵ First, they acted ¹⁷² Enforcement of marketing laws has not much been discussed, though Thompson noted presentments and prosecutions in a footnote to ‘Moral Economy’, 196 n. 99—however, see J. Bohstedt, ‘The Pragmatic Economy, the Politics of Provisions and the ‘‘Invention’’ of the Food Riot Tradition in 1740’, in Randall and Charlesworth, Moral Economy, 81, for informers in action, and Hay, ‘Lord Kenyon and Mr Waddington’, 114–15, for public prosecutions and attempts to incite informers to act. ¹⁷³ See n. 155. ¹⁷⁴ I am much indebted to Colin Smith’s unpublished thesis, ‘The Market Place and the Market’s Place’ (cited above, n. 14), for his account of these matters: see esp. chs 4 and 6. Though I have followed up some of his references, I rely upon the basic framework of his account. ¹⁷⁵ Corp. of London archives: COL/CC/01/01/060 ( Journals of Common Council, March 1759–June 1762), ff. 176b–177; COL/CC/CLC/01/046 (City Lands Committee minutes,

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only within City bounds: whatever they thought about the merits or demerits of cattle-trading at Kensington and Mile End, the committee must have judged that beyond their control. Though they were worried about the extent of extra-market trading, in 1760 they abandoned an attempt to suppress the use of ‘salesmen’, on the ground that the effect might be rather to raise than to lower prices.¹⁷⁶ Two years later, the City applied to Parliament for an act to remove butchers’ shops from public streets—but the application stressed nuisance and health grounds, rather than price issues; Parliament in its turn was persuaded to reshape the bill as a bill of regulation, rather than prohibition, and at that point it dropped, not to be revived.¹⁷⁷ In the same year, the City Solicitor was instructed to threaten to sue those trading in inn yards—but in 1770 he reported that the City regulations in this regard seemed to rely on custom; he hesitated to enforce them without better authority. He thought that those trading out of waggons might perhaps be indicted for not paying toll, if they stayed an unreasonable length of time, but since waggons had the right to pass and unload without paying toll, this was a grey area.¹⁷⁸ The Butchers’ Company proved equally powerless.¹⁷⁹ In 1766, the then mayor put to the Company a proposal made to him, whereby meat unsold at the end of the day would be requisitioned and sold off to the public under the supervision of grand jurors at prices set weekly by the Company’s wardens. The Company however dismissed these proposals as impracticable.¹⁸⁰ To the extent that leading members of the Company took sides in the conflict between wholesalers and retailers, their sympathies seem to have lain with the retailers.¹⁸¹ Insofar as the scheme proposed targeted ‘abuse’ in the retail sector, it therefore did not address what they saw as the root of the problem. Yet, as a Company, the Butchers exercised power only over the retail sector, and then chiefly in relation to the attempted sale of unwholesome meat: in their corporate capacity, they had no purchase on alleged abuses in the cattle trade.¹⁸² January–December 1762), f. 43b, 58–58b. The City reassumed direct control over Newgate market 1758 and Fleet 1763 against a background of toll disputes, and was probably moved in part by the desire to protect its income stream. After decades of stagnation, the metropolis began to grow again from the 1760s; the sense that this put established trading patterns under pressure probably also spurred reassessment. ¹⁷⁶ Corp. of London archives: COL/CC/CLC/01/044 (City Lands Committee minutes, January–December 1760), f. 235b–236a. ¹⁷⁷ CJ, xxix, 140, 217, 220, 291, 340. ¹⁷⁸ Corp. of London archives: COL/CC/CLC/01/054 (City Lands committee minutes, January–December 1770), ff. 58–59b. ¹⁷⁹ For the Company, P. E. Jones, The Butchers of London (London, 1976). ¹⁸⁰ Guildhall Library manuscript room, Butchers’ Company, Court minutes 1762–74, 13 June 1766. ¹⁸¹ Notably, John Cheese, who drummed up witnesses for the Lords’ enquiry into what he termed ‘this Great Affair’ (HLRO, Dearness of provision papers, f. 48). He later became warden and then master of the Company (1769, 1773). On the Company’s general orientation in such disputes, Jones, Butchers, 102–3. ¹⁸² This did not of course prevent the same people from acting collectively, though in a noncorporate capacity, to represent the interests of the ‘trade’ as they saw them. Jones, Butchers, 102,


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By proceeding as common informers, under ancient statutes, Payne and his associates cut through these obstructions and hesitations. Yet the unintended effect of their actions was to precipitate a speedy and unfavourable resolution to certain issues in public debate. They played into the hands of the deregulators. A few years later, Payne’s anti-Catholic efforts would rebound in a similar way.

PAY N E A N D T H E C AT H O L I C M E N AC E In 1700, the English Parliament added to swingeing existing laws against the practice of the Catholic religion a new law promising a reward of £100 to anyone who succeeded in prosecuting a priest for saying the mass; the same law allowed Protestants in the line of succession to property to challenge the rights of Catholic heirs who would normally have had precedence over them (if they wished to make such a challenge).¹⁸³ In effect, this statute held out under both heads inducements to private citizens to take legal action against Catholics. In the mid-1760s, a few months into his first anti-forestalling campaign, and even while that was still unfolding, Payne initiated a number of actions on the basis of this law. According to a census of Catholics undertaken in 1767, there were then about 68,000 Catholics in England, a little more concentrated than the norm in the metropolitan area, which was home to about 10,000. They made up therefore a little over 1 per cent of the metropolitan population.¹⁸⁴ Socially, they were a diverse group, including gentlemen, tradesmen, and labourers. Though most were British born, some came from the continent; some were Irish immigrants. Irish labourers were prominent in some sectors of rough work, for example as ‘chairmen’ (sedanchair carriers), as coalheavers, and in the building industry. Some—though probably no great proportion—of London’s prostitutes were Irish.¹⁸⁵ Anti-Catholic laws and anti-Catholic prejudices encouraged both lay Catholics and those who ministered to their religious needs to tread cautiously. Yet there were some protected sites of worship, and others were usually in practice tolerated. Key protected sites of public worship were chapels maintained by the reports a 1786 meeting critical of the conduct of the trade, held in a public house, and chaired by a former master of the Company. It may be in this sense that one of the 1760s prosecutions was, according to newspaper report, brought ‘by the trade’: London Chronicle, 28 June–2 July 1766, and see n.155. ¹⁸³ 11 Will. III c.4. For the penal laws, see Burton, Challoner, i, 65–6. ¹⁸⁴ For the returns, Return of Papists 1767, ed. E. S. Worrall (2 vols, Catholic Record Society, 1989). For discussion, Le Sourd, Les Catholiques, i, chs 2–3; M. B. Rowlands ed., Catholics of Parish and Town 1558–1778 (Catholic Record Society Monograph Series, vol. 5; Totton, Hampshire, 1999), chs 12–14; on London, 302–7. For general surveys, J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1550–1780 (London, 1975); M. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basingstoke, 1998), chs 5 and 6; and E. Duffy ed., Challoner and his Church (London, 1981). ¹⁸⁵ For Irish working and poor people in London, Linebaugh, London Hanged, ch. 9.

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ambassadors of Catholic powers. There was a particularly large chapel, long used for Catholic worship, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (just north of Bell Yard), in a building at one time occupied by the Bavarian ambassador, later by the Sardinian ambassador.¹⁸⁶ Other, legally unprotected masshouses included one in Ropemakers Alley, Moorfields, which served a large area of eastern London; Virginia Street, off the Ratcliff Highway, which catered to a population of Irish dock labourers; and other, more transient spaces in buildings around St Giles, in the Tower Liberty, and in Southwark.¹⁸⁷ Ambassadorial and other private chaplains apart, the Catholic community was ministered to by a body of ‘missionary priests’, England having the status of a mission field. Their efforts were overseen by four bishops, nominally appointed to middle-eastern sees. (James II had encouraged the restoration of a de facto hierarchy, and it had survived his ejection.) De facto bishop of London was Richard Challoner. Now ageing, Challoner had for decades provided the English priesthood with relatively bold and charismatic leadership. Within the metropolitan area (ambassadors’ and private chaplains apart) there were some thirty other priests.¹⁸⁸ English anti-Catholicism drew on a variety of sources, some religious, some more broadly cultural, some specifically political.¹⁸⁹ Many Protestants regarded the Catholicism of their own day as a mistaken, corrupt religion—though they might respect elements of Catholic tradition, and even certain recent writers and religious leaders. Catholic teaching and practice were widely thought to foster superstition: credulous irrationality. Catholics were also feared as intolerant persecutors: Foxe’s Book of Martyrs helped to keep alive the memory of the Marian persecutions in England; much attention was paid to the more ferocious activities of the Inquisition, and to contemporary instances of condign punishment. Catholics also had a reputation for plotting and conspiracy. A longstanding charge against them was that they believed they could be released from oaths, so could not be trusted. The widely admired ‘immortal republic’, Venice, was a Catholic polity—but that fact was not usually highlighted. Rather, it was stressed that certain Catholic monarchs claimed absolute powers: Catholicism was seen as the handmaiden of tyranny. In some contexts and at some junctures during the eighteenth century, there were local, pragmatic political reasons for Britons to worry about Catholicism. Stuart ‘pretenders’ to the throne, James II and his heirs, were Catholics, and drew disproportionate support from the Catholic community. Until 1778, in English Catholic services prayers continued routinely to be offered for Stuart ¹⁸⁶ D. Newton, Catholic London (London, 1950), 239–41, and picture facing 257. ¹⁸⁷ Ibid., 239, 289. ¹⁸⁸ Burton, Challoner i, 1–8, ii, 3. Challoner’s lists give seventy-two priests in all, including thirty-four attached to embassy chapels and eight serving as private chaplains. (Information from David Butler.) ¹⁸⁹ The best account is Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, ch. 5, for this period.


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‘kings’.¹⁹⁰ Britain’s chief enemy in most wars since the Revolution had been Catholic France. For want of educational opportunities in England, many gentry and middle-class Catholics sent their children to be educated on the continent, usually in the Austrian Netherlands; in consequence, they often spoke French fluently, and maintained an interest in French-speaking lands. This did not mean that they did not regard themselves as British, nor did it mean that in the face of rebellion or invasion they automatically flocked to Jacobite or French colours, yet there were grounds for the authorities to be concerned about where their loyalties might lie. This was one argument for keeping anti-Catholic laws on the books: so that they could be used, if need arose, even if there was no such need in normal times. In the later eighteenth century, at the highest levels of government, and among the sorts of people who served as MPs, attitudes were changing—in some cases, on the basis of principle, in others, on the basis of a pragmatic assessment of changing times. Foremost among spokesmen for principled toleration were the same two men who would shortly emerge as key proponents of free trade: on the government side, the politically influential judge, Lord Mansfield; among the Rockingham Whigs, Edmund Burke, product of an Irish Catholic lineage, the male members of which had in recent generations prudentially conformed to the established Church.¹⁹¹ Few shared their level of principled commitment, but many others nonetheless accepted that the defeat of the Jacobite rising of 1745–6 had knocked Jacobite hopes on the head. The rising had received little support in England, and, in Scotland, had been comprehensively crushed. Since that time, Britain had been spectacularly successful in the Seven Years War, gaining ascendancy in India and capturing Canada and some Caribbean islands from the French. In 1764, when James II’s son, ‘James III’, ‘the Old Pretender’ died, the Pope declined to recognize his heir, Charles Edward, as rightful king. This helped the cause of those—chiefly Mansfield and Burke—who argued that in the former French colonies not only Catholics but the institutions of the Catholic Church should be generously treated.¹⁹² This new departure in colonial policy in its turn gave Catholics in Britain and Ireland cause to hope that the time might be approaching when domestic laws might be altered in their favour: when the threat of persecution would no longer be held over their heads. Some expressed this hope in pamphlets.¹⁹³ Catholics ¹⁹⁰ Burton, Challoner, i, 235, ii, 4, 208. William Mawhood, a Catholic linen draper, noted in his Diary (Catholic Record Society) (London, 1956), 8 June 1778, that he went to Hammersmith and heard prayers ‘wherein George III was prayed for’. ¹⁹¹ For Mansfield, see Lawson, The Imperial Challenge. Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution (Quebec, 1990), 132–3; Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, ii, 869–73; for Burke, T. Mahoney, Edmund Burke and Ireland (London, 1764), 14–23, 69–75, 92–100. ¹⁹² On Canada, V. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire (2 vols, London, 1964) ii, 664 et seq., and Lawson, Imperial Challenge. ¹⁹³ See, for example, Considerations on the Penal laws against Roman Catholics in England and the New Acquired Colonies in America in a Letter to a Noble Lord by a Country Gentleman (London, 1764).

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themselves took some new initiatives. Some mass houses were new built. To address the educational needs of genteel and middle-class Catholics, a school was opened at Sedgeley Park in Staffordshire.¹⁹⁴ Some Catholic scholars ventured to publish challenges to standard historical accounts. One example was a biography of Mary’s cardinal, Cardinal Pole. Another, a book by a Mr Warner, challenged the Protestant account of the ‘Irish massacres’ of 1641. Widely advertised in the press, such books attracted some favourable notice in literary reviews.¹⁹⁵ Unfortunately, such stirrings inflamed latent anti-Catholicism. The mood of heightened religious excitement that seems to have characterized these years probably helped to fuel the flame. Some evangelical preachers seized upon the issue. A Catholic priest who lived through this period later recalled that in the mid-1760s ‘the Field Preachers inveighed with the utmost vehemence against Popery’.¹⁹⁶ Liberal Anglican and rational Dissenting ‘friends of liberty’ had their own special grounds for anxiety. George III, who had acceded to the throne in 1760, was the first Hanoverian to be raised a member of England’s established Church. He began his reign by making it clear that he planned to break with Hanoverian tradition and foster links with staunchly Anglican ‘Tories’.¹⁹⁷ To Dissenters, liberal Churchmen, and staunch Whigs, this was an ominous turn of events. Fears for political and religious liberty were heightened when post-war fiscal initiatives precipitated a series of clashes between Britain and her American colonies, and ministers lashed out against anti-government propagandist John Wilkes.¹⁹⁸ This range of developments produced a variety of responses—but among them was a stream of anti-Catholic propaganda. This did not go unanswered. Both the cause of toleration, and the cause of Catholicism, found advocates. For several years, the press was full of rumour and response. Sermons provided one medium for anti-Catholic harangues.¹⁹⁹ Some sermons were subsequently printed as pamphlets, and there were other pamphlet-length exposés of Catholic misdeeds too.²⁰⁰ But not all preachers preached against ¹⁹⁴ M. Rowlands, ‘The Education and Piety of Catholics in Staffordshire in the Eighteenth Century’, Recusant History, x (1969), 67–78. ¹⁹⁵ For example, London Chronicle, 4–7 May, 29–31 October 1765; 16–19, 26–8 May, 11–13, 27–30 June 1767. ¹⁹⁶ Barnard, Challoner, 162–3. ¹⁹⁷ Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 184–5. See, for example, Kenyon, Life of . . . Kenyon, 30. ¹⁹⁸ For Wilkes: n. 18. ¹⁹⁹ See praise for the ‘worthy rector of a parish eastward of London’ for a series of sermons exposing the absurdities of Rome. London Chronicle, 27–9 March 1766. ²⁰⁰ A collection of such pamphlets in the Bodleian (Vet A5 e1117) was gathered by Rev. Dr. William Harris of Honiton (a non-conformist minister and friend of Thomas Hollis who wrote biographies of Cromwell et al.—see G. Goodwin, ‘Harris, William (1720–1770)’, rev. P. Carter, ODNB). He appended this note: ‘These were the principal pieces for and against Popery published during the alarm, the reasonable alarm we were under from its increase from 1744 to 1767’.


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Catholicism, and the pamphlets will have had only a limited circulation. It was probably the newspaper press that forced the Catholic issue upon the attention of the largest audience. Interest peaked in 1766–7. In the case of certain London papers, barely an issue appeared at that time without a number of paragraphs, essays, and letters on the Catholic menace. Historians have established that a particular group of Protestant ‘friends of liberty’ originated much of this material, but their efforts clearly inspired other concerned parties to pitch in.²⁰¹ There was no shortage of suitable copy. The burning alive of Portuguese Jesuit Malagrida and Parisian ne’er-do-well the Chevalier de la Barre served to illustrate Popish cruelty even against their own.²⁰² From Ireland came alarming rumours of priestly support for peasant ‘Whiteboy’ outrages.²⁰³ When Catholicism was repeatedly linked with treachery, cruelty, and superstition, simple accounts of numbers and initiatives in England could evoke dismay and fear.²⁰⁴ Catholics in Protestant lands really could not win. If they practised their religion openly, that was an outrage; if covertly, evidence that they had something to hide.²⁰⁵ Striving to defuse such paranoia, writers against anti-popery emphasized the divided state of international Catholicism, and deprecated the health and strength of its English branch.²⁰⁶ There was debate too over the historical record: were Catholics guilty of all their enemies charged them with, or had Protestant propagandists distorted history?²⁰⁷ Both the lurid tone of much of the anti-Catholic material and the existence of debate must have helped to maintain interest. Yet, by ²⁰¹ See Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 184–5, on the group who spearheaded the press campaign, focusing especially on the London Chronicle and the Monthly Review. ²⁰² K. Maxwell, Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995), 82–3; London Chronicle, 30 November–3 December 1765. The case of the Chevalier was taken up by Voltaire: see his ‘Relation de la mort de la chevalier de la Barre’, Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. L. Moland (52 vols, Paris, Garnier, 1877–85), xxv. For English press coverage of Voltaire’s involvement in the contemporaneous Calas case: London Chronicle, 30 March–2 April 1765. ²⁰³ London Chronicle, 1–3 April, 1–3 May, 5–7 June 1767; for background T. F. Power, Land, Society and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Tipperary (Oxford, 1993), 252–65. ²⁰⁴ See London Chronicle: on priests in ambassadorial chapels, 28 September–1 October 1765; on numbers of Catholics in London, 16–18 July 1767 (this may derive from the returns then in course of being collected); on Catholic schools, 12–15 April 1766 and 16–18 June 1767; on schools for English Catholics in France, 24–27 May 1766. ²⁰⁵ Payne displayed a classic paranoid mentality when (Cry Aloud, 23–4) he questioned the credibility of Catholic powers truly wishing to suppress the Jesuits: ‘Are not the Jesuits papists as well as others? . . . From whence . . . does this quarrel arise? Is it not rather a scheme, in order to strengthen the popish party now among us?’ See also O. Chadwick, The Popes and the European Revolution (Oxford, 1981), ch. 5. ²⁰⁶ For example, London Chronicle, 3–5 December 1765 (on the Portuguese inquisition as a mere instrument of state); 3–5 June 1766 (on Catholic schools in France); 6–9 June (on Jesuits). A Free Examination of the Common Methods employed to prevent the Growth of Popery, in which are pointed out their Defects and Errors, and the Advantages they give to Papists (London, 1766)—a collection of letters originally published in the Public Ledger —despite its title includes contributions from both sides. ²⁰⁷ See, for example, London Chronicle, 4–7 May, 29–31 October 1765; 1–3 May 1766; 14–17 February, 21–4 March, 25–8 April, 16–19 May et seq., 1767.

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the late 1760s, the printer of at least one paper had begun to refuse material, apparently fearing to weary the greater part of his audience with the obsessions of a minority.²⁰⁸ We have some evidence, and can venture further speculations, about the influences shaping Payne’s anti-Catholicism. Moving in the sort of Protestant milieu he did, he will almost certainly have been exposed to some anti-Catholic preaching.²⁰⁹ He also developed his prejudices through reading—as we know from the sources he cited in the anti-Catholic pamphlet he himself published in 1767: Cry Aloud and Spare Not: a Warning to all the Protestants of Great Britain. Disclaiming the skill to develop the case against Catholics in his own words, he relied largely on citing Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and reports of Catholic persecution in Poland, which he had read about in the press.²¹⁰ The chief burden of his pamphlet was that Catholicism was a persecuting religion. This was the point he would stress again in 1780—recall his assertion to magistrate George Reid: ‘our forefathers were persecuted and massacred by Papists’. Talk of Catholicism’s historic decline and current weakness in Britain probably did not cut much ice with him. He knew that it was a living presence in metropolitan culture. No doubt he will have known or known of Catholic merchants and tradesmen. There were Catholics among Payne’s ‘brother officers’ (he would indict one of them for keeping a ‘mass house’ in his home).²¹¹ He probably encountered Catholic building labourers and Catholic prostitutes. Perhaps more worrying to him, though, would have been the ways in which he would have observed Catholicism impinging on non-Catholics. Service and sermon-hopping were favourite Sunday pastimes for Londoners (there were not many permitted Sunday pastimes). Payne would have been well aware that many non-Catholics tried out Catholic services, notably at the chapel in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.²¹² ²⁰⁸ The printer of the Gazetteer, for which he was taken to task by Payne, Cry Aloud, 26–7. The printer of the Public Ledger, after allowing a long debate in his pages, apparently similarly cut it off: A Free Examination, introduction. The Robin Hood debating society, after hosting many such debates, in 1766 discontinued them, on the grounds that some found it offensive to have religious issues debated in a tavern: [Francis Gentleman], History of the Robinhood Society (London, 1764); London Evening Post, 6–8 November 1766. ²⁰⁹ Among others probably from Whitefield and Romaine. See their wartime diatribes: G. Whitefield, A Short Address to Persons of all Denominations, Occasioned by the Alarm of an Intended Invasion (London, 1756), and [Romaine], A Seasonable Antidote against Popery, in a Dialogue upon Justification (London, 1757). ²¹⁰ Cry Aloud. Payne drew heavily on one of the ephemeral productions of this period: England’s Bloody Tribunal, or an Antidote against Popery, compiled by the Rev. Matthew Taylor, currently selling in sixteen parts at sixpence each. Barnard, Challoner, 163, notes that anti-Catholic harangues were printed in cheap pamphlets and put in the hands of the people; Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was rummaged from end to end, and new editions printed. ²¹¹ London Chronicle, 26–8 October 1765. ²¹² Sylas Neville went with his Catholic landlady to hear mass in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (i.e. at the Sardinian chapel) in February 1769: The Diary of Sylas Neville, ed. B. Cozens-Hardy (Oxford, 1950), 63. The Catholic linen draper William Mawhood sampled a variety of other services: Quaker and Moravian (Diary 109); Unitarian (146); and Methodist (161).


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Nor was all Protestant curiosity about Catholicism idle. In the fluid world of experimental popular piety in which Payne moved, there were some who were drawn to the faith; some became converts. Payne mentions in his pamphlet that several he himself knew had ‘gone over to Popish superstition’.²¹³ Catholic priests in England were charged with making Protestant converts when they could.²¹⁴ To that extent, the case that they defensively made, for their own weakness, though not untrue, was disingenuous; though weak, they were interested in becoming stronger. We know from evidence later cited at trials that Payne began to attend and take notes on what transpired at Catholic services as early as the autumn of 1764. In at least one instance, he was accompanied by the recently appointed city marshal, Thomas Gates.²¹⁵ He continued such visits for at least five years.²¹⁶ In 1768, he stated at a trial that he had also ‘often been at the Ambassadors’ chapels, and heard them say mass there’.²¹⁷ That his presence, even in unofficial ‘mass houses’ did not apparently initially excite suspicion is the less surprising given the numbers present: Payne reported attendance of 1,000 at Moorfields; 600 at Virginia Street, Wapping.²¹⁸ It is also possible that he resorted to deliberate subterfuge. According to one contemporary Catholic writer, at some presumably early stage, Payne approached bishop Challoner and told him that he would like to be instructed in the faith, with a view to conversion.²¹⁹ In November 1765, both religious and civil authorities in London launched action against Catholics across a broad front. Richard Terrick, Anglican Bishop of London, sent to all the clergy of his diocese letters requiring them to ‘cause diligent search to be made after private mass houses’.²²⁰ City and other metropolitan constables launched a series of raids upon illegal mass houses. And, drawing on the evidence he and others had begun to collect a year before, Payne set in train the first of what was to be a series of prosecutions against individuals—his first ²¹³ Cry Aloud, 30. For one such experimenter: O. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (orig. 1794, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1995), 179. See also n. 257. For Protestant conversions a few decades earlier, E. Duffy, ‘Poor Protestant Flies’, in D. Baker ed., Religious Motivation (Studies in Church History, xv) (Oxford, 1978). ²¹⁴ In a generally not very optimistic report to the papal bureaucracy in 1773, the Catholic bishop in London, Richard Challoner, noted that, though conversions were rare outside London (partly because magistrates and parsons persecuted those who succeeded in making conversions), in London, the situation was a little better: ‘the priests labour strenuously and gather much fruit, especially in the conversion of many’. Burton, Challoner, ii, 162. ²¹⁵ OBP: February 1771, James Talbot (t17710220-81); Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, ii, 876–8. ²¹⁶ Le Sourd, Les Catholiques, i, 214, 219–20, sets out a list of Payne’s prosecutions derived from TNA: KB 10 (King’s Bench, oyer and terminer jurisdiction) and Corp. of London archives. For a Surrey case, n. 233. ²¹⁷ Barnard, Challoner, 174. ²¹⁸ OBP: February 1771, James Talbot (t17710220-81). ²¹⁹ Barnard, Challoner, 156–7. In his pamphlet, Payne quoted from a 1746 broadside containing the Pope’s case against heretics, and a Catholic devotional manual—material presumably acquired from one of London’s Catholic bookshops. ²²⁰ London Chronicle, 9–12 November 1765.

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targets being two laymen (a victualler, Thomas Hunt, and a bricklayer, George Thompson), both charged with the offence of hearing mass.²²¹ Initial reports of the effects of the raids were optimistic: they were said ‘already in a great measure [to have] had the desired effect, several [mass houses] being already shut up, and the Priests absconded to avoid a prosecution.’²²² In fact, the Popish hydra proved hard to behead. Chapels raided and shut down reopened and had to be raided again; priests escaped through back doors in disguise and lived to preach another day. Both raids and prosecutions would continue into the early 1770s—raids indeed continued more sporadically even later.²²³ Activity on this scale implies the involvement of City marshals, and, insofar as constables acted on the basis of warrants, of City and other metropolitan magistrates too. Bishop Terrick was plainly involved. All this is suggestive of the breadth of anti-Catholic feeling, stirred no doubt by recent developments, and inflamed by pulpit and press agitation. Given the extent of that agitation, and the continuing power of anti-Catholic sentiment in London (dramatically revealed again in the late 1770s, by the activities of the Protestant Association), there seems every reason to suppose that the campaign—at least in its optimistic early days—did enjoy broad metropolitan support, both from men in authority, and from many ordinary people. (Though certainly there were exceptions, again at all levels: Sir William Stephenson, lord mayor in the initial evidence-gathering period, is said thus to have tried to discourage activists, including Payne—at the price of having to compensate them for their trouble.²²⁴) To what extent Payne may have acted as agent for others, to what extent he was an initiator, is hard at this point to determine. He acted in a climate of excitement, and with a measure of official support. But it remains possible that he developed the plan of campaign, and then sought support for it. There were clearly parallels between Payne’s anti-popery and his anti-forestalling campaign, though no common backer is evident. In the case of butchers, Payne had acted alongside other informers; in the case of priests, he was ‘the informer’. His was the name that appeared, often alone, on all the indictments: at least thirty of them, entered, over a five-year period, in four metropolitan courts. Equally, in consequence, he was the man increasingly targeted by the campaign’s critics.²²⁵ ²²¹ Corp. of London archives: CLA/047/LJ/01/971 (City sessions files, December 1765); CLA/047/LJ/04/133 (City sessions minutes, December 1765–October 1766). See also London Chronicle, 21–3, 26–8 November 1765, and 25–7 February 1766. ²²² London Chronicle, 23–5 November 1765. ²²³ Raids recurred throughout the next few years: e.g. Burton, Challoner, ii, 88. Barnard, Challoner, 159–61 says persecution was maintained 1765–78 ‘though not always with the same relentless fury’. The fuss over the Quebec Act seems to have prompted further initiatives: Mawhood, Diary, 82; London Evening Post, 24 September 1774. Hunting priests must have become something of a game for law enforcement officers; according to the Midnight Spy (1772 edn, 75), Payne and his friends referred to Catholic priests with the ‘cant’ term ‘trouts’: cf. ‘lark’ for prostitute. ²²⁴ Barnard, Challoner, 157–8. ²²⁵ Horace Walpole portrayed Terrick as initiator of the campaign, but professed himself surprised, and clearly relied on the press for his information: Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of


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What could he have hoped to accomplish by this means? His critics at the time and since found it useful to simplify his motives. Often they harped on the theme of personal enrichment. On one notable occasion, Payne did secure a statutory reward of £100 (double the salary he would subsequently receive as a marshalman) for securing the conviction of an Irish Catholic priest, John Baptist Malony, for the offence of saying the Mass.²²⁶ Payne as we know was not a rich man, and no doubt this was welcome recompense for his time and trouble²²⁷—but here, as in other instances, his singular actions are not well explained by commonplace motives. Edmund Burke, recalling Payne’s campaign in a speech to the House of Commons in the wake of the Gordon Riots, imputed to him blind and ruthless partisanship: ‘Payne . . . he said, had gone about, trying to find out matter to incarcerate for life, men against whom no complaint was made for any offence, other than saying their prayers in a language which he did not understand, but they did.’²²⁸ Yet Burke’s aim was to discredit, not to explain. Payne’s anti-Catholicism had more in the way of rationale than Burke allowed. Catholicism, as he saw it, was a persecuting religion. This mattered because, contrary to law, it had carved out a place for itself in English society. Its adherents sought not just to maintain but to strengthen its position—and efforts to prevent them from doing so lacked strong leadership at the highest levels. The solution Payne developed was to try to use the law to stop the public practice and transmission of Catholicism. His tactics seem to have developed over time—partly perhaps as he learnt what approaches had what effects, partly as he tried to adapt to criticism. His first prosecution was (as we have seen) directed against two laymen for hearing the mass—but when the case came to trial the jury, having withdrawn for two hours, reported that they had failed to agree on a verdict; though a retrial was scheduled, Payne later agreed to let the matter drop.²²⁹ Meanwhile, several priests had been arrested and hauled George III (London, 1894), ii, 164; The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis (48 vols, New Haven, 1937–83), xxx, 209. Barnard blamed the devil, but reports him to have worked primarily through Payne; he credits Payne with having stirred up city authorities, and also with having drawn in Terrick: Challoner, 157. Payne may have known Terrick of old: he had preceded Romaine as lecturer at St Dunstan’s; in the early 1760s, Terrick supported Romaine in his struggle to retain his lecturership. (Cadogan, Life, 18). Payne himself wrote (in characteristically slightly fractured prose) that he had ‘as a true born Englishman, endeavoured to suppress the spreading of Popery . . . after several warnings from the magistrates, both in the city, &c, to shut up their places, and likewise from the Bishop of London. Finding nothing of the sort would do, I was determined to try what the Law would do; consequently I have indicted four of the emissaries of Rome . . .’. [Payne], Cry Aloud, 3. The fact that he does not say that he helped to evoke the initial warnings does not in my view preclude his also having had a hand in them. ²²⁶ On the conviction of Malony, for which see below. For payment of the reward, TNA: T 60/23 f. 40. ²²⁷ Not least legal costs. Payne, Cry Aloud, 3, claims that Catholics have tried to bribe him by offering to pay ‘all the expence I have been at’ if he would stop prosecuting. ²²⁸ Parliamentary History, xxi, 710. ²²⁹ On the first hearing, London Chronicle, 25–7 February 1766: ‘It is said no one has been tried for many years on the above statute’. At the retrial on 5 March, ‘by consent of the prosecutor’, the

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before magistrates. Pleas that they had not realized that in saying the mass they acted contrary to law sometimes earned them release—but also the warning that the law could not merely be ignored. Technical pleas and arguments that full evidence was wanting served to stave off conviction in other cases. In more than one case, Payne fell back on bargaining: offering to drop the prosecution if the defendant would enter into a bond to say the mass no more. In one case, against two priests in 1767, the offer was reportedly accepted, the defendants entering into a bond in the sum of £400. Payne recognized the potential power of the charge that his own proceedings made him ‘no better than a Catholic’—and stated that he hoped to convince ‘the Popish party of the difference between a Protestant and a papist’, by his generous and humane mode of proceeding.²³⁰ All such achievements were hard won. As the jury’s indecision in the Hunt and Thompson case suggests, public opinion was divided. Payne seems to have had trouble recruiting supporters as staunch as he. Witnesses who sensed that they faced a hostile court were inclined to mutter that they had in fact seen nothing very material.²³¹ Most defendants fought their ground. Civil-liberty-minded lawyers helped them to do so: a Catholic barrister later reported that the single office of Dyneley and Ashmall, attorneys of Gray’s Inn, had defended ‘more than twenty priests under such persecutions’, generally without fee.²³² But the great rock upon which the crusade most evidently came to grief lay elsewhere. As the reformation of manners campaign had done, and as the forestalling campaign would shortly do, Payne’s anti-Catholic campaign foundered on the hostility of the judiciary. Payne gained his most notable success—if we count a conviction as a success—in the summer of 1767, when John Baptist Malony was convicted at the Surrey Assizes under the statute of 1700 for exercising his function as a priest; in accordance with the terms of the statute, he was sentenced to imprisonment for life.²³³ Counsel for the prosecution in this instance was Sir Fletcher Norton, a defendants’ recognizances were respited sine die: Corp. of London archives: CLA/047/LJ/01/971 (City sessions files, December 1765); CLA/047/LJ/04/133 (City sessions minutes, December 1765–October 1766). This was one of very few instances in which Payne attempted to prosecute laymen (Le Sourd, Les Catholiques, 220, cites two further cases from December 1770). See also Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, ii, 879. ²³⁰ London Chronicle, 9–11 July 1767. (I think Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, ii, 872, is wrong to assume that the informer here was other than Payne.) Payne’s offers to treat in these terms were generally spurned; on one occasion, in 1771, when he tried to raise the option of a negotiated solution at the beginning of a trial, he was told by the judge that this was ‘not a proper thing to be proposed in court’. OBP: February 1771, James Talbot (t17710220-81). See also Cry Aloud, 24. Barnard, Challoner, 164, suggests that Payne made one such concession when he was found to have forged some subpoenas. He may have negotiated more readily when his position was weak, but Barnard’s story fails to account for repeated such offers over several years. ²³¹ See the cases in Mansfield’s trial notes and OBP: February 1771, James Talbot (t177 10220-81). ²³² Charles Butler, ‘Biographical Account of the Rt. Rev. Richard Challoner’, Catholic Spectator (1824), 316. ²³³ London Chronicle, 22–5 July 1767.


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coarse and avaricious lawyer who had served first as Solicitor and then as Attorney General to the Bute and Grenville administrations, in the early 1760s. Norton’s involvement raises again the question of what backing Payne may have had: how was Norton feed? Or could there have been career or public-interest reasons for him to agree to argue the case?²³⁴ Norton and Payne were aided in this instance by the fact that they were able to bring in evidence an avowal in Malony’s own handwriting of his priestly status.²³⁵ The outcome of this case underlines the political sensitivity of the Catholic issue. The 1700 statute was so framed that, once Malony had been convicted, the judges had no choice but to sentence him to life imprisonment. Only a royal pardon could revoke or mitigate the sentence. Shelburne, Secretary of State at the time, subsequently recalled that he and his colleagues had been ‘perfectly persuaded of the impolicy and inhumanity of the law’, but had been able to find no way out under it ‘nor dared the King himself to grant him a pardon’.²³⁶ By Shelburne’s own account, overcoming their qualms, he and his colleagues on the Privy Council had ‘ventured to give him his liberty at every hazard’. In this he claimed too much for himself and his embattled colleagues in the Chatham–Grafton administration. Malony was not in truth pardoned until June 1771, in the second year of North’s administration, and then only on condition that he left the kingdom.²³⁷ As Malony’s fate passed into the hands of the politicians, the judges put their heads together to decide how they could avoid such embarrassing outcomes in future. The fruit of this conference was an agreement that all henceforth would insist on so rigorous an interpretation of the law that convictions would be impossible to secure. Two points of the law in particular seemed to provide an opening for obstructive rigour. First, the provision that it was an offence for a priest to exercise his function. Henceforth, juries would be directed not to convict ²³⁴ Having lost office in 1765, Norton had since been angling to get back, and may have been attracted to the issue as one potentially embarrassing to government—though, as Speaker of the Commons in the late 70s and early 80s, he was more sympathetic than most MPs to the Protestant cause. For Norton see John Brooke’s biography in History of Parliament: House of Commons 1754–90, ed. L. Namier and J. Brooke (3 vols, London, 1985), iii, 214–17; J. Brooke, The Chatham Administration (London, 1956), 265–6. For his later stance: BL Add ms 42129 f. 30, where Gordon reports having gone to Norton in search of advice; also London Chronicle, 13–15 June 1780. ²³⁵ Barnard, Challoner, 178 (quoting from R v. Webb); also cited in J. Holliday, Life of William late Earl of Mansfield (London, 1797), 176–9. ²³⁶ Parliamentary History, xix, 1145. ²³⁷ At the time the Malony case broke, the Chatham administration had been six months in office, was suffering from Chatham’s prolonged absence and sharp divisions of opinion between remaining members; it had recently been defeated in the Commons on the Land Tax. Malony was apparently transferred from the New Gaol Southwark to the King’s Bench under the Chatham–Grafton administration (Barnard, Challoner, 164) and steps towards his release were initiated in Grafton’s final days ( TNA: HO 49/1, Law Officers’ Letter Book, Weymouth to the Attorney General, 18 June 1770) but the pardon was not issued until 19 June 1771: Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, ii, 870 n. 53.

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unless it could be authoritatively established that a defendant was an ordained priest. (The Catholic Church could be generally be counted upon not to supply the necessary evidence.) Second, the provision that it was an offence to say mass. Henceforth, juries would be directed not to convict unless they were sure beyond all reasonable doubt that it was indeed mass which had been said.²³⁸ In 1768, Counsellor Cox, speaking for the defence, and well apprised of the new canons of interpretation, was to suggest to the jury that the priest on trial, having noticed Payne in his congregation, might very well have left out a phrase or two from the order of service—in which case it was not the mass and no conviction would lie.²³⁹ In the face of a judicial bloc committed to this course of obstruction, Payne could not hope to prevail. Subsequent trials were to see him mocked and maligned by defence counsel and bench alike, confident that they had him cornered. Thus Mansfield in 1768: ‘this Payne is a very illiterate man; knows nothing of Latin, the language in which Mass is said; and moreover he is an Evidence in his own cause, because if Payne convicts him he is entitled to a Hundred pounds reward . . .’ Thus Counsellor Cox at the same trial: ‘Gentlemen of the Jury; you must have observed that the chief evidence against [the priest on trial] is this Payne, who has been all his life a common informer, who makes it his business to make people miserable . . . What can you think of such a man, who makes it his whole employment to go about from place to place; watching all opportunities to ruin his fellow creatures?’ Payne won no more convictions.²⁴⁰ What did Payne make of this? The only direct evidence comes from a phrase in his pamphlet of 1767, written—it would appear—before the Malony trial. Earlier trials had already made it clear to Payne that the bench would frustrate his efforts if they could, but the decisive struggle had yet to come. Payne adopted a heavily ironical tone, in which the challenging note was yet unmistakable: surely the judge cannot be a friend to Popery? he enquires. No honest man could take a salary from the government and at the same time encourage a principle which would dethrone the King and set up a Popish pretender.²⁴¹ PAY N E A N D T H E P ROT E S TA N T A S S O C I AT I O N Payne brought his last anti-popery case in 1771 (returning thereafter to his anti-forestalling efforts—to similarly unsatisfactory effect). The next few years ²³⁸ Barnard, Challoner, 168, 175 (quoting R v. Webb). Burke, in his Bristol Election speech, characterized the judges as ‘superseding . . . the strict rule of their artificial duty with the higher obligations of their conscience’: W. M. Elofson with J. Woods eds, Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (9 vols, Oxford, 1981–in progress), iii, 642. ²³⁹ Barnard, Challoner, 172. ²⁴⁰ Ibid., 176–7; Burton, Challoner, ii, 90 (quoting R v. Webb). A printed account of R v. Webb is apparently held at the Westminster Diocesan Archives. Lengthy sections are quoted by Barnard, Challoner, 166–81. ²⁴¹ Cry Aloud, 25.


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were relatively fallow ones for him. He mainly failed to secure appointments as an extra constable. Though he continued to act against pickpockets, only from 1775 did his involvement even in routine policing really pick up again and develop—climaxing in 1778 with his appointment as marshalman, and subsequent years of official service. The Catholic issue did not die—indeed it flared into life again in 1774, when Parliament reaffirmed its tolerant attitude towards Catholicism in Quebec, in one of the four so-called ‘intolerable acts’ that kick-started the final breakdown in the British-American relationship.²⁴² In October, a meeting of the liverymen of London (the citizen-group one step higher in status than Payne) condemned the general shape of the government’s American policy. The gentlemen, merchants, and traders of the City of London petitioned the King in the same month, lamenting the ‘deep wound to commerce’ inflicted by the collapse of harmony, and worrying about the government’s decision to ‘raise and discipline papists both in Ireland and Canada for the purpose of enforcing submission to laws, which your Majesty’s Protestant subjects in America conceive to be destructive of their liberties’.²⁴³ The political opposition exploited the issue for all they were worth. In some mouths, anti-popery rhetoric was probably tactical. But the theme was much aired in the City; undoubtedly in some hearts it struck a more resonant chord. In 1778, with war now in train, and recently widened by the entry of France as America’s ally, government and opposition came together to agree a positive gesture towards English Catholics. A mix of pragmatism and principle informed the move. There were practical reasons for wishing to reinforce native Catholic loyalties. From Scotland, Sir John Dalrymple argued that such concessions might aid efforts to raise Catholic troops in Scotland and Ireland. Principled pro-tolerationists, such as Mansfield and Burke, welcomed the chance to shift public policy. Waverers, such as opposition Whig Sir George Savile, who had headed opposition to the Quebec Act, were brought on side; Savile indeed was persuaded to introduce the bill.²⁴⁴ The concession agreed upon was the repeal of the statute under which Payne had chiefly proceeded: the act of 1700. In practice that statute was probably a dead letter. Payne’s efforts had shown that it could still be used in terrorem—but, as we have seen, the judges had done their best to nullify that use. Repealing it must have seemed the ideal symbolic gesture: all that was surrendered was a law ²⁴² Lawson, Imperial Challenge, ch. 7, and postscript; Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots, 59–67, 82–3. ²⁴³ The petition was printed in the London Evening Post, 14–17 October 1775. The original petition is at HLRO 55/7/3. Though signatories include two William Paynes, this was a more socially elevated group, and neither is my Payne. ²⁴⁴ R. K. Donovan, ‘The Military Origins of the Roman Catholic Relief Programme of 1778’, Historical Journal, xxviii (1985), 79–102; Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 236–9. Terrick absented himself.

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that much opinion anyway reprobated. Savile made the limits of the repeal bill plain: ‘he did not meddle with the vast body of that penal code, but selected that act on which he said most of the prosecutions had been formed, and which gave the greatest scope to the base views of . . . unprincipled informers’.²⁴⁵ Unfortunately, this carefully judged attempt to conciliate Catholics at minimal price achieved only partial success. English Catholic leaders welcomed the gesture, and hastened to take a new form of loyalty oath designed not to offend their religious sensibilities. In Catholic services, prayers for the monarch were newly phrased as prayers for the Hanoverian monarch. Possibly recruiting officers gained new heart. But in Scotland, evangelical clergy encouraged expressions of outrage against plans to extend the bill north of the border, and, in Edinburgh and Glasgow, riotous disorder and assaults on Catholic property ensued.²⁴⁶ In England also, a ‘Protestant Association’ formed to press for the repeal of the bill.²⁴⁷ In 1779, the Duke of Gordon’s impetuous younger brother, who had already distinguished himself in the Commons as an ardent critic of both government and the mainstream opposition, agreed to accept appointment as this Association’s president. Through late 1779 and early 1780, he chaired meetings of Associators, where he regaled his audience with endless snippets of information about the errors of popery and the proceedings of papists. Other leading Association members and committeemen included Calvinistic clerics Rowland Hill and Erasmus Middleton and Baptist minister John Rippon, along with various small merchants and businessmen.²⁴⁸ Among the rank and file, one passionate and pushy recruit was William Payne—with his son, William junior, now in his mid-twenties, generally in tow. The main object of the Association was to mobilize and demonstrate the scale of anti-Catholic opinion, notably by collecting signatures for petitions. In the preamble to the main, London petition, as ultimately drafted, it was argued that the act had been ‘suddenly introduced and . . . hastily passed before the Sense of ²⁴⁵ [Holcroft], Plain and Sufficient Narrative, 8. See in relation to another similarly obnoxious provision, Butler, Challoner, 317; Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 174. ²⁴⁶ R. K. Donovan, No Popery and Radicalism: Opposition to Roman Catholic Relief in Scotland 1778–82 (New York, 1987). ²⁴⁷ E. Black, The Association: British Extra-Parliamentary Political Organization (Cambridge, MA, 1963) remains the fullest account, though Black’s hostility to these ‘children of darkness’ blunts his curiosity. See also Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 207–12. As early as May 1779, William Mawhood reports being warned by his consistently sympathetic local parson that he had been sent a letter, a paper, and a book from Coachmakers’ Hall, possibly pointing to systematic canvassing of clerics: an early stage in the building of what would prove to be an impressive infrastructure (Mawhood, Diary, 138). For anti-Catholicism in City politics at this period, Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots, 156–8. But City politicians divided on this issue, and sympathizers at best played second fiddle to Gordon. ²⁴⁸ The committees’ names appear on the copy of the petition made in connection with Gordon’s subsequent trial: the only surviving copy. This can be seen at TNA: TS 11/389. I am grateful to John Seed for advice on the identity of committee members.


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the Nation could be obtained’. In other respects the preamble rehearsed familiar arguments. Popery was ‘by its nature intolerant’—and in a Protestant country, also seditious, encouraging disaffection from ‘the current reigning family’. The petitioners protested that they did not ‘desire to persecute the papists, but to preserve themselves and their posterity from a repetition of those rebellious and bloody scenes which popery under pretence of promoting the Interest of that Church has exhibited in these kingdoms’. Though advertised as making little difference, the recent act was said to have been taken by the papists to be a toleration—such that they had been encouraged to open mass houses and schools, to print popish books and publicly expose them to sale.²⁴⁹ As befitted an organization which related to its members primarily by staging public meetings for them, the Protestant Association was a metropolitan body, though it had sister societies in some provincial towns.²⁵⁰ Some metropolitan neighbourhoods may have had their own local associations,²⁵¹ and there were related tavern clubs, such as the ‘Cardinals or Antipapists’, meeting at the Coach and Horses, Water Lane, off Fleet Street.²⁵² When it came to enlisting signatures for the petition, the London associators proceeded vigorously. It seems likely that signatures were collected on a number of separate sheets, only subsequently linked together.²⁵³ Some signatures were collected by parish or chapel community, possibly in the church or chapel—thus in St Olave, Southwark; the Fitzroy Chapel, St Pancras; the meeting in Cannon Street, New Road.²⁵⁴ The common council of Queenhithe ward signed in a group.²⁵⁵ In some parts of the petition, several members of the same family, sometimes men and women both, signed one after another—perhaps in church or chapel, perhaps in the context of house-to-house canvassing. Other women perhaps signed as householders.²⁵⁶ However, most of the signatories were men.²⁵⁷ The women in ²⁴⁹ As above. Moorfields chapel was rebuilt around this time: William Mawhood first attended a service there in July 1778, though collections for the building had antedated the act (Mawhood, Diary, 117, 127). ²⁵⁰ Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 207–9. Seven petitions were sent in from a miscellaneous collection of provincial towns. For rioting in the provinces, Haydon, 213–18. ²⁵¹ Signatures on f. 118 of the petition are listed as those of ‘The Protestant Association, St Matthew Bethnal Green’. ²⁵² TNA TS 11/1130 (miscellaneous papers relating to the prosecution of Gordon rioters); information of John Hill, Mr Tyse. ²⁵³ I deduce this from the layout of the copy of the petition. ²⁵⁴ Erasmus Middleton, one-time curate of Romaine’s at St Anne’s Blackfriars and founder of the English Protestant Association, told Gordon that most of his parish would go in a body to the Fields. BL Add. ms. 42129, f. 10. ²⁵⁵ The alderman of this ward was the anti-Catholic Frederick Bull. ²⁵⁶ There is, for example, a cluster of women’s signatures around ff. 80–2. Collecting of signatures in vestries may have been standard practice: in 1765, signatures to a Westminster petition against the high price of provisions were collected in the vestries of the several parishes: London Chronicle, 3–5 April 1766. ²⁵⁷ Among these, at f. 69, was ‘Gustavus Vassa’, or Olaudah Equiano: at this time an affiliate of the Methodists’ Westminster Chapel, who in 1774 had considered converting to Catholicism: see n. 213.

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the Payne family did not sign, but William Paynes senior and junior signed one after another.²⁵⁸ The number of signatures collected was extremely impressive: probably about one in five adult male Londoners signed.²⁵⁹ There were almost no titled signatories, and little indication that many emanated from the haunts of the nobility and gentry: the West End. There were signatories from Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, but many seem to have come from the parts of Westminster adjacent to the City, from the City itself, the East End, and south of the river. A significant proportion of all middle-class men in these areas must have signed, along with others of lower status. No other petition of this period was signed by such a broad and deep range of ordinary Londoners.²⁶⁰ In this context it is not surprising to find that questions about popery and papists were frequently canvassed at the debating societies which flourished in this era—some of them especially inclined to air religious issues because they met on Sundays. The merits of the Protestant petition were opened to discussion—revealing, as one would expect, that opinion was divided. But at several such discussions, the petition was backed by a majority: thus, the Pantheon Society supported the Associators; the Westminster Forum resolved that it was not ‘agreeable to the maxims of sound policy for any Protestant Government to tolerate Popery’ and that the bishops were wrong to refuse to support the Association. (They also voted that the ecclesiastical establishment stood more in need of reform than either the civil or the military.²⁶¹) There were debates both among the Association’s committee and among the body of its members as to when and how the petition should be presented. Many members thought that the petitioners should ‘go up with’ their petition, but some of the committee got cold feet, and urged that the petition be held over for the next session, or that, if it was to be presented, this should be by a small group only. Gordon was unimpressed by this pusillanimity and, after a long debate in committee, took the issue out of the committee room to the now restless membership. Here, as he recalled later, ‘Mr Payne and ²⁵⁸ f. 60. ²⁵⁹ Gordon estimated the total at 45,000 (BL Add. ms. 42129, f. 6)—which seems plausible from the surviving copy. Signatories included, according to Gordon (f. 20), many magistrates, and ‘almost all the creditable constables’—suggesting a deliberate effort to base support in metropolitan authority structures. Petitions from Rochester and Newcastle were also supported by large numbers of signatures: Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 208. ²⁶⁰ By way of comparison, the Wilkite petitions of 1769 garnered some 5,000 signatures from Westminster, 1,500 from Middlesex; the petition that issued from a meeting of the City livery was signed only by the Lord Mayor. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, 109–10, 117. These lower figures do not necessarily indicate less popular support—perhaps rather different signature-collecting tactics. ²⁶¹ London Debating Societies, 71, 86. By contrast, in 1778, the societies had generally favoured toleration—34, 39–40—perhaps reflecting the effectiveness of Protestant Association propaganda in shaping opinion. In the wake of the riots, Sabbatarian legislation banned Sunday debating: Parliamentary History, xxii, 262–90; 21 Geo. III c.49. Samuel Romilly (Life (3 vols, London, 1940), i, 123) avers that the chief purpose was to suppress religious debating societies.


337

his son and connections were the most active people’ favouring the plan for a mass rendezvous, but ‘a kind of buzz . . . thro’ the whole people’ suggested more general support.²⁶² There was in fact still on the books a statute from the Restoration era banning mass petitioning—but that had not recently been invoked, and, according to Gordon, he was not aware of its existence at this time, nor did anyone present express doubts about the legality of the proposed proceedings. ‘Mr Paine the constable’, he suggested later, could name a hundred or so who could bear witness to the character of what passed. Gordon suggested that the Associators, who were to gather in St George’s Fields, to the south of Westminster Bridge, should organize themselves into four divisions, so that fellow marchers would be more likely to know one another and would thus be able to identify and expel troublemakers. Signatories should dress in ‘sabbath day cloaths’ and purchase blue cockades, by this expenditure demonstrating ‘a becoming earnestness’. After the meeting, Gordon and Payne chatted further about how best to maintain order. Payne explained that he could not bring his constable’s staff, since his authority did not extend to Surrey, but said that he would certainly be present.²⁶³ In the event, the crowds and confusion were rather worse than Gordon had anticipated.²⁶⁴ When the marchers finally reached the Commons, magistrates and constables were summoned to control them, but found the numbers hard to handle. Soldiers were then called out. Numerous MPs took exception to the Associators’ show of force—the more so because Gordon attempted to exploit their presence to argue for immediate consideration of the petition, lest delay anger the people. Some MPs told him that he should be sent to the Tower. The Commons nonetheless prudently refused to discuss the petition forthwith, and adjourned for a long weekend: Monday was the King’s birthday, when Parliament would not sit. Against this background of unresolved tension, the situation first slowly, then rapidly degenerated. That evening and the weekend saw attacks on the ambassadors’ chapels (according to Gordon, arising in the first instance from an official search for smuggled goods, which uncovered an abundance of tea and lace, which were then burnt in the street). Hostile crowds hung around the mass house in Moorfields, straining against the efforts of the marshals and their men ²⁶² BL Add. ms 42129: Gordon’s narrative of proceedings, ff. 4–8. Also State Trials, xxi, 568. According to Erasmus Middleton (567), many hundreds attended the meeting: he thought that Coachmakers Hall held about 1,000, but numbers were such that many were left outside. ²⁶³ The doggerel Third Book of the Chronicles of London for 1780 (London, 1781) suggests that not merely Payne but ‘Payneites’ joined the crowds in the Fields: in its mock-Biblical catalogue, ‘the Wilkites and the Joiceites, the Giffardites and the Payneites joined the congregation according to their families’. Giffardites were possibly followers of the Baptist minister Andrew Gifford. I have not established who ‘Joiceites’ may have been. I owe this reference to Nick Rogers. ²⁶⁴ See n. 1 above for accounts of the riots. Among recent interpreters, Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 213–44, and N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998), ch. 5, stress the rioters’ religious programme; Linebaugh, London Hanged, ch. 10, suggests other motivations.

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to contain them.²⁶⁵ There were attacks on the houses of some Catholics and law enforcement officers. Rumours began to circulate that the papists planned to assassinate Gordon; Gordon’s servants heard the story from ‘all the chairmen in the White Hart’, and Gordon was personally warned by a grocer ‘in a very religious discourse’. Horse guards patrolled the West End—but the situation continued to deteriorate. On Monday morning before 7 a.m. a ‘riotous mob’ knocked violently on Gordon’s door and held a shouted exchange with him, before going off towards Marylebone ‘carrying something like a sideboard; most had pieces of wood in their hair’.²⁶⁶ Tuesday—the day when magistrate George Reid later recalled having seen Payne, shouting and passionate, in the crowd outside Parliament—was the day when tempers exploded. By the afternoon, Parliament had come out against the petition, and resolved not to meet again for another ten days. No assurances as to the fate of people arrested during the past few days’ disturbances had been forthcoming. From Old Palace Yard, the crowd passed to Newgate, and battered and burnt its way into the prison. The next day, more prisons were attacked and broken open, Sir John Fielding’s house, Lord Mansfield’s house, and Lord North’s house were attacked, an assault was finally made upon a great Catholic-owned distillery in Holborn, around which crowds had hovered for several days, the tollhouses on Blackfriars bridge were burnt down, and an assault was made on the Bank. It was at this point that City magistrates began a series of crisis sessions, while householders in several London parishes, following the example of a Fleet Street tavern keeper, formed voluntary associations for their own defence. And it was at this point that the King, impatient especially with City magistrates’ failure to control the situation, gave the order to send in troops. These were difficult times for many generally law-abiding Londoners. As Burke, in the immediate aftermath of the troubles, not insensitively read the situation ‘a very great part of the lower & some of the middling people of this City’ were in ‘a very critical disposition . . . In general, they rather approve than blame the Rioters; though the better sort of them are afraid of the consequences of the very principles, which they approve.’²⁶⁷ Both Gordon and the City authorities urged the government to end the troubles by repealing the offending act, in effect endorsing the rioters’ cause (insofar as they had a cause) even while distancing themselves from their means.²⁶⁸ Officially, the Associators deprecated the riots—and more readily did so as they persisted and became ²⁶⁵ There were conflicting reports at the time as to exactly how much damage was done to Catholic chapels on the first Saturday: BL Add. ms. 42129, f. 26. ²⁶⁶ BL Add. ms 42129 ff. 26–33 for Gordon’s interesting account of this period of rumour and uncertainty. ²⁶⁷ Quoted in Black, Association, 167. ²⁶⁸ For City proceedings, Corp. of London archives: COL/CC/01/01/066 ( Journals of Common Council, January 1780–April 1783), f. 60ff., esp. ff. 66v–67.


339

more indiscriminate. On Thursday, according to Horace Walpole, members of the Association fell upon rioters in St George’s Fields.²⁶⁹ Those on the law-enforcement front line could repel rioters with more or less zeal—but they had to make choices. In practice, those who had earlier helped to enforce the law upon Catholics now made differing choices. Thomas Gates, City marshal, had gone with Payne to hear mass at the chapel in Moorfields in 1765. In 1780, he defended this same chapel against the mob—supervising the defence which kept it intact for two days, before, on the third evening, his forces were overwhelmed. By contrast, John Bradley, marshalman, refused to answer Gates’ call for aid on the critical third evening. He is reported to have said ‘that he would not come to protect any such Popish rascals’.²⁷⁰ Confronted with this story at the City’s own post mortem on the riots, he conceded that he had said this. He was suspended from his post (as the House of Commons was informed) but shortly afterwards reinstated (which it was not).²⁷¹ What of Payne? After Tuesday, tantalizingly, he disappears from the record, not to surface until the end of the month, when the embers were cold. It is hard to know what to make of this. As we saw from the questioning reported in the opening pages of this chapter, the Privy Council were curious about his activities: had they found evidence that he had breached the laws, it is hard to imagine that he would have been left unprosecuted. Unlike Bradley, he was not reprimanded by the City—so perhaps he did his duty at Moorfields. The City magistrates’ book covering the western half of the City, his usual stamping ground, does not survive; no significance can be attached to his absence from the roster of arresting officers in the eastern book. Unlike Gates, his brother, and another marshalman, Thomas Linton, he gave no evidence against rioters at subsequent major trials—but nor did several other marshalmen. More striking in his absence from the next western City magistrates’ book until the last week of July—for Payne to make no arrests in several weeks was exceptional.²⁷² Was he injured? Ill? Tactically incapacitated? We cannot say. He did briefly raise his head late in June. On 27 June, he composed a letter to the mayor, putting forward a plan for recapturing criminals who had gained their liberty when the rioters broke open the prisons. (Of course, by this time the dust ²⁶⁹ Burton, Challoner, ii, 260–1. ²⁷⁰ OBP: June 1780, Theophilus Brown (t17800628-110). For proceedings at Moorfields see also A Narrative of the Proceedings of Lord George Gordon (London, 1780), 22; Corp. of London archives: COL/AC/006 (Alchin papers, Box F/77), item 1, ff. 1–11, and Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, ii, 1030–6. Bradley also said that he would not go to protect any Popish priest ‘for he had taken the oaths of allegiance, abjuration and supremacy as a constable’. See similar statements in De Castro, Gordon Riots, 44. ²⁷¹ The Court of Aldermen may not have been well placed to dismiss Bradley in 1780: in April 1778 he was still in course of suing Alderman Brass Crosby for the sum he had spent purchasing his place as marshalman: Corp. of London archives: COL/CC/CLC/04/064 (Common Council papers, August 1777–September 1778), 10 April 1778. ²⁷² Corp. of London archives: CLA/005/01/009 (Guildhall justice room minute book, 28 June–26 July 1780). The first arrest by Payne recorded in this book was on 26 July.

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had settled, and one would scarcely expect him to be taking any other stance.) The plan is a heavy-handed one. Attributed to ‘a friend’ it is nonetheless characteristic in its exuberant willingness to deploy coercive power against disorderly elements. ‘To wit’, as Payne says, ‘Let all the Peace Officers commanded by the City Marshalls, Assisted by the Military Gentlemen [the City Militia] . . . block up every suspected Street or Ally at a Certain hour, I would propose by 6 o’clock in the Morning before the Vilains are Rouzed from their nests then search every house of ill Fame from Temple Bar to Whitechappel Barrs, & in every Quarter at the same hour, then secure every suspected Person both men & women, & upon examination a great number of bad fellows will no doubt be found out.’²⁷³

PAY N E A N D I N F E R I O R P O L I T I C S For all the tantalizing gaps, Payne’s career is extraordinarily well documented, for someone of his station. This owes much to his thrusting self-confidence, but much too to the line of work into which he channelled so much energy: the records of the City of London, and of London law courts are (as non-personal records go) notably rich and informative. The value of this material derives both from Payne’s ordinariness and from his extraordinariness. All his causes were controversial. But they were also all congenial to many middle-class Londoners: merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Payne’s extraordinarily vigorous career brings vividly to our attention a set of concerns that loomed large in the minds of many men like him: the dissoluteness of the times; the problem of disorderly street life; the anxiety and suspicion induced by rises in food prices; the luridly imagined horrors of popery. We might imagine eighteenth-century life as presenting a kind of imaginative landscape that people viewed from different heights, according to their social station. Of course, at every height, there were also a variety of things upon which one might focus. At Payne’s level, the concerns of those aroused by constitutional and mainstream political issues—of petty bourgeois radicals—are perhaps most familiar to us, made so by the creative work of several generations of historians.²⁷⁴ A study of Payne’s life and preoccupations may help us to think more broadly than we have heretofore about other features of this landscape, observed from his level—at the same time that it enriches our understanding of the variety of points of view from which the scene might be surveyed. ²⁷³ Corp. of London archives: COL/AC/008 (Alchin papers Box 17/118), no. 8—reference from CLRO archivist. ²⁷⁴ Most studies of the activism of middling men have focused on their support for oppositional/radical politics. See, for example, L Sutherland, The City of London and Opposition to government 1768–74 (Creighton lecture, 1958); Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty; J. Brewer, ‘English Radicalism in the Age of George III’, in J. G. A. Pocock ed., Three British Revolutions (Princeton, 1980), and, an especially thorough study for a slightly earlier period: Rogers, Whigs and Cities, Parts I and II.


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Again familiar from political studies, but now visible in a fresh light are aspects of the milieu in which Payne’s views were formed. He inhabited a by-now familiar world of newspaper-reading, society-joining, parochially and to some extent civically active small tradesmen. But those structures, it must be clear, supported diverse subcultures. In Payne’s case, the vital importance of religious structures—of religious lectures and meetings—is self-evident (even if we know less about the detail of his experiences of this genre than we might like). The importance of religious experience and culture in the formation of people’s outlooks has been emphasized by some historians of this period. Payne provides us with an instance of someone whose life was clearly motivated and shaped by his own brand of religion. Of interest third, and especially in the context of this book, is the record of Payne’s attempts to act upon his world—and their fruits. Payne exploited the opportunities open to him to promote his various causes with extraordinary energy, and—insofar as his dour, contracted spirit allowed—panache. But his opportunities were limited by the kind of person he was. As we trace his career, we gain a clearer understanding of the nature and limits of those opportunities. The limits were wider than we might suppose. Payne exploited to the full the opportunities laid open by the relatively open and participatory system of petty office-holding, and by a legal tradition which made citizen-initiated litigation one among other instruments of public policy. He proved able to do things we might not expect a small master carpenter to have been able to do: he wrote and published pamphlets; gained coverage of his deeds in the national press; gave evidence to parliamentary committees; organized interviews with bishops; collaborated with top lawyers; and swayed the policy of societies whose committees were composed of citizens considerably more solid than he by virtue of his standing with the rank and file. Yet in the end he was thwarted, time and again, when men of other minds and higher rank proved able to rally the judicial and parliamentary establishment against him. In that context his social status was debilitating, exposing him to mockery and denigration. He was not reprobated by all: his causes usually won sympathy from some of higher rank; had that not been so, he would not have got as far as he did. Elite opinion was often divided, and its balance contingent. Ultimately, it was that contingency, which he could influence only at best indirectly, that determined his causes’ fate.


Index of bills and acts Statute/failed bill ref

Short title

Page nos

Before 1660 5&6 Ed. VI c.14 5 Eliz c.12

Against regrators, forestallers and engrossers Touching badgers of corn and drovers of cattle

309 309

14 Feb. 1670–22 April 1671 22&23 Chas. II c.19 To prevent frauds in buying and selling of cattle 22&23 Chas. II c.20 Relief and release of prisoners for debt

309 253

4 Feb. 1673–29 March 1673 25 Chas. II 4 Repeal of clause relating to salesmen

309

6 Dec. 1698–4 May 1699 10 Wm. III c.12

28

Better apprehending of felons

16 Nov. 1699–11 April 1700 11 Wm. III c.4 Further preventing growth of popery 11 Wm. III c.18 More effectual punishment of vagrants 11 Wm. III c.19 To enable JPs to build gaols

321, 333–4 30, 64 95–6, 97

24 Oct. 1704–14 March 1705 40.002 Better relief of poor

91

3 Dec. 1706–8 April 1707 6 Ann c.9

29

Repeal of clause in act for better apprehending felons

16 Nov. 1708–21 April 1709 7 Ann c.5 Naturalising foreign protestants, ‘General naturalisation act’ 7 Ann c.6 To explain an act concerning buying of cattle in Smithfield 7 Ann c.17 Making more effectual act for preventing mischiefs by fire, ‘Building act’ 7 Dec. 1711–8 July 1712 10 Ann c.9 Repeal of act for naturalising foreign protestants 9 April 1713–16 July 1713 49.003 Preventing duelling 20 Feb. 1717–15 July 1717 3 Geo. I c.5

Continuing duty on ale and beer within city of Edinburgh 21 Nov. 1717–21 March 1718 6 Geo. I c.18 Better securing certain powers and restraining extravagant and unwarrantable practices, ‘Bubble act’ 6 Geo. I c.23 Further preventing robbery and more effectual transportation of felons, ‘Transportation act’

100 n. 58 309 307 n. 123

100 n. 58

36 102

93 29, 34

344 9 Oct. 1722–27 May 1723 9 Geo. I c.7 9 Geo. I c.28

Index of bills and acts Amending law relating to settlement, imployment and relief of poor, ‘Workhouse act’ More effectual execution of justice in a pretended privileged place called the Mint

12 Nov. 1724–31 May 1725 11 Geo. I c.22 To prevent violence by any persons under pretence of sheltering themselves for debt 11 Geo. I c.28 Better regulating buildings and to prevent mischief by fire, ‘Building act’ 21 Jan. 1729–14 May 1729 2 Geo. II c.22 Relief of debtors with respect to imprisonment 17 Jan. 1734–16 April 1734 7 Geo. II c.21 More effectual punishment of assaults with intent to commit robbery 1 Feb. 1737–21 June 1737 10 Geo. II c.28 To explain and amend an act relating to rogues and vagabonds, ‘Stage Licensing act’ 1 Feb. 1739–14 June 1739 12 Geo. II c.29 More easy assessing of county rates 15 Nov. 1739–29 April 1740 13 Geo. II c.18 s7 To continue several laws, ‘Hodge podge act’ 13 Geo. II c.24 Amending laws relating to rogues, vagabonds etc, ‘Vagrancy act’ 10 Nov. 1747–13 May 1748 86.003 Naturalising foreign protestants 29 Nov.1748–13 June 1749 22 Geo. II c.47 More easy and speedy recovery of small debts, Southwark 14 Nov. 1751–26 March 1752 25 Geo. II c.30 Regulating the commencement of the year, ‘Calendar act’ 25 Geo. II c.36 Better preventing thefts and robberies, ‘Disorderly Houses act’ 11 Jan. 1753–7 June 1753 91.018 91.023

Establishing a census Encouraging industry

30 29

29 307 n. 123

29, 253 41

88, 93

32, 87, 91 91–2 71

100 n. 58 95 n.45

133 98 n.51, 295 n. 65, 307 n. 123 138–9 133

15 Nov. 1753–6 April 1754 92.001 Naturalising Jews, ‘Jew bill’

35

1 Dec. 1757–20 June 1758 31 Geo. II c.40

309 n. 134

97.033

To ascertain weight of straw and restrain salesmen of cattle Obliging all parishes to keep proper registers of births, deaths and marriages

23 Nov. 1758–2 June 1759 32 Geo. II c.28 Relief of debtors with respect to imprisonment

139 n. 118

253

Index of bills and acts 3 Nov. 1761–2 June 1762 102.026 10 Jan. 1765–25 May 1765 missing from Hoppit list 17 Dec. 1765–6 June 1766 6 Geo. III c.43 11 Nov. 1766–2 July 1767 107.33

Regulation of the butchers of London

320

Repeal part of an act for buying and selling cattle in Smithfield

309

To explain and amend acts for the amendment of public highways and turnpike roads

100–1

High price of provisions (forestalling corn)

317

24 Nov. 1767–10 March 1768 8 Geo. III c.10 To enable His Majesty to license a playhouse, Bath 21 Jan. 1772–9 June 1772 12 Geo. III c.71 To repeal several laws against badgers, engrossers, forestallers and regraters 26 Nov. 1772–1 July 1773 13 Geo. III c.78 To explain, amend and reduce into one act statutes for public highways 13 Geo. III c.84 To explain, amend and reduce into one act general laws for regulating turnpike roads 13 Jan. 1774–22 June 1774 14 Geo. III c.20 Relief of prisoners acquitted respecting fees 14 Geo. III c.78 Further and better regulation of buildings, ‘Building act’ 14 Geo. III c.83 For the government of the province of Quebec, ‘Quebec act’ 29 Nov. 1774–26 May 1775 15 Geo. III c.32 To repeal an act against erecting cottages 13 Oct. 1776–6 June 1777 17 Geo. III c.54

345

93 n. 41

309, 317

101 n. 62 101

87 n. 19 289 n. 38, 307 n. 123 328 n. 223, 333 37

Defraying the expence of a new gaol and shire hall, Westmorland

96 n. 47

Relieving HM subjects professing the Popish religion from certain penalties, ‘Catholic Relief act’

183, 279, 333–4

Preventing certain abuses and profanations on the Lord’s Day

336 n. 261

99

123.037

Better relief and employment of the poor, ‘Gilbert’s act’ Game laws

5 Dec. 1782–16 July 1783 124.048 124.049

Persons found with housebreaking instruments Receiving stolen goods, stealing jewels

34, 63 34, 63

20 Nov. 1777–3 June 1778 18 Geo. III c.60

27 Nov. 1781–1 July 1782 21 Geo. III c.49 27 Nov. 1781–1 July 1782 22 Geo. III c.83

36

346

Index of bills and acts

18 May 1784–20 Aug. 1784 24 Geo. III s2 c.54 To explain and amend an act enabling JPs to build and repair gaols 25 Jan. 1785–2 Aug. 1785 25 Geo. III c.45 Reducing the time for the imprisonment of debtors in London, Middlesex and Southwark 127.001 Prevention of crime in London, ‘Middlesex Justices bill’ 24 Jan. 1786–11 July 1786 26 Geo. III c.38 Regulating the time of the imprisonment of debtors imprisoned by courts for the recovery of small debts 128.053 Regulating disposal of bodies of criminals 23 Jan. 1787–30 May 1787 27 Geo. III c.44 Preventing frivolous and vexatious suits in ecclesiastical courts 15 Nov. 1787–11 July 1788 28 Geo. III c.30 Enabling JPs to licence theatrical representations occasionally, ‘Eighty day act’ 21 Jan. 1790–10 June 1790 30 Geo. III c.38 Repealing duties upon licences for retailing wine and sweets 25 Nov. 1790–10 June 1791 31 Geo. III c.28 Making compensation to the officers of the late wine office 31 Geo. III c.46 Better regulating of gaols 31 Jan. 1792–15 June 1792 32 Geo. III c.45 Explaining and amending an act relating to rogues and vagabonds 32 Geo. III c.53 More effectual administration of the office of JP in parts of Middlesex and Surrey, ‘Middlesex Justices Act’ 32 Geo. III, c.57 Further regulation of parish apprentices 32 Geo. III, c.59 Amending so much of two acts as relates to the licensing of alehouse keepers 13 Dec. 1792–21 June 1793 33 Geo. III c.54 Encouragement and relief of friendly societies, ‘Rose’s act’ 33 Geo. III c.55 Authorising JPs to impose fines on peace or parish officers and masters of apprentices 21 Jan. 1794–11 July 1794 34 Geo. III c.61 Better observation of Lord’s Day by bakers 30 Dec. 1794–27 June 1795 35 Geo. III c.123 More easy and expeditious recovery of small debts in Scotland 29 Oct. 1795–19 May 1796 36 Geo. III c.23 Amending so much of act of 9 Geo 1 as prevents the distributing occasional relief to poor persons in their own houses

97

101, 104 n. 73 5, 68, 189

101 34 198 n. 62

98

209–10

209–10 45, 208 45, 71, 208 68, 209 209–10 209–10

161, 170 n. 233 209–10

209 102

170 n. 233

Index of bills and acts 27 Sept. 1796–20 July 1797 139.018 Poor, better support and maintenance 2 Nov. 1797–29 June 1798 38 Geo. III c.76 After 1800 58 Geo. III c.45 11 Geo. IV & 1 Wm. IV c.27 1&2 Wm. IV c.60 3&4 Wm. IV c.46 3&4 Wm. IV c.90 4&5 Wm. IV c.76 5&6 Wm. IV c.76 7&8 Vict c.91 8&9 Vict c.83 9&10 Vict c.95 21&22 Vict c.97

347 33, 158 n. 186

Better protection of trade, ‘Convoy act’

156

Building additional churches in populous parishes To make provision for lighting and watching of parishes For the better regulation of vestries, ‘Hobhouse’s act’ To enable burghs in Scotland to establish a general system of police, ‘Burgh Police act’ To repeal an act for the lighting and watching of parishes and to make other provisions Amendment and better administration of laws relating to the poor, ‘New Poor Law’ Regulation of municipal corporations in England and Wales, ‘Municipal corporations act’ To consolidate and amend laws relating to turnpike trusts in South Wales, ‘South Wales county Road Board Act’ Amendment and better administration of laws relating to the poor in Scotland For the more easy recovery of small debts and demands, ‘County Courts act’ Vesting in the Privy Council certain powers for the protection of the public health, ‘Public Health act’

92 n.37 99 99 n. 58 85 n. 12 99 85 85 85 85 n. 12 85 104–5

Notes. Sessional dates supplied for bills and acts 1660–1800 derive from the Lords Journals (old style dates used before 1753, except that the year is always treated as beginning on 1 Jan). Titles of acts abbreviated from Statutes of the Realm ed. Owen Ruffhead and continuators Statute numbers from HMSO Chronological Table of the Statutes (London, 1975), which also contains a table setting out variances between official ‘Statutes of the Realm’ and Ruffhead’s numeration. Failed bill titles abbreviated from Hoppit ed., Failed Legislation (London, 1997), as also reference nos.


General Index Achenwall, Gottfried (1719–72) 167 acts see clauses acts; legislation; local acts; permissive acts; private acts; public acts Addington, Henry (1757–1844) 205 adultery see legislation relating to Agriculture, Board of 33, 37, 143, 146, 166 n. 217, 170 aldermen, specific actions 189, 198, 200, 201, 294, 302 America 136, 149, 151 American independence, war of (1776–83) and social problems 5, 14, 34, 64, 65 n. 36, 68, 70, 73, 158, 181–7 other effects 83, 110, 333 Anderson, Adam (c.1692–1765) 143–4 Anderson, James (1739–1808) 147 Andrews, J.P. (c.1737–97) 201 n. 73, 204 n. 83 Annals of Agriculture 152, 154, 158, 168 Anne, Queen (1665–1714) 191, 197 Annexed Estates, Commissioners of (Scotland) 58, 72, 147 n. 142 annuities 135, 148 n. 143, 151 anti-slave-trade campaign 17, 171, 192, 194 n. 44, 199 n. 65, 212 n. 113 antiquarians see economic antiquarians; information collected by apprenticeship 195, 21, 220 n. 132, 281 n. 6, 283, 286 see also legislation relating to Arbuthnot, John (c.1667–1735) 126, 129 archbishop of Canterbury see Canterbury, diocese; Moore, John; Secker, Thomas archbishop of York see Markham, William Archenholz, Johann Wilhelm (1743–1812) 299 armed forces 51, 52, 61, 62, 164–5 mobilisation and demobilisation, effects 62–74 see also militia Assizes see circuit judges Association movement 174, 182, 184, 188, 197 n. 58 Atkyns, Sir Robert (c.1647–1711) 126, 135 Attorney General see law officers Austria see Habsburg lands Austrian succession, war of (1739–48), effects 69, 128, 292

backbenchers, role 23, 36–7, 38, 40, 45, 103–4 Bacon, Francis (Baron Verulam) (1561–1626) 113–16 bailiffs 233, 252, 305 balance of trade see information relating to Barnard, Sir John (c.1685–1764) 104 Barrington, George (1755–1804) 279, 306 Barrington, Shute (1734–1826) 192, 204 Bartholomew Fair 302–3, 307 n. 124 Bayes, Thomas (c.1701–61) 151 n. 156 Bayley, Thomas Butterworth (1744–1802) 163, 191 n. 35, 201 n. 73, 208 Beauchamp, 1st Earl (William Lygon) (1747–1816) 40, 103 n. 73 Beattie, John 6, 28 Beaufoy, Henry (1750–95) 200 Bedfordshire 87, 137, 161 Beeke, Henry (1751–1837) 109, 112, 156 Beevor, Sir Thomas, 1st Bt. (1726–1814) 196, 207–8, 217 beggars 165, 283, 306 n. 121 Bell Yard, Temple Bar 281–2, 291, 292, 297 Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832) 112 n. 8, 159, 162 Berkshire 160, 170 bills see legislation bills of mortality (as reports) 118, 131, 137–9, 151, 153 bishops and reformation of manners 191, 196, 197, 199, 202 see also Barrington, Shute; Butler, John; Challoner, Richard (Catholic bishop); Fleetwood, William; Gibson, Edmund; Porteus, Beilby; Terrick, Richard; Wake, William black people see anti-slave trade campaign; information relating to slavery, slave trade black persons, distressed 60 Black, William (1750–1829) 165 n. 215 Blake, William (1757–1827) 170 blasphemy 39, 191, 212, 225, 294 Board see Agriculture, board of; Fisheries and Manufactures, board of (Scotland); Trade, board of

350

General Index

Boate, Arnold (1606–53) 125 n. 50 Boddington, Thomas (1736–1821) 191 n. 33 boroughs, powers 86, 94, 98 n. 51, 319 Boscawen, Hugh (c.1680–1734) 97 n. 49 Bow Street see Fielding, Henry; Fielding, Sir John; runners Bowdler, Thomas (1746–1823) 204 n. 83, 207 n. 92 Boyle lectures 126 Bradley, John (fl. 1770–80) 307, 339 Brakenridge, William (d. 1762) 137 branding 28–9 Brewer, John 2, 7 n. 18, 11, 47, 48 Bridewell, London 115, 295 bridewells see correction, houses of Brighton, Sussex 98 Bristol 224 Britain, how figures in this book 9 British Merchant 127, 132 n. 85, 86 Brockholes, William (fl. 1770s–) 306 brothels 292, 294, 295, 298, 300, 302, 306 see also prostitution Brothers, Richard (1757–1824) 225 Brotherton, Thomas (c.1656–1702) 97 n. 49 Brown, Ford K. 194 Browne, Sir Thomas (1605–82) 122 Buckinghamshire 32 buggery see homosexual activity building regulation see legislation relating to bull-baiting 214, 225 bull-running 201 n. 70, 225 Burdett, Sir Francis, 5th Bt. (1770–1844) 225 burghs, Scottish 102 Burghs, Royal, Convention of see Convention Burgh, James (1714–75) 174, 316–17 Burke, Edmund (1730–97) 145 n. 131, 317, 323, 329, 332 n. 238, 333, 338 business and merchants as members of Proclamation Society 199, 202, 214, 217 see also collection of information by butchers 297, 309–21 Butler, John (1717–1802) 166 Byerly, Robert (c.1660–1714) 97 n. 49 Byng, John (1743–1814) 150 cabinet 51, 54, 55, 56–7, 67 calendar reform see legislation relating to Calvinistic Anglicans 289–91, 334 Camden, William (1551–1623) 124, 126 Camden, 1st Earl (Charles Pratt) (1714–94) 298 Canada 72, 76, 323, 333 Canning, George (1770–1827) 214 Canterbury, diocese of 123, 166 see also Moore, John; Secker, Thomas; Wake, William (archbishops)

Cantillon, Richard (c.1680–1734) 135 capital punishment 69, 161, 302 see also pardoning process Carlisle, Cumb. 148 n. 143, 152, 154 Carte, Thomas (c.1686–1754) 128, 129 n. 74 ‘‘cases’’ (to Parliament) 43 Catholic conversion 327 Catholics, attitudes towards 17, 183, 280, 308, 321, 322–7, 329–38 in Scotland 279, 333–4 Catholics in England number and profile 321 religious organisation and practice 321–2, 323–4, 326–7 see also legislation relating to Catholics, Irish, in England 321, 329 census 75, 110, 138, 140, 143, 151, 154, 157 local 153 see also information relating to population central government as source of initiative 4, 33–4, 47, 48–77, 78, 85–6, 89, 103, 105, 173 its power in the localities 2–3, 23, 30–1, 47, 48–77, 86, 89–90, 105 use of term 2 see also Agriculture, Board of; cabinet; Crown; Home Office; Privy Council; Secretaries of State; Trade, Board of; Treasury Chadwick, Edwin (1800–90) 45 Challoner, Richard (1691–1781) 322, 327 Chalmers, George (c.1742–1825) 147 n. 142, 149, 152 n. 161, 156 Chamberlayne family (Edward 1616–1703 and John 1669–1723) 130 Chandler, Samuel (1693–1766) 294 change, general patterns 17, 45–47, 110–13, 128–9, 133, 172–3, 237, 270–1 modelled in empirical enquiries 122, 134, 136–7, 140, 141–2, 148, 149–50, 151, 159, 160, 173 Charges (by magistrates) 217, 310 charities, specific 65 n. 36, 316–17 see also Foundling Hospital; King’s Bench prison, prison charities; Magdalen Hospital; and under voluntary societies, specific societies charity, role and patterns 40, 90, 140, 200, 218, 235 see also information collected by charitable societies; information relating to charity; legislation relating to poor, charities for charity case-work 165 charity schools 191 charters 88

General Index Chatham Chest 65 Chatham, 1st Earl see Pitt, William, the elder Chelsea Hospital and pensioners 66, 68 n. 41, 72 Chester, Chesh. 153 chorography 124, 167 Christ’s Hospital, mathematics teacher at 151 Church of England reforming currents 184, 198 n. 62, 201 n. 72 role 122–3 visitations 52, 123–4, 130–1, 140, 168, 169 see also bishops; Calvinistic Anglicans; high churchmen; information collected by clergy; information relating to church attendance; legislation relating to church building; rates, church Church of Scotland, General Assembly of 54, 169 circuit judges, role 2, 25, 31, 49, 53, 56, 293 citizens’ arrests 303 n. 98 City of London actions by corporate body 68, 280, 308, 318, 319–20, 333, 338 milieu 299 see also marshals, City; marshalmen, City; metropolis Clarkson, Thomas (1760–1846) 171 clauses acts 85 clergy see information collected by clergy Clifton, Francis (d. 1736) 131 climate see information relating to Cobbett, William (1763–1835) 213 Cochrane, Lord (honorific; later 10th Earl of Dundonald) (1775–1860) 247 n. 52 coining 258, 303, 304, 306 Coldbath Fields house of correction 213, 226 Colquhoun, Patrick (1745–1820) 163 Combe, William (1742–1823) 145 commission see Board; Royal Commission Common Pleas, court of 272, 298 Lord Chief Justice of the court of see judges, High Court; Camden, 1st Earl; Wedderburn, Alexander Commons Journals 144–5 compulsory purchase 93 conscription 76 constables, informing 222, 294–8 constables, roles law and order 70, 71 n. 50, 250, 292, 300, 303 n. 100, 308, 318 tax collection 50, 52, 292 miscellaneous 207, 262, 336 n. 259 see also Payne, William, as constable constitution see unconstitutionality

351

constitutional reform 173–5, 181, 182, 184, 198 see also Association movement convention of magistrates (1790) 45, 71, 201 n. 73, 208–9 Convention of Royal Burghs (Scotland) 54 convoys see legislation relating to Cook, Capt. James (1748–1829) 151 Cookson, John 156 Cornwall 97 n. 49 corporations see boroughs; trading companies corporations of the poor 65 see also legislation relating to the poor, corporations of correction, houses of 29, 69, 207 see also Bridewell; Coldbath Fields cottages see legislation relating to county meetings (Scottish) 54 Court justice 68 courts see Common Pleas; debt courts, small; King’s Bench; manorial courts; Session, court of (Scotland) courts, use of, to establish precedents 13, 209, 272, 303 n. 100, 331–2 see also prosecution as strategy courtiers 196, 197, 199, 200 Clark, Peter 211 cravings, sheriffs’ 69 creditors, powers 229–32 crime effects of wars on 63–4 general policy towards 55, 67, 217 levels 67, 217 see also information relating to; legislation relating to criminal law, implementation 2, 25, 29, 31, 51–2, 56–7 see also branding; correction, houses of; disturbances, responses to; pardoning process; policing; prison reform; transportation crops see dearth; information relating to food supply Crown, role 51, 88, 200, 235 Cullum, Sir John, 6th Bt. (1733–85) 152 n. 161, 169, 170 Cumberland 153 n. 166 see also Carlisle Cunningham, Timothy (fl.1754–d. 1789) 143, 152 n. 161 Currie, James (1756–1805) 155–6 Custos Rotulorum 195 Dalrymple, Sir John, 4th Bt. (1720–89) 333 Dartmouth, 2nd Earl (William Legge) (1731–1801) 188

352

General Index

Davenant, Charles (1656–1714) 110, 116, 120–1, 127, 129, 132 n. 85, 172 work cited or used in the past 126, 128, 134, 144, 168, 174 Davies, David (1742–1819) 160, 164 Deane, Phyllis 127 dearth, general policy towards 55, 59, 147, 170, 212, 315, 317–20 debt, imprisonment for attitudes to 16, 231, 235, 237 final process 229, 230, 232, 235, 236 levels and trends 30, 232, 238, 239 mesne process 229, 230, 232, 235, 236 rationale 231–2, 233 debt, legal framework for dealing with 229–33 see also information relating to; legislation relating to debt and credit networks 228, 290 debt courts, small 88, 92–3, 95, 101, 104 debtor ethos 234–5, 238 debtors, sanctuaries for 29 debtors prisons, in general 30, 237, 248 see also Fleet prison; King’s Bench prison; legislation relating to; parliament, committees of enquiry into Decker, Sir Matthew, 1st Bt. (1679–1749) 127 Defoe, Daniel (c.1660–1731) 127, 132 n. 85, 135 Derbyshire 168 Derham, William (1657–1735) 126 Devon 64 n. 31, 324 n. 200 see also Exeter, Plymouth disease see information relating to; plague; quarantine; smallpox disorderly houses see brothels dispensaries 165 Dissent, religious, attitudes to 183, 197, 198 n. 62 Dissenters, religious 183, 184, 198, 200, 290–1, 294, 324, 334 disturbances, response to 2, 51, 61, 280, 302, 338–9 see also King’s Bench prison, disturbances divorce see legislation relating to Dobbs, Arthur (1689–1765) 132 dogs, tax on 188 Dolben, Sir William, 3rd Bt. (1727–1814) 196, 198 domestic government, issues of, use of term 1 Dorset 147, 198, 207 Dublin 132, 171 Dubois, A.B. 93 duelling 36, 39, 191, 245 Dundas, Henry (1742–1811) 103 Dutch see United Provinces

earthquakes 293 East India Company 161 East India crisis 182, 188 economic antiquarians 143–4, 152, 160 Eden, Sir Frederick Morton, 2nd Bt. (1766–1809) 160–1, 162, 170 Edinburgh 334 education 57, 58, 59–60, 90, 112, 219, 323, 324 see also charity schools; information relating to; legislation relating to; Sunday schools empirical enquiry see information employment general policy towards 57–8, 64, 71–4 see also legislation relating to employment enclosure see information relating to; legislation relating to engrossing see marketing offences; Payne, William and the moral economy enlightenment 12, 18, 133, 136 enquiry see information; Parliament, committees of enquiry enthusiasm, attitudes to 295 see also Puritanism Equiano, Olaudah (c.1745–97) 335 n. 257 Equitable Insurance Company 151 n. 156, 156 Erskine, Thomas (1750–1823) 213 Essex 31, 195 n. 50 see also Wanstead European comparisons 74, 87–8, 105, 110, 137–8, 162, 167 made in the past 115, 120, 126, 130, 149–50, 162 evangelical conversion 14, 192 evangelical revival 184 evangelically inclined people 188, 189, 192, 198, 213, 289–91, 324, 334 execution, proceedings in see debt, imprisonment for debt, final process executions see capital punishment Exeter 65 n. 36 Exeter, 9th Earl (Brownlow Cecil) (1725–1793) 201 n. 70 fact, culture of 12–13 factories, conditions in 172 Failed Legislation 4 n. 9, 26 n. 12 false imprisonment, actions for 189, 222, 295 families, of soldiers and sailors 63, 65 fees, clerk of (Commons) 100 Fielding, Henry (1707–54) 68, 140, 164, 235 n. 18, 293 Fielding, Sir John (c.1712–80) 17, 68, 140, 164, 293, 310–11, 314, 338 see also Payne, William and John Fielding

General Index final process see debt, imprisonment for fiscal-military state as context for empirical enquiry 113, 117, 119–22, 129 functioning 2–3, 11, 48–77 use of term 2, 11, 47 Fisheries and Manufactures, Board of Trustees for (Scotland) 57, 147 n. 142 fisheries 72, 73 Fitzpatrick, Sir Jeremiah (c.1740–1810) 65, 163 Fitzwilliam, 2nd Earl (William Wentworth) (1748–1833) 196, 200 n. 68, 219 Fleet prison 15, 16, 29–30, 247 n. 50, 274 Fleetwood, William (1656–1723) 148, 160 forestalling see marketing offences: Payne, William and the moral economy forests, royal 73 Forfitt, Benjamin (fl. 1750–70s) 294 n. 62 Forster, Richard (fl. 1730s–60s) 137 Foucault, Michel 6, 109 n. 2 Foundling Hospital 60, 66 n. 38, 220 n. 135 Fox, Charles James (1749–1806) 182, 198, 200 Foxe’s Book of Martyrs 322, 326 France as rival or enemy 117, 130, 150, 293, 323, 333 compared to Britain 74, 76, 115, 120 intellectual contacts 119, 136, 322 and Catholicism 322, 324 Franklin, Benjamin (1706–90) 136, 150, 151 n. 156 French Revolution, effects 271 French Revolutionary War (1793–1802), effects 68, 71, 75, 147, 155–7, 211–13 friendly actions (in debt cases) 233, 237 friendly societies 72, 127, 160 n. 192, 161, 170 n. 233, 186, 189, 195, 220 n. 133 gambling 251, 258, 294, 299, 302 game see legislation relating to gaols 31, 32, 95–6, 97, 161–2, 248, 250 Gates, Joseph (d. 1787) 301, 303, 305 n. 107, 339 Gates, Thomas (fl. 1760s–80s) 301, 302 n. 91, 327, 339 Gee, Joshua (1667–1730) 132 n. 86 George III (1738–1820) 182, 194, 205, 324, 338 general warrants 15, 272 General Register Office 110 German territories 167 Gibson, Edmund (c.1669–1748) 125 Gilbert, Thomas (c.1720–98) 33, 38, 44, 46, 99, 100–1, 158–9, 161 n. 198, 188 Gilbert unions 99

353

gin 132 Glasgow 163, 334 Glass, D.V. 110 Glasse, Samuel (1734–1812) 189, 190 n. 31, 191 n. 35, 196, 198, 212 n. 112, 214, 215 n. 122 Gloucester, diocese of 125 Gloucestershire 126, 168, 190, 195, 197 n. 60, 207 n. 93, 208, 223 n. 142 Godolphin, Sidney (1645–1712) 129 n. 72 Gottingen , University of 167 Gordon, George (fl.? 1720s–50s) 135 Gordon, Lord George (honorific) (1751–93) 279–80, 334, 336–8 Gordon riots 153, 183, 190, 244, 268 governmentality, use of term 109 n. 2 grace, acts of, use of term 15 see also legislation relating to debt Grafton, 3rd Duke (Augustus Fitzroy) (1735–1811) 197, 198, 201 n. 72, 219, 331 n. 237 grain riots 155, 212, 317 grand juries 190, 310, 317, 320 grants, from central funds 59–61, 68, 69 graphic techniques 149 Graunt, John (1620–74) 116, 118–19, 168, 172 work cited or used in the past 126, 127, 134, 139 Greenwich Hospital and pensioners 66 Grenville, George (1712–70) 145 Grey, Charles (later 2nd Earl Grey) (1764–1845) 212 Habermas, Jurgen 5 n. 11, 6 Habsburg lands 74, 76, 130 Hale, Sir Matthew (1609–76) 122, 149 Halifax, 2nd Earl (George Montagu Dunk) (1716–71) 72 Halifax, Yorks. 88 Halley, Edmond (1656–1742) 127 Hampshire 118, 146, 170, 207 n. 93 Hanway, Jonas (c.1712–86) 140, 190 n. 30 happiness, use of term 111–12, 170 n. 233 Hardwicke, 1st Earl (Philip Yorke) (1690–1764) [Lord Chancellor] 293 Harley, Edward (‘Auditor’) (1664–1735) 36 Harley, Robert (later 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer) (1661–1724) 120, 121 Harris, William (1720–70) 324 n. 200 Hay, William (1695–1755) 40, 44 Haygarth, John (1740–1827) 152 n. 162, 153, 162 n. 203 Hayton, David 38 headborough 292 Heberden, William (1710–1801) 139, 152 n. 161

354

General Index

Hereford, diocese of 166 heritable jurisdictions 54 Hertfordshire 96 n. 47, 195 nn. 50, 51, 207 n. 93 Hey, William (1736–1819) 189, 192 Heysham, John (1753–1834) 152, 154, 159 n. 188 high churchmen 198, 213, 214–15 Highlands, Scottish 54, 58, 59, 60, 72, 76, 147 highways see legislation relating to Hill, Rowland (1744–1833) 334 Hillsborough, Earl (Wills Hill) (1718–93) 35–6 history, use of term 160, 162 Hogarth, William (1697–1764) 15 Hoghton, Sir Henry, 6th Bt. (1728–95) 198 Home Office role 52, 59, 68, 143, 163, 203 n. 79 specific actions 33, 34, 42, 63, 163, 165, 195 homosexual activity 294, 295, 302, 305 n. 111 Hoppit, Julian 81, 110 see also Failed Legislation Horne, George (1730–92) 215 Horwitz, Henry 36 hospitals 90, 92, 131, 165 see also Chelsea Hospital; Foundling Hospital; Greenwich Hospital; Magdalen Hospital Houghton, John (1645–1705) 122, 174 Howard, John (c.1726–90) 30, 87, 161–2, 164, 186, 207 n. 93, 210, 227, 241 Howlett, John (1731–1804) 152, 153, 154, 158 n. 187, 159, 168, 218 Hume, David (1711–76) 136, 154 n. 167, 167 Huxtable, John (c.1692–1768) 131 identity see social identity impeachment 206 n. 88 imprisonment as punishment 52 see also gaols; solitary confinement for debt see debt, imprisonment for improvement as aspiration 116, 132, 133, 139 see also legislation relating to urban India 6, 76, 182, 323 see also East India Company; East India crisis inferior officers, use of term 2 inferior politics, use of term 5 information in general 12, 59, 109–75 access to sources of 111–12, 129, 132, 134, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 149

see also parliament, committees of enquiry; print media and empirical enquiry information collected and circulated by Proclamation Society 206–8 information collected by antiquarians 124–6, 130, 143–4, 148, 152, 167, 175 businessmen and merchants 118–19, 122–3, 134, 135, 140, 144, 160, 161, 163–4, 171–2 charitable societies 112, 135, 164–5, 171 clergy 112, 123–4, 125–6, 130–1, 136–9 passim 147, 154, 156, 160, 165–6, 169 see also Howlett, John government 120, 123, 138, 141, 142, 147, 151, 156, 169, 170 as source 114–16, 121, 129, 132, 137, 152, 156, 168, 174 medical men 112, 124, 126, 131, 155–6, 165 parliament 42–4, 59, 129, 132, 140, 141, 142, 144, 157–8 as source 132, 158–9 see also bills of mortality; parish registers; prison calendars information, historiography 109–10, 113 information relating to balance of trade 129, 149 charity 59, 157 Catholics 123, 153, 321, 325 church attendance and provision 123, 126, 157, 166 climate 126, 131 crime and punishment 42, 47, 59, 63, 143, 157, 161–4 debt 15, 42, 59, 157, 158, 232 disease 110, 114, 126–7, 131, 153–4, 157, 159, 164–5, 172 education 123, 124, 135, 157, 164, 172 enclosure 116, 154 food supply 75, 143, 146, 147, 313 friendly societies 161 the metropolis 130, 151, 158, 163 morals 124, 132, 172 national income 127, 134, 146, 156, 157 parliamentary business 144–5 parliamentary representation 122–3, 126, 173–5 poor (other than expenditure) 157, 159–61 poor relief expenditure 42, 52, 59, 121, 123, 124, 130, 140, 157–9, 168, 169 population 110, 115, 118, 122, 126–7, 134, 135–9, 142, 150–4, 159 of particular localities 116, 118, 126–7, 130, 139, 147, 153–4, 168, 169 prices 58, 122, 132, 142, 146, 148

General Index revenue 120, 129, 132, 135, 142, 143–6, 156 Scotland 125, 136, 147, 169 slavery, slave trade 171 statute labour 103 topography 114, 121, 124–5, 130, 147 vagrancy 59, 157, 165 wages 116, 132, 155, 169 Wales 125 workhouses 124, 140, 157, 159, 164 information, techniques of collection and analysis 110, 115, 118–20, 124, 125, 127, 129–32 passim 137, 138, 143, 149, 158, 165, 166–7, 168 informers 311, 318–19, 321, 332, 334 see also constables, informing; Payne, William insolvency acts see legisation relating to debt Inspector General of Imports and Exports 120, 156 Inspector General’s ledgers (‘Customs House books’) 132 n. 86, 311 Inspector General of Prisons (Ireland) 163 Inspectorate of Corn Prices 58 insurance 127, 128 n. 67, 135, 160 lottery (a form of gambling) 58 see also Equitable Insurance Company ‘‘interference”, by government, attitudes to 62, 313 Ireland 57, 119, 125, 132, 162, 163, 171 as context for English actions 6, 182, 311, 324–5, 333 see also Catholics, Irish in England; Dublin Irish soldiers’ dependents 65 Irving, Thomas (c.1738–1800) 156 Italy 161 Jackson, W.F. (1730–1803) 273, 275 Jacobinism, ideas about 212, 213 Jacobite see rebellions, Jacobite Janssen, Stephen Theodore (1705–77) 63, 161 jargon, of law enforcement 307–8, 328 n. 223 Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826) 210 n. 105 Jekyll, Sir Joseph (c.1662–1738) 91 judges, High Court role 2, 4, 13, 25, 30–1, 34–5 specific actions 34–5, 201 n. 72, 204, 272, 331–2 see also Camden, 1st Earl; Kenyon, Lloyd; Mansfield, 1st Earl; Wedderburn, Alexander juries see grand juries Jurin, James (c.1684–1750) 131, 165 n. 215 justices of the peace (JPs) see magistrates

355

Kent 168, 336 n. 259 Kenyon, Lloyd (later 1st Baron Kenyon) (1732–1802) 34, 198, 199, 200 n. 68, 201 n. 72, 204, 280 n. 1, 282, 318 King see Crown; Monarch King William’s War (1689–97), effects 63 King, Gregory (1648–1712) 116, 121–2, 123, 125, 127, 129, 172 work cited or used in the past 121, 126, 134, 137 n. 112, 149, 174 King, Peter 9 Kings’ Bench, court of location of sessions 282 Lord Chief Justice of see judges, High Court; Kenyon, Lloyd; Mansfield, 1st Earl relation to prison 245–6, 247, 252–5, 260, 266–70, 276 role 4, 13 King’s Bench prison 15–16, 232, 234, 238–78 authority structures, general 245–49, 266–70 buildings and facilities 241–5, 248–50, 256 campaign against imprisonment for debt 270–7 charities 253, 258, 260 collective organisations 259–70 college 261–70, 273 college rules 261–3 commonside 241, 260–1 Crown prisoners 241, 262 disturbances 250–5, 265–6, 270–6 economy 255–9 escapes 247, 248, 272, 274 fees 246, 253, 263, 273 marshal 245–53, 256, 266–70, 274–6 master’s side 241 petitions 264, 265, 273 population, size and character 238–41 room letting 241, 243, 248, 256–7, 263, 268 ‘Rules’ 233 n. 12, 241, 259, 261 rules and regulations 244, 250 n. 64, 253, 260, 267 social hierarchy 259, 264–5 tap 244, 248, 249–50, 256, 259, 269 tipstaffs 246, 254 turnkeys 244–5, 246, 248, 272–6 Visitor 254–5 King’s Speech 36, 55, 73, 292 Kirby, John (c.1728–1804) 300 labour disputes 59 Lambert, Sheila 24, 80

356

General Index

Lancashire 97 n. 49, 153 n. 162, 207 n. 93, 208 see also Liverpool, Manchester Langford, Paul 80, 96 lark, use of term see jargon law officers role 4, 34–5 specific actions 34, 35, 36, 68, 103, 199 lawyers role 41, 271, 290, 330 gaol or prison 234, 256 Leeds, Yorks. 189, 192 legal processes (other than in debt cases) see legislation relating to legislation, in general categories of 79 drafting 96 role 4, 9, 11 see also Failed Legislation legislation, general drafting 34–5 failure, patterns 27, 28 reasons for promoting 37–40 see also criminal laws, implementation of; poor laws, implementation of; vagrancy laws, implementation of legislation, local, in general 11–12, 28, 78–105 failure, patterns 83 historiography 80–1 interaction with general legislation 97–9 reasons for promoting 86–96, 103–5 trends and patterns 82–6, 88–9, 95–6, 101 n. 63 legislation and social policy 21–47 effects 23, 27–32 numbers of measures 26–7 legislation relating to adultery 100 n. 58 apprenticeship 40, 72, 133, 209–10 building regulation 289 n. 38, 307 n. 123 calendar reform 133 canals 79, 100 Catholics 183, 321, 328 n. 223, 333–4 the census and vital registration 138–9 church building 79, 92 n. 37 cottages 37 convoys 156 crime, general 38, 39 policing of 5, 34, 42, 68, 189, 209 punishment of 11, 28–9, 31, 34, 41–2, 43 debt, general 11, 15, 29, 39, 40, 43, 72 acts of grace, insolvency or relief acts 15, 29, 235–7, 238, 253, 259, 271, 276 sanctuaries 29∗

small debt courts 79, 85, 92–3, 95, 101, 102, 104 debtors’ prisons 15, 29, 253 divorce 99 n. 58 education 39 employment 72 enclosure 79, 100 n. 58, 100, 103 friendly societies 161, 170 n. 233 game 36 highways 37, 100–1, 102–3 legal processes (other than in debt cases) 38, 39, 198 n. 162 liquor licensing 39, 209–10 local government structures 85, 99, 104–5 marketing offences 309–10, 314, 317–18, 320 the metropolis 5, 30, 63, 83–4, 98 n. 51, 101, 209, 318 morals 11, 36, 39, 98, 295 n. 65, 307 n. 123 naturalisation 100 n. 58, 35 poor, general 11, 22–3, 27–8, 33, 35, 40, 44, 52, 98–9, 157, 158 n. 186, 170 n. 235 charities for 90 corporations of 22–3, 28, 79, 98 ‘new’ poor laws 85 settlement of 72 prisons 31, 32, 39, 45, 79, 95, 97, 208 railways 85 rates 32, 87, 91–2 Scotland 10, 54, 57, 69 n. 43, 101–3 Sunday observance 40, 205, 209–10, 336 n. 261 theatres 79, 88, 93, 98 trading companies 93 turnpikes 79, 83, 84, 85, 92, 100, 102 urban improvement 79, 83, 93, 94 n. 44, 99, 102 vagrancy 30, 39, 45, 64, 71, 87, 208 weights and measures 37 n. 53, 133 n. 92 lesser middling sort, attitudes and experience 221–5, 285–9, 298, 336, 338, 340–1 Lhuyd, Edward (c.1660–1709) 125 nn. 50, 51, 148 n. 143 liberty, ideas about 197, 234, 270, 271, 272, 276, 324 Liberty Boys 269 life table see mortality table Lincoln, diocese of 123, 166 Lincolnshire 201 n. 70 liquor licensing, laws, implementation 185, 189, 195, 209, 211 see also legislation relating to Liverpool, Lancs. 155 Lloyd, Sir Richard (1697–1761) 98

General Index local acts, use of term 79 see also legislation, local local government attitudes to central government 61, 75 powers 3, 25, 50, 53, 67, 86–7, 96, 97–8 restructuring 85–6, 94 structures see legislation relating to use of term 1, 2, 25 see also aldermen; City of London; constables; Custos Rotulorum; Lords Lieutenant; magistrates; mayors; Quarter Sessions; rates and under specific policy topics, e.g. poor relief Loch, David (d. c.1780) 147 n. 142 Locke, John (1632–1704) 126 London, City of see City diocese of 327 Lord Chancellor, specific actions 98, 293 Lords Lieutenant role 50 specific actions 195, 201 Lords, House of role 34 specific actions 35, 97, 139, 147, 153, 310, 314–15, 316 Loughborough, Baron see Wedderburn, Alexander Lowndes, William (1652–1724) 32 Luson, Hewling (fl. 1786–1803) 5–6, 14 McCulloch, John Ramsay (1789–1864) 109, 164 n. 209 Macclesfield, 2nd Earl (George Parker) (c.1697–1764) 133 n. 92 Magdalen Hospital 140 magistrates, general role 2, 4, 58, 75, 158, 206, 207, 216–17 specific actions 69, 87, 185, 191, 195, 201, 208–9, 275, 290 relating to legislation 42, 44, 45, 95 n. 47 magistrates, county 2, 91, 147, 211, 235 magistrates, stipendiary 68, 197 n. 58, 209 magistrates, urban (borough, metropolitan) 68, 88, 294, 302 magistrates see also Quarter Sessions magistrates in Scotland 101–2 Magna Charta, ideas about 271, 276 ‘‘maimed’’ soldiers or sailors, provision for 65, 70 see also poor demobilised servicemen Mainwaring, William (d.1821) 189, 190 n. 33, 198, 210 Maitland, William (c.1693–1757) 127, 130 Malony, John Baptist (fl. 1760s–70s) 329, 330–1

357

Malynes, Gerard (fl. 1585–1641) 115 Manchester, Lancs. 152 n. 162, 163 manorial courts 86, 92–3, 264 n. 108 Mansfield, 1st Earl (William Murray) (1705–93) 272, 287, 298, 310, 318, 323, 332, 333, 338 market rights 88, 92 marketing offences attitudes to 17 implementation of law against 222 see also legislation relating to; Payne, William and moral economy Markham, William [archbishop of York] (c.1719–1807) 197 Marshall, William (c.1745–1818) 170 marshals City 280, 299–304, 328 provost 63, 64 marshalmen, City 280, 299–308, 329, 339 Martin, Matthew (1748–1838) 165 Martin, Samuel (1714–88) 139 n. 118 Mary II, Queen (1662–94) 191 Massie, Joseph (d. 1784) 134, 140, 144 Mawhood, William (1724–97) 323 n. 190, 326 n. 212, 334 n. 247, 335 n. 249 mayors, specific actions 189, 195, 303, 320, 328, 339–40 medical arithmetic, use of term 165 Mein, John (1732–1810) 273 mesne process see debt, imprisonment for Methodists 189, 213, 294, 295 n. 68 metropolis 211 Catholicism in 321–2 petitioning in 335–6 specific policies bearing on 30, 56–7, 60, 68 see also bills of mortality; information relating to; legislation relating to; Moorfields; Payne, William, neighbourhood Middlesex 32, 87, 189–90, 195, 196, 198, 209, 225–6 see also Mainwaring, William; metropolis; Stepney and Hackney; Uxbridge; Wilkes, John Middlesex bench 189–90 Middleton, Erasmus (c.1739–1805) 334, 335 n. 254 Middleton, Sir Charles (1726–1813) 191 n. 35, 192, 200 middling people 14, 17 middling people see also lesser middling sort military-fiscal state see fiscal-military state militia 50, 53, 66–7, 75 millennarianism 224–5 Miller, Sir John Riggs, 1st Bt. (c.1744–98) 37 Milnes, Richard Slater (1759–1804) 198

358

General Index

monarch petitions to 272, 333 role 56, 88, 93, 194, 272 see also Crown monarchs see Anne; George III; Mary II; pretenders, Stuart; William III Montagu, Duke of (George Brudenell) (1712–90) 196, 200 n. 68, 204, 212 Montesquieu, baron de la Brede et (Charles-Louis de Secondat) (1689–1755) 136 Moore, Arthur (d. 1730) 121 Moore, John [archbishop of Canterbury] (c.1730–1805) 194, 197 Moore, T.K. 36 Moorfields 290, 293, 295 n. 68, 317, 322, 327, 335 n. 249 moral economy 308 n. 131, 318 see also marketing offences; Payne, William and the moral statistics 173 morals general policy towards 55, 217, 293 see also information relating to; legislation relating to; reformation of manners More, Hannah (1745–1833) 220 Morgan, William (1750–1833) 156 mortality table 127, 137, 153 Morris, Corbyn (1710–79) 128, 138 n. 116, 139, 145 municipal corporations see boroughs Napoleonic wars (1803–15), effects 71 national income see information relating to natural theology 126 naturalisation see legislation relating to Neild, James (1744–1814) 162 Newcastle, 1st Duke (1693–1768) 138 n. 116 Newcastle, Northd. 93, 336 n. 259 newspapers see print media Nichols, John (1745–1826) 148 n. 143 nobility 197, 199, 225 Norfolk 196, 207, 224 see also Norwich Norris, H.H. (1771–1850) 214 North, Lord (honorific, later 2nd Earl of Guilford) (1732–92) 182, 197, 198, 331, 338 Norton, Sir Fletcher (1716–89) 330 Norwich, Norf. 214 Northamptonshire 126, 153, 196 Northumberland see Newcastle Nova Scotia 72 numeracy 117, 128, 130

obscenity 209, 212, 225, 294 officers of state, use of term 2 Ogilby, John (1600–76) 121 Old Bailey 63, 161, 302 See also Payne, William, Old Bailey appearances Oldfield, Thomas (1755–1822) 175 overseers of the poor 195, 207 Oxfordshire 163, 207 n. 93, 208, 226 n. 149 Paine, Thomas (1737–1809) 160 n. 192, 164, 213 pardoning process 51, 56–7, 67 parish registers 126, 137, 151, 152, 154 Parliament, attitudes to 3, 16, 43, 98, 171, 276–7 committees of enquiry, general 42, 133, 171 into debtors prisons 15, 232, 247 n. 52, 254, 257 other specific 157–9, 171, 183, 314, 315 committees, select 80, 147 consultation by 44 debates 41 historiography 24 official publications see Commons Journals; Reports from Committees; Votes petitions to 15, 43, 79–80, 237, 315, 334–7 role 3–4, 11–12, 21–47, 50–1, 54, 58–9, 61, 78–105, 122, 173, 235 sources for history of 41 standing orders, of Commons 100 See also information collected by; information relating to parliamentary representation; Proclamation Society and Parliament parliamentary counsel 43 Parsons, Richard (1642–1711) 125 passes, for use by travellers 64, 70–1 patrols (in context of policing) 68 patriotism, use of term 139 see also public good, public spirit Paul, Sir George Onesiphorus, 2nd Bt. (1746–1820) 190, 197 n. 60, 202 n. 73, 208, 226 Payne, Elizabeth (c.1723–fl. 1788) 282, 285 Payne, William (c.1718–82) 16–17, 279–341 as anti-Catholic activist 279–80, 305, 326–39 as carpenter 283, 285, 288–9, 297, 301 n. 87, 302 as constable 280 n. 1, 281 n. 4, 295–308, 333, 337

General Index as headborough 291–2, 295 as moral reformer 295–8 family 285 income 306–7, 312–13, 329 literacy 287, 332 marshals and marshalmen 301–7, 308, 328, 333, 339 neighbourhood 281–3 Old Bailey appearances 289, 299, 301–2, 304 religious affiliation 289–91 and John Fielding 295, 299, 310, 314, 319 and Lord Mansfield 298, 316, 317, 332 and moral economy 309–21 and prostitution 17, 282, 295, 302, 303–4, 307–8 Payne, William jr (c.1754–1833) 285, 288, 334, 336 Pelham, Henry (1694–1754) 35, 133 Penrice, William (fl. 1768–74) 248 pension funds 136 pensioners see Chelsea Hospital; Greenwich Hospital Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703) 117 Percival, Thomas (1740–1804) 152 n. 162, 153, 172 n. 239 permissive acts, use of term 85, 99 petitions see King’s Bench prison, petitions; monarch, petitions to; Parliament, petitions to Pett, Peter (c.1630–99) 123 n. 44 Petty, William (1623–87) 109, 116, 118, 119–20, 123 n. 44, 129, 172 work cited or used in the past 127 n. 63, 128, 130, 134, 135, 139 petty bourgeoisie see lesser middling sort Phillips, Sir John (c.1666–1737) 10 pickpockets 288, 290, 302, 304 Pitt, William, the elder (later 1st Earl of Chatham) (1708–78) 66, 134, 331 n. 237 Pitt, William, the younger (1759–1806) 5–6, 33, 156, 158 n. 186, 169, 170, 182, 197 n. 58, 198, 200 n. 69, 204, 212 Pitt, William Morton (1754–1836) 198, 226 Place, Francis (1771–1854) 225 n. 145, 281–2, 286 plague 55, 89 cattle 56, 64 Playfair, William (1759–1823) 149, 150 n. 153 Plymouth, Devon 131 Police, Commission of (Scotland) 54 ‘‘police, plan of’’ 188–9 policing 68, 140, 185, 190, 299–301 see also constables, Fielding, Henry; Fielding, Sir John; Home Office; legislation

359

relating to crime, policing of; magistrates political arithmetic as tradition 116, 126, 127–9, 130, 134, 142, 144, 148, 149, 151, 156 use of term 116, 119 see also information polyarchy 50 poor general policy towards 55, 60–1, 63, 67 see also information relating to; legislation relating to poor demobilised servicemen, policy towards 63, 65–7, 69–73 poor laws, implementation 10, 185 see also correction, houses of; vagrancy laws, implementation of; workhouses poor relief expenditure 183 see also information relating to poor Poovey, Mary 109, 113 pornography see obscenity Porteus, Beilby (1731–1809) 153, 192, 194, 197, 199 n. 65, 204, 205, 209, 211, 212 n. 112, 215 posse comitatus 75 Postlethwayt, James (d. 1761) 135, 139 Postlethwayt, Malachi (c.1707–67) 134–5, 174 Potter, Thomas (c.1718–59) 138 Priestley, Joseph (1733–1804) 189, 220 n. 133 press gangs 63 Prest, John 80 pretenders, Stuart 322–3 Price, Richard (1723–91) 145, 148 n. 145, 150–4, 156, 162, 174, 220 n. 133 prices see information relating to prices prime minister see Godolphin; Grafton; Grenville; Harley; North; Pelham; Pitt, elder and younger; Rockingham; Shelburne; Walpole Prince of Wales, George (later George IV) (1762–80) 196 print media 18, 25, 43, 209, 272, 294, 305, 311, 341 as aid to reformation of manners 187, 192, 196, 207, 221, 294 and anti-Catholicism 324–6, 327 n. 219, 334 and empirical enquiry 122, 129, 130, 134, 135, 144–5, 150, 152, 157, 158, 159, 172 prison calendars 163 prison reform before John Howard 39, 60, 140 Howard and after 87, 185, 186, 190, 191, 202 n. 73, 207, 208, 210, 219, 224–6

360

General Index

prison reform (cont.) see also parliament, committees of enquiry into debtors prisons prisons see correction, houses of; debt, imprisonment for; debtors prisons; gaols; legislation relating to see also for specific prisons Fleet prison; King’s Bench prison private acts 79, 100 n. 58 Privy Council (English or British) role 2, 46, 49–53, 56, 58, 70, 89, 154 specific actions 56, 64, 116, 158 n. 186, 280, 331, 339 Privy Council, Scottish 53 Proclamation Society, general 14–15, 39–40, 45, 71, 98, 162, 180, 190–215 decline 211–15 membership 197–8, 199–203, 214–15 proceedings 198–9, 203–15 and parliament 209–10 proclamations role 55 against forestallers and engrossers 55 n. 12, 311 against vice and immorality 191, 194, 195 prosecution, as strategy 191, 221–3, 294–5, 297–8, 303–5, 306–7, 310–21 Proclamation Society and 202–3, 209, 213 see also courts, use of to establish precedents; societies for the prosecution of felons; societies for the reformation of manners prostitution 17, 222, 251, 283, 294–9 passim, 299, 307–8, 321 see also brothels; Payne, William and prostitution Protestant Association 279, 328, 334–9 Prussia 74, 130 public acts 79 public good, as motive or justification for action 38, 104, 139, 186–7, 262, 298, 310 public opinion 43–4, 67 public sphere functioning 4–5, 12–13, 18, 25, 111, 129, 133, 142, 341 in Scotland 54 use of term 5 n. 11 see also print media public spirit 180, 186 punishment see branding; correction, houses of; transportation Puritanism, attitudes to 193, 200, 319 see also enthusiasm quarantine 56 Quarter Sessions, specific actions 42, 44, 45

Quebec Act 327 n. 223, 332–3 questionnaires 125, 137, 146, 147, 151, 159, 166, 170, 311 quo warranto 86 Rack, Edmund (c.1735–87) 152 n. 162, 161 n. 197 radicals 270 see also Association movement; constitutional reform; information relating to parliamentary representation; and under voluntary societies Radnor, 2nd Earl (Jacob Pleydell-Bouverie) (1750–1828) 98 Raikes, Robert (1736–1811) 190, 196 n. 51 railways see legislation relating to railways rates borough 87, 91–2 church 87, 92 n. 37 county 30, 32, 67, 87, 91 reactive state, use of term 8 rebellions, Jacobite general effects 57 1715, effects 59 1745, effects of 54, 58, 133, 323 Recorder of London 2, 56–7 Recorders of boroughs 201 Reeves, John (1752–1829) 214 reform see constitutional reform; information relating to parliamentary representation; prison reform reformation of manners as aspiration 179–81, 188, 192, 200, 297–8 attitudes to 193–4, 196, 197, 215–26, 297–8 rules 188, 190, 195, 216 tactical issues 194, 196–9, 202–3, 208 see also print media and; Proclamation Society; Vice Society reformation of manners, local societies late seventeenth-early eighteenth century 124, 191, 216, 223, 294 mid eighteenth century 293–9 late eighteenth century 189, 195, 223 regrating see marketing offences; Payne, William and the moral economy Reid, George (fl. 1764–95) 280, 326, 338 Reports from Committees of the House of Commons 144, 157 requests, courts of see debt courts, small revenue, national collection 2, 50, 52, 76, 120 see also information relating to Revolution of 1688, effects 3, 50–1, 53, 56, 88 rewards 219, 305, 310, 314–15, 320

General Index Rickman, John (1771–1840) 140 Rippon, John (1751–1836) 334 riots see disturbances, response to; grain riots Rockingham, Marchioness (nee Mary Bright) (c.1735–1804) 188 Rockingham, 2nd Marquess (Charles Watson Wentworth) (1730–82) 36, 145, 153 n. 163, 196 Rolls liberty 287, 291–292, 317 Romaine, William (1714–95) 289, 293, 326 n. 209, 329 n. 225, 335 n. 254 Royal Burghs, Convention of see Convention Royal Commission to consider the establishment of a national penitentiary 207 n. 92 to enquire into Coldbath Fields prison 226 to enquire into forests and wastes 73 to survey education in Highlands 59 Royal Society 114, 118, 150, 152 specific members 119, 122, 126, 131, 133 n. 92, 135 n. 101, 137, 139 n. 119, 153 n. 163, 161, 174 Ruggles, Thomas (1745–1813) 152 n. 161, 160 rules see King’s Bench prison, college rules; King’s Bench Prison rules and regulations; reformation of manners rules Rules (of debtors’ prisons) 233–4, 241 see also King’s Bench Prison, Rules runners 68, 305 Rusnock, Andrea 110 Rymer’s Foedera 144 Sabbath breaking see legislation relating to Sunday observance; Sunday observance St George’s Fields 241, 279 Savile, Sir George (1726–84), 8th Bt. 333 schools see charity schools; education; Sunday schools Scotland how figures in this book 9–10 Parliament of 10, 53–4 specific policies agriculture 147 education 59, 60 employment 57–8, 72–3 enclosure 102 local legislation 83–4, 101–3, 105 orphans 221 n. 135 poor 60, 85 n. 12 prisons 207 n. 93 roads 102–3 transportation (convict) 69 n. 43 structures of government in 53–4, 57–8, 75, 79, 101

361

Scotland see also Catholics, attitudes towards, in Scotland; information relating to; legislation relating to Scott, Sir John (later 1st Earl of Eldon) (1751–1838) 200 n. 68 Secker, Thomas (1693–1768) 166 Secretaries of State role 2, 34, 50–2, 54, 61, 63 specific actions 15, 149 n. 150, 331 see also Home Office Secretary at War 66 n. 38, 72 sentimental writers 219 Session, court of (Scotland) 54 settlement see legislation relating to poor, settlement of Seven Years War (1756–83), effects 66, 68, 134, 141, 323, 325 n. 209 Sheffield, Yorks. 94 n. 44, 131 Shelburne, 2nd Earl (William Petty Fitzmaurice) (1737–1805) 145, 280, 331 sheriffs role 69, 86, 158, 218 specific actions 42, 87, 161, 195 in Scotland 54, 101 Short, Thomas (c.1690–1772) 131, 139 Shropshire 96 n. 47, 195 n. 50 Sierra Leone 60 Sinclair, Sir John, 1st Bt. (1754–1835) 112, 144–5, 169–70 Slack, Paul 115 slavery, slave trade see anti-slave-trade campaign; information relating to slavery, slave trade smallpox 131, 165 Smith, Adam (c.1723–90) 148 Smith, John (c.1700–fl. 1757) 129 Smith, Richard Carpenter (fl. 1769–1800) 197 n. 58 Smith, Dr William (fl. 1776) 269 Smithfield market 310, 311 smuggling 251, 258, 337 social identity 13–14, 288–9 social status, implications of 16–17, 215–16, 259, 264–5, 285–8, 340–1 social policy, use of term 1 societies see voluntary societies societies for the prosecution of felons 185, 189, 195 Solicitor General see law officers solitary confinement 210 Somerset 168 South Sea Company 144 Southwark, Surrey 241, 250 Spanish Succession, war of, effects 68 n. 41, 69, 127, 132

362

General Index

Speenhamland 170 Staffordshire 71 n. 50, 121, 324 Star Chamber 2, 49, 53 state, use of term 162 State, Secretaries of see Secretaries of State statistics use of term 169 see also information statute see acts, legislation statute labour (on the roads) 102 statutory instruments 85 Stephen, James (1758–1832) 271 Stephenson, Sir William (fl. 1754–73) 328 Stepney and Hackney, Mdsx. 88 Stilling the Grumbling Hive 7–8 Stow, John (1525–1605) 124 Suffolk 160, 169, 207 n. 3, 224 Sunday observance 190, 205, 212, 222, 293, 294, 300, 310 n. 137 Sunday schools 164, 185, 186, 189, 190, 191 n. 35, 195, 207 supersedable (prisoners for debt), use of term 232 Surrey 195 n. 50, 208 n. 96, 275, 276 see also Southwark Sussex 41 see also Brighton swearing 222, 225 Sweden 162 n. 201 Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745) 129 n. 70 Taylor, Michael Angelo (1757–1834) 103 n. 73 Terrick, Richard (1710–77) 327, 328 Test and Corporation Acts, campaign for repeal 187 Thatched House Society for relief of small debtors 40, 104 n. 73, 162, 235 theatres see legislation relating to theatres thieftakers 42, 252, 300, 304 Thompson, E.P. 318 Thompson, William (c.1730–1800) 273 Thoresby, Ralph (1658–1725) 126 Thornton family (John 1720–90, Henry 1760–1815) 214 Thurlow, 1st Baron (Edward Thurlow) (1731–1806) [Lord Chancellor] 98 toleration, religious, attitudes to see Dissent, religious; Catholics Topham, John (1746–1803) 149 n. 150 Townshend, Thomas (later 1st Viscount Sydney) (1733–1800) 34, 42, 63 Trade, Board of role 33, 52, 57, 138, 143 specific actions 52, 59, 72, 121, 140, 149

trading companies 88, 93 transportation (of convicts) 29, 34, 52, 60, 69, 158, 184 Treasury role 50, 52, 57–8, 59–60 specific actions 139 n. 118, 147 n. 142, 314–15 see also grants Trimmer, Sarah (nee Kirby) (1741–1810) 220 Trinity House 65 n. 35 trout, use of term see jargon Turner, Sir Gregory Page, 3rd Bt. (1748–1805) 38 turnpikes see legislation relating to turnpikes ultra vires 87 unconstitutionality 15–16, 270, 271 n. 124, 276 unemployment see employment, general policy towards union of 1707 10, 53–4 Unitarianism 198 United Provinces 117, 120, 130 utility as aspiration 117, 118, 138, 158–9 Utrecht, Treaty of 132 Uxbridge, Middx. 290–1 vagrancy general policy towards 63, 64, 69–71, 208, 212 levels 184, 217 see information relating to; legislation relating to vagrancy laws, implementation 30, 32, 42, 185, 222, 299, 306 Vaughan, Rice (d. c.1672) 116 Venice 322 Venturi, Franco 133 vice and immorality see morals Vice Society 15, 202–3, 214, 221 n. 137 virtue, use of term 180 virtuosi 117, 128 visitation see Church of England, visitations visiting, health and charitable 171 Voltaire [pseud.] (Francois-Marie Arouet) (1694–1778) 325 n. 202 voluntary societies, role 4–5, 39–40, 54, 90–1, 92, 122, 143 see also empirical enquiry, contribution of charitable societies; specific societies: Abolition Society 171 Bath and Western agricultural society 146, 152 n. 162, 161 n. 197, 207 n. 93

General Index Bath Literary and Philosophical Society 152 n. 162 Bettering Society 159 n. 190, 165, 212 Dublin Society 132 Leeds Literary and Philosophical Society 189 London Corresponding Society 213 Marine Society 140, 189 Odiham (Hampshire) agricultural society 146 Philanthropic Society 220 n. 132 Revolution Society 179 n. 58 Robin Hood debating society 326 n. 208 Rota Club 119 Society for Free Debate 308 Society for Promoting Arts, Manufactures and Commerce 132, 133, 139, 144 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) 14, 36, 39, 44 n. 80, 124, 132, 164, 191 Society for Promoting Constitutional Information 175 Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor 294 n. 62 Society of Antiquaries 152 Society of the Friends of the People 197 n. 58 Society of the Friends of the People, Holborn 225 n. 145 Sunday School Society 186 see also Proclamation Society; Protestant Association; Royal Society; Thatched House Society for the relief of small debtors; Vice Society specific kinds of society: agricultural societies 146, 152 debating societies 308, 326 n. 208, 336 freemasonry 259 Lit and Phils 152, 189 medical societies 152 n. 162 religious societies 291 n. 48 see also friendly societies; King’s Bench prison, collective organisations; societies for the prosecution of felons; societies for the reformation of manners volunteer (military or police) forces 185, 186, 338 Votes 129 wages 206, 263 see information relating to

363

Wake, William (1657–1737) 123 Wales how figures in this book 10 interest in prison reform in 207 n. 93 see also information relating to; Welshmen and reformation of manners Wales, William (c.1734–98) 151–2 Wallace, Robert (1697–1771) 127 n. 64, 136–7, 154 n. 167, 167 Walpole, Robert (1676–1745) 15, 38, 129 n. 72, 133, 135, 144 Wanstead, Essex 189, 196 n. 52 Wargentin, Pehr Wilhelm (1717–83) 162 n. 201 wars effects of, assessments in the past 121, 142, 150, 155–7, 161 in general, effects 62–74, 110, 133 specific, effects see American Independence, war of; Austrian succession, war of; French Revolutionary war; King William’s War; Napoleonic wars; Seven Years War; Spanish Succession, war of Warwickshire 69 Wasse, Joseph (d. 1738) 126 wastelands 73 watchmen 247, 300 water supply 90, 92 Watson, Brooke (later 1st Bt.) (1735–1807) 198 Watson, Joshua (1771–1855) 214 Ways and means, chairman of 38, 100, 144 Webb, Beatrice and Sidney 30, 6, 9, 22–6, 33, 45–7, 80 Webster, Alexander (1707–84) 136 Wedderburn, Alexander (later Baron Loughborough, then 1st Earl of Rosslyn) (1733–1805) 35, 153 weights and measures 148 n. 147, 222, 263 see also legislation relating to Welshmen, and reformation of manners 191 n. 34 Wesley, John (1703–91) 166, 289, 294, 298 Westminster 68, 88, 90, 131, 209, 211, 287, 299, 310, 315 see also metropolis Westmorland 95 n. 47, 153 n. 166 Whitelaw, James (1749–1813) 171 Whitfield, George (1714–70) 17, 289, 290, 297, 326 n. 209 Whitworth, Sir Charles (c.1721–78) 144–5 Wight, Andrew (c.1719–92) 147, 152 n. 161 Wilberforce, William (1759–1833) 14, 34–5, 46, 156, 190 n. 33, 191 n. 35, 192–215 passim

364

General Index

Wilkes, John (1725–97) 15, 174, 272, 283, 288, 324, 336 n. 260 William III, King (1650–1702) 66 Williams, Robert (fl. 1760s) 314 n. 151, 315 n. 155 Williams, Thomas (fl. 1790s) 213 Willoughby, Sir Christopher (fl. 1787–1811) 208, 226 n. 149 Wilson, Jasper (pseud.), really James Currie (1756–1805) 156 Wilson, Thomas (1703–84) 132 Wiltshire 207 n. 93 Windham, William (1750–1810) 213–14 Wintringham, Clifton (c.1689–1748) 131 women, as activists 14, 112, 202 n. 75, 206, 217–18, 220, 335–6 status 17, 241

workhouses, general 30, 79, 159, 218, 220 n. 133, 224, 291 establishment of 30, 79, 88, 140, 185, 191, 224 see also information relating to York, archbishop of see Markham, William Yorkshire 95 n. 47, 97 n. 49, 126, 131, 200, 207 n. 93, 223 West Riding 188–9, 196, 208 see also Halifax; Leeds; Sheffield Young, Arthur (1741–1820) 146, 151, 152, 154, 159, 169, 170 see also Annals of Agriculture Zouch, Henry (c.1725–1795) 188–9, 196, 197, 208

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