1 Zedner, L., Women, crime and custody in Victorian England (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; Finnegan, F., Poverty and prostitution: a study of Victorian prostitutes in York (Cambridge, 1979)Google Scholar; Walkowitz, J., Prostitution and Victorian society: women, class and the state (Cambridge, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Hammerton, A. J., Cruelty and companionship: conflict in nineteenth-century married life (London, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Conley, C.; The unwritten law: criminal justice in Victorian Kent (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; Doggett, M., Marriage, wife-beating and the law in Victorian England (London, 1992).Google Scholar For recent early modern research see for example Kermode, J. and Walker, G. eds., Women, crime and the courts in early modern England (London, 1994).Google Scholar Crime issues have received some coverage in textbooks on women in early modern England; see Lawrence, A., Women in England 1500–1760: a social history (London, 1994), 254–71.Google Scholar

2 Beattie, J., Crime and the courts in England 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar; Beattie, J., ‘The criminality of women in eighteenth-century England, Journal of Social History 8 (1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clark, A., Women's silence, men's violence. Sexual assault in England 1770–1845 (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Clark, A., ‘Humanity or justice? Wife-beating and the law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, in Smart, C. ed., Regulating womanhood (London, 1992)Google Scholar; Hunt, M., ‘Wife-beating, domesticity and women's independence in eighteenth-century London’, Gender and History 4 (1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the lack of textbook reference see Hill, B., Women, work and sexual politics in eighteenth-century England (Oxford, 1989).Google Scholar

3 Beattie, , Crime, 237–43Google Scholar; Beattie, , ‘The criminality of women’, 80–116.Google Scholar See also King, P., ‘Crime, law and society in Essex 1740–1820’ (unpublished PhD. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1984), 141–7Google Scholar; Pole, S., ‘Crime, society and law enforcement in Hanoverian Somerset’ (unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Cambridge, 1984), 139Google Scholar; Heidensohn, F., Women and crime (London, 1985), 5–10.Google Scholar

4 Beattie, , Crime, 239Google Scholar; King, , ‘Crime, law and society’, 142Google Scholar; both indicate that in Southern England women appeared more frequently among the accused the nearer the area was to London. Between 1660 and 1800, 24 per cent of property crime offenders at the Surrey quarter sessions and assizes were women; the equivalent figure for Sussex was 13 per cent. The percentages at the assizes were generally lower, because only major crimes were involved, but the differentials remained the same. Data on 1782–1787 and 1799–1800 reveal the following female percentages among the accused - Surrey 14.7, Kent 11.6, Essex 9.0, Herts 7.8, Sussex 6.8. National data on all felonies tried at borough sessions, quarter sessions and assizes in 1805–1807 indicate that 28.76 per cent of offenders in England and Wales were female. In Middlesex the figure was 38.86 per cent - see Essex Record Office (hereafter ERO), Q/SBb 412 (1807), and Neild, J., State of the prisons in England, Scotland and Wales (London, 1812), 639.Google Scholar Comparable figure for 1805–1850 can be found in Rudé, G., Criminal and victim: crime and society in early nineteenth-century England (Oxford, 1985), 60–1.Google Scholar

5 The Old Bailey Session Papers (hereafter OBSP) are the basis for example of Langbein, J., ‘The criminal trial before the lawyers’, University of Chicago Law Review 45 (1978), 265–316.CrossRefGoogle Scholar They also form the basis of much more problematic work on the ‘decline’ of female offenders; see Feeley, M. and Little, D., ‘The vanishing female: the decline of women in the criminal process, 1687–1912’, Law and Society Review 25 (1991), 719–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), HO 26/1–2. The sample runs from October 1791 to September 1793 (i.e. two full court years). Those listed in the Newgate registers included not only those whose indictments were ‘found’ by the grand jury and who therefore went on to public trial but also those ‘discharged by proclamation’ because the prosecutor failed to turn up or because the grand jury brought in a verdict of ‘not found’.

7 Kermode, and Walker, eds., Women, crime and the courts, 4–5.Google Scholar

8 Female offenders almost certainly represented a higher proportion of those indicted at the Middlesex quarter sessions or at the general sessions than they did at the Old Bailey. Women represented 38.9 per cent of all indicted offenders in 1805–1807 (see note 4, above) but only 25.7 per cent of Old Bailey property crime indictments in 1791–1793.

9 Young offenders and those with young families to support generally attracted less harsh sentences. They may also have received more favourable treatment when the victim chose which court to prosecute in. By choosing a simple larceny charge and pursuing it at the quarter sessions level rather than at the Old Bailey prosecutors made it much more likely that the offender would receive a lesser sentence. See King, P., ‘Decision-makers and decision-making in the English criminal law 1750–1800’, Historical Journal 27 (1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for sentencing patterns by age.

10 The Home Circuit pattern is discussed in more detail in King, P., Crime, justice and discretion: law and society in Essex and south-eastern England 1740–1820 (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).Google Scholar

11 See Wall, R., ‘The age at leaving home’, Journal of Family History 3 (1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Snell, K., Annals of the labouring poor (Cambridge, 1985), 322–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wrigley, E. and Schofield, R., The population history of England 1541–1871 (Cambridge, 1981), 424.Google Scholar

12 Walker, N., Crime and punishment in Britain (2nd edn; Edinburgh, 1968), 30.Google ScholarFarrington, D. (‘Age and crime’, Crime and Justice; a Review of Research 8 (1986), 189–250)CrossRefGoogle Scholar links the modern age-crime curve to ‘decreasing parental controls, a peaking of peer influence… and then increasing family and community controls with age’. Similar forces can be seen to be at work in the period studied here, but discontinuities may be equally important or more so. For a wide-ranging and excellent discussion of continuities and changes in attitudes to, and experiences of, youth from the early modern period onwards, see Mitterauer, M., A history of youth (Oxford, 1991).Google Scholar

13 Landers, J. (Death in the Metropolis; studies in the demographic history of London 1670–1830 (Cambridge, 1993), 180)CrossRefGoogle Scholar indicates a 1.7 per cent increase in the proportion of London's population aged 10–19 between 1790–1809 and 1810–1829. The 1821 Census which provides age-structure data for the London and Middlesex populations divided by sex is from Parliamentary Papers (1822), XV, 197.

14 Blackstone, W., Commentaries on the laws of England (London, 1769), vol. 4, 22–4Google Scholar; Hanway, J., The defects of police (London, 1775), 59.Google Scholar

15 Blackstone, , Commentaries, vol. 4, 28Google Scholar; The Times, 15 and 27 January and 1 February 1785; OBSP, January 1792 and May 1792.

16 For a critique of the accuracy of indictments in earlier periods, see Cockburn, J., ‘Early-modern assize records as historical evidence’, Journal of Society of Archivists 5 (1975), 223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For data on marriage see Laslett, P., Family life and illicit love in earlier generations (Cambridge, 1987), 26–7Google Scholar, which calculated from early modern parish census data that less than 2 per cent of 15 to 19-year-old women and 71 per cent of 30 to 34-year-olds were married, and that only 7 per cent of 40 to 44-year-old women had never been married. Londoners married rather younger and were more inclined to marry at all; see Earle, P., A city full of people; men and women in London 1650–1750 (London, 1994), 160–2Google Scholar- but overall they followed the same pattern. Of the London women who gave their age at first marriage in their depositions 77 per had married before they were 30.

17 Earle, , A city full of people, 161Google Scholar; since the average age at marriage fell during the eighteenth century in the nation as a whole, these London figures may have been lower by the 1790s (see Wrigley, and Schofield, , The population, 423–4)Google Scholar. For the larger families produced by women marrying earlier and for national data on the small proportion never marrying, see Wrigley, E., ‘Marriage, fertility and population growth in eighteenth-century England’, in Outhwaite, R. ed., Marriage and society (London, 1981), 149 and 151.Google Scholar

18 Laslett, P. and Wall, R., Household and family in past time (Cambridge, 1972), 145CrossRefGoogle Scholar, the calculation for all females adjusted by removing those aged nine and under using the 1801 figures for female age structures in Wrigley, and Schofield, , The population, 121.Google Scholar

19 Figures 4, 8 and 9 are based on data for 1792 only (i.e., all court sessions from January to December) (PRO, HO 26/1–2).

20 See Earle, , A city full of people, 38–9Google Scholar; George, D., London life in the eighteenth century (Harmondsworth, 1966, 2nd edition), 145–57 (Young is quoted on p. 157).Google Scholar

21 Snell, , Annals, 15–103Google Scholar; Kussmaul, A., Servants in husbandry in early-modern England (Cambridge, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Langford, P., A polite and commercial people: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1991), 61–121Google Scholar; Hill, , Women, work and sexual politics, 128–9.Google Scholar

22 Hecht, J., The domestic servant in eighteenth-century England (London, 1980), 11–13Google Scholar;George, , London life, 120Google Scholar; Hanway, J., Advice from Farmer Trueman to his daughter Mary (Pontefract, 1805 edition), 165Google Scholar; OBSP, September 1792, prosecution of Mary Harrison whose place of birth was found in PRO, HO 26/1. For an excellent discussion of the insights that can be gained from the vagrancy records about the vulnerability of female migrants into London, see Rogers, N., ‘Policing the poor in eighteenth-century London - the vagrancy laws and their administration’, Histoire Sociale/Social History 24 (1991), 131–7.Google Scholar

23 PRO, HO 26/1–2.

24 Corfleld, P.The impact of English towns 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1982), 105Google Scholar; George, D., London life, 116–19 and 347Google Scholar; Landers, , Death and the Metropolis, 47Google Scholar; Earle, (A city full of people, p. 47)Google Scholar uses depositional evidence but comes up with fairly similar figures and suggests that London's migration field was expanding.

25 Earle, P., ‘The female labour market in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, Economic History Review 42 (1989), 344–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Earle, , A city full of people, 44 and 57.Google Scholar

26 Earle, , ‘The female labour market’, 345.Google Scholar

27 PRO, HO 26/1–2. For a discussion of gendered labelling, see Roberts, M., ‘Words they are women, and deeds they are men: images of work and gender in early modern England’ in Charles, L. and Duffin, L. eds., Women and work in pre-industrial England (London, 1985), 138.Google Scholar

28 Printed trial reports need, of course, to be treated carefully. They are not complete or balanced accounts. They were a commercial venture and sensational cases were therefore reported almost verbatim whilst the more mundane ones were sometimes only very briefly summarized. No direct indication was usually given of the occupation of the accused and, although it can frequently be inferred from the evidence, the cases in which it can be inferred are not necessarily a random sample of the whole. The following analysis is based on the OBSP for all eight sessions in 1792. For a critique of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, see Langbein, J., ‘Shaping the eighteenth-century trial: a view from the Ryder sources’, University of Chicago Law Review 50 (1983), 1–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Langbein, , ‘The criminal trial’, 265–315.Google Scholar

29 Of the Old Bailey 1792 reports 65 identified a work content. Of these 19 involved living-in servants stealing from their employers. In 4 more it is indicated that the accused was a living-in servant. Many of the 63 cases involving minor theft, burglary and so on in which the accused's occupation is not described may also have involved servants.

30 Quoted in Hill, , Women, work and sexual politics, 128.Google Scholar See also Moreton, A. (Daniel Defoe), Everybody's business is nobody's business (London, 1725), 8Google Scholar; Laslett, , Family life, 34Google Scholar; Kent, D. A., ‘Ubiquitous but invisible: female domestic servants in mid-eighteenth-century London’, History Workshop Journal 28 (1989) 111–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Earle, , ‘The female labour’, 343Google Scholar, for the dominance of domestic service amongst London women under 25 in the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth centuries. For a very similar pattern in the 1851 Census, see Schwarz, L., London in the age of industrialisation: entrepreneurs, labour force and living conditions, 1700–1850 (Cambridge, 1992), 46–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 OBSP, January 1792; The proceedings at the assizes… Surrey… July 1740, 8Google Scholar; Defoe, Everbody's business 9–11Google Scholar; Hill, , Women, work and sexual politics, 140.Google Scholar

32 OBSP, December 1792.

33 See Hill, , Women, work and sexual politics, 131–47Google Scholar; Roberts, , ‘Words’, 157Google Scholar; Earle, , A city full of people, 123–30Google Scholar for good accounts of the advantages and disadvantages of domestic service.

34 Meldrum, T., ‘London domestic servants from depositional evidence 1660–1750: servant-employer sexuality in the patriarchal household’Google Scholar (paper given at the ‘Words of the poor, lives of the poor, 1700–1850’ conference, University of North London, January 1995, and forthcoming in Hitchcock, T., King, P. and Sharpe, P. eds. Words of the poor, lives of the poor: poverty, authority and the strategies of the English poor, 1640–1840.)Google Scholar; OBSP, 12 1992Google Scholar; Beattie, , Crime, 173–5.Google Scholar

35 OBSP, March 1792.

36 Hecht, , The domestic servant, 24–5Google Scholar; Kent, , ‘Ubiquitous but invisible’, 115Google Scholar; for the companions, see OBSP, cases of Elizabeth Bates in February 1792 and of Martha Hall in October 1792.

37 In 1851 60 per cent of London servants were under 30; see Schwarz, , London in the age of industrialisation, 45.Google Scholar

38 Fielding quoted in George, London life, 119Google Scholar; Defoe, Everbody's business, 8.Google Scholar Part-time prostitution was also linked to the clothing trades. For the most thorough study available of the backgrounds of London prostitutes in this period, see Henderson, A., ‘Female prostitution in London 1730–1830’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, London University, 1992), 34–96.Google Scholar

39 In the 1792 reports 24 cases involved an allegation or, more usually, a defence that linked the alleged theft to prostitution. Not all those involved were necessarily full-time prostitutes but 4 other cases in which drunken men were robbed by women late at night may also have involved them. A bank clerk with a wife and six children who prosecuted the 18-year-old prostitute Sophia Tilly was told ‘t was a disgrace to come with such a prosecution into court’ (OBSP, December 1792). Only one of more than half a dozen prostitutes indicted at that sessions was found guilty. Risking public criticism by defence counsel probably made little sense to most victims and this form of theft was almost certainly left unprosecuted in the vast majority of cases for that reason. Men bringing prosecutions in such circumstances were, of course, motivated by a variety of agendas; see Linebaugh, P., The London hanged: crime and civil society in the eighteenth century (London, 1991), 340–1.Google Scholar

40 OBSP, March 1792.

41 McMullan, J., The canting crew: London's criminal underworld 1550–1700 (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1984), 117–42Google Scholar; Sharpe, J., Crime in early modern England 1550–1750 (London, 1984), 114–15Google Scholar, Henderson, , ‘Female prostitution’, 68Google Scholar; cases of Sarah Free and Sarah Lofts et al. OBSP, December 1992.

42 For a more detailed discussion of the various sources on the ages and single status of prostitutes, see Henderson, , ‘Female prostitution.’, 46–55Google Scholar: Henderson found that nearly a third of prostitutes convicted at the Old Bailey in 1790–1799 were 30 or over, but concluded that in general most prostitutes entered the trade in their late teens and early twenties and left within a few years. See also Speck, W., ‘The harlot's progress in eighteenth-century England’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1980), 138.Google Scholar

43 OBSP, May 1792, On London's unique receiving networks, see McMullan, , The canting crew 23–5 and 105–16Google Scholar, and Beattie, , Crime, 189–90.Google Scholar

44 OBSP, May 1792 (case of Mary Hodwell), October (case of Margaret Snow), December (case of Elizabeth Stevenson). Of the 19 shoplifting women whose ages can be traced, 58 per cent were aged 10–24, 42 per cent were aged 25–40.

45 OBSP, May 1792, case of Ann Young, a married woman aged 42 who worked at her employer's mill rather than at home; see George, , London life, 179–86.Google Scholar

46 Earle, , ‘The female labour market’, 339–43Google Scholar; Schwarz, , London in the age of industrialisation, 46–8Google Scholar; Earle, , A city full of people, 144–6.Google Scholar

47 OBSP, February and September 1792.

48 OBSP, September 1792, and case of Ann Thorn in October 1792; Hill, , Women, work and sexual politics, 150–61Google Scholar; Schwarz, , London in the age of industrialisation, 46–7.Google Scholar

49 See OBSP, December 1792, case of Ann Talbot, and see also case of Elizabeth Spring, an Irish-born shoplifter with four small children.

50 OBSP, March 1792; George, , London life, 173–4.Google Scholar

51 Schwarz, , London in the age of industrialisation, 15–23Google Scholar; Earle, , A city full of people, 115Google Scholar; Smith, R., ‘Some issues concerning families and their property in rural England 1250–1800’, in Smith, R. ed., Land, kinship and lifecycle (Cambridge, 1984), 69–71Google Scholar; Earle, , ‘The female labour market’, 337Google Scholar; Prior, M., ‘Women and the urban economy: Oxford 1500–1800’, in Prior, M. ed., Women in English society 1500–1800 (London, 1985), 93–7Google Scholar; Wall, R., ‘Some implications of the earnings and expenditure patterns of married women in populations in the past’, in Henderson, J. and Wall, R. eds., Poor women and children in the European past (London, 1994), 322.Google Scholar

52 Malcolmson, R., Life and labour in England 1700–1780 (London, 1981), 136–59Google Scholar; Snell, , Annals, 138–227Google Scholar; Humphries, J., ‘Enclosures, common rights, and women: the proletarianization of families in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, Journal of Economic History 50 (1992), 17–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Although they were under attack, the value of these customary rights remained substantial; see King, P., ‘Customary rights and women's earnings: the importance of gleaning to the rural labouring poor, 1750–1850’, Economic History Review 44 (1991), 461–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53 Earle, , A city full of people, 107–23Google Scholar; Schwarz, , London in the age of industrialisation, 22.Google Scholar

54 Earle, , A city full of people, 115–16Google Scholar; Rogers, , ‘Policing the poor’, 135.Google Scholar

55 Rogers, , ‘Policing the poor’, 131–7.Google Scholar

56 Ibid., 136.

57 War might also increase the vulnerability of women whose partners joined up but conversely might create labour shortages which made it easier for women to get certain types of work.

58 King, P., ‘The origins of “the problem of juvenile delinquency”: the growth of juvenile prosecutions in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, Criminal Justice History 14 (1993), 17–42.Google Scholar

59 Schwarz, , London in the age of industrialisation, 14.Google Scholar

60 For the Home Circuit age structures see King, , Crime, justice and discretion, chapter 6.Google Scholar

61 Farrington, , ‘Age and crime’, 200–1.Google Scholar