Why they stole: women in the Old Bailey, 1779-1789 - Old Bailey Sessions Papers

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1999 by Lynn MacKay

Why did women steal? In his answer to this question for early-modern England, John Beattie noted that women turned to theft "for the same reason men stole in this period - largely as a means of survival, as a way of supplementing inadequate wages or of supplying the most basic wants."(1) While need was undoubtedly a major factor in most female theft, the motivations of these women were actually quite complex, and in some ways differed significantly from the reasons men had for stealing. As Garthine Walker has recently pointed out, "the dynamics of female criminality ... reveal a far more complex and instructive view of gendered experience than historians of crime have hitherto acknowledged."(2) The differences between male and female theft surfaced with respect to what they stole, but were even more apparent when the social contexts in which plebeian women and men operated are considered. These contexts, in turn, had a crucial impact on the motivations each sex had for stealing.

The complexity of women's motivations can be seen through an examination of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers from the 1780s. This was a seminal decade in the development of modern attitudes toward crime and punishment. There was a huge and sustained increase in the number of individuals charged with theft during these years (see Table One), and not surprisingly, the decade has figured prominently in historical studies of changing crime rates. Many upper-class contemporaries were deeply concerned, and a number of social commentators began to call for an overhaul, particularly to the system of punishment. Crime - especially theft - was thought to be a very serious social problem.(3)

There were also major difficulties in this period: 1780 to 1782 were, of course, war years. When the American War ended in 1783 some 130,000 soldiers and sailors were very rapidly demobilised. As well, 1782 and '83 saw poor harvests, and in the latter year an economic slump and high food prices made life difficult for many in the labouring classes. Toward the end of the decade there was another period of economic difficulty which peaked in the crisis of 1788.(4) This was made worse by severe weather, particularly in the winter of 1788-89 when a frost lasted from November until January and the Thames froze over.(5) According to L.D. Schwarz, real wages in London fell by just over 11 per cent between 1780 and 1790.(6) This was, without doubt, a difficult decade for many on the bottom rungs of the income ladder.

The Old Bailey Sessions Papers (hereafter OBSP) constitute one of the few verbatim accounts we have of eighteenth-century trials.(7) The figures in the analysis that follows are based on the legal year which began in December.(8) The OBSP are not complete trial transcripts; discussions of legal points were often truncated or omitted altogether. As the decade wore on and the number of indictments rose, there are more and more of what John Langbein has called 'squibs.'(9) These very truncated accounts, usually of more minor cases, could consist of little more than the charge, the verdict and the sentence. Nevertheless, there are in each year a more than sufficient number of cases - never fewer than 190 males and 89 females - containing the statements of prosecutors, witnesses and defendants to make viable the kind of analysis I propose to do.(10)

Table 1

THEFTS IN THE 1780S

YEAR                  MALES           FEMALES           TOTAL

1779-80(*)             227               214             441
1780-81                324               195             519
1781-82                355               214             569
1782-83                525               230             755
1783-84                738               211             949
1784-85                752               202             954
1785-86                699               216             915
1786-87                648               227             875
1787-88                538               175             713
1788-89                631               174             805

                     5,437             2,058           7,495

* These dates refer to the legal year which began in December.

Various theft charges have been included in this analysis: stealing, stealing from a dwelling house, from bleaching grounds, from ships, stealing privily (which includes picking pockets and shoplifting), horse theft, sheep stealing, as well as burglary and housebreaking. Since robbery was almost always accompanied by assault charges, these offences have not been considered in the tabulations that follow, although at certain points robbery will be discussed. Finally, counterfeiting charges have also been excluded since these offences often seem to have been committed by professional gangs.(11)

The characteristics of women's theft were both similar to and different from male patterns. As Garthine Walker has shown for an earlier period, the assumptions that women were for the most part the helpmates of male criminals and that they stole goods of lesser value than did men, simply do not hold.(12) In the first place, the propensity to form criminal associations was virtually identical for both sexes. If the decade is treated as a whole, 28.7 per cent of both male and female thieves acted with accomplices. Obviously women were not any more likely to act in consort with others than were their male counterparts. Indeed, if robberies are added to the other kinds of theft under consideration, then males were more likely to act in collusion with others. Including robbery, 37.1 per cent of males and 32.3 per cent of females acted in association with others.(13) Nor were women likely to take items of lesser value than were male thieves.(14) Women were a little less likely to steal items valued at less than 10s. than were men, a little more likely to take things valued from 10s. to [pounds]10, and then, finally, less likely to steal items worth more than [pounds]10. In all, two-thirds of both men and women pilfered goods valued up to 40s.(15)