You’ll see the post immediately below is my contribution to the Old Bailey Session Papers symposium. I’ve been enjoying reading the other contributions – do follow the link and check them out. They include other pieces that might be generally described as “social history”, like mine, and also a quite astonishing piece of statistical work for those who prefer numbers.

I didn’t want to get distracted from the point in my main post, but what was noticeable, as I conducted the research for mine, was how hard the Old Bailey juries tried to avoid reaching verdicts that would result in the death penalty. Frequently burglary charges were downgraded by say concluding that 4am was not “in the night” and therefore the charge could not be burglary, or coming to the same conclusion because a homeowner could not swear that a door or window had been locked. That’s in addition to the well-known practice of greatly downgrading the actual value of the stolen goods.

In Penny Richard’s piece there is the case of a man acquitted of stealing a ring because of mental disability, caused by medical and personal problems; in Sharon Howard’s an account of an arson case: “In the 1737 trial of John Wright it emerged that he had told the examining JP that “he had been in a melancholy Way, and that he did this [i.e, started the fire], in Order to be Hanged he seemeÂ’d to be in a very heavy dull Condition, and said, he wanted to get out of this Life.” This was corroborated by other witnesses and John was acquitted.” (Shows that the “death by police” practice about which there was a panic a couple of years ago is nothing new.)

But overall, despite the prevalence of the death penalty, the impression is certainly of juries trying to be as merciful and humane as they could possibly be, and recognising the circumstances that diminished responsibility.

Rather good for your faith in human nature, really.

This post (which is very long – sorry – on Blogger you can’t put things under the fold, at least as far as I know) is part of the Old Bailey Session Paper Symposium, which has been organised by Jonathan of The Head Heeb.

On August 23, 1676, what was reputed to a long criminal career of a “young” woman, Martha Harman, was cut short. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey online record that she had “broke open a house at Islington; a Crime rarely attempted by that Sex”. (u16760823-1) An alternative account (t16760823-1) says that she had gone to Islington with two “Gronies”, and at midnight they tried to use to use a picklock to break into a dwelling within a house in which the mother of one lived. (The record is not entirely clear, but it seems likely the ringleader, whose mother’s house it was, was Martha. The names of the other two are not recorded.)

This failed, so they went to the mother and got from her a key, which they used to lever open a casement. Then,

Whilst one stood ready at the Window to receive the Booty, and the other was very advantageously posted in the Street, to give notice to the Attacquers, if any Alarm hapned. They stole a considerable quantity of Linnen and Cloaths, and had done more mischief, had they not been frighted with a noise, as if somebody were stirring in the Chamber; however they got away safe, but with such unlucky haste, that they left the Key in the Room, which the Woman of the house next Morning finding, and knowing it to be her Neighbours, whose Daughter was noted to be of an ill repute, she seized them upon suspicion; and they in effect confessed the Fact before the Justice: but the Jury found only two Guilty, so that their Scout was acquitted.

Despite the suggestion of Martha being a hardened criminal, she hardly fits our profile of such. And the comment of the Old Bailey recorder of burglary being a rare crime for women seems to fit with modern statistics.

But I was interested in early modern women burglars, after learning about possibly the most famous of them – Mary Frith, as she styled herself, although she’s better known as “Moll Cutpurse”. She first makes an appearance on the criminal record living up to that traditional tag: On August 26, 1600, she and two other women were indicted for snatching “a purse kept in a breast pocket and containing 2 shillings and 11 pence from an unknown man at Clerkenwell”. The court records that she confessed, but the 15-year-old Mary and her companions were found not guilty. Two years later she was again in trouble, suspected of taking of purse containing 25 shillings.

But then her criminal career seems to have turned more serious. (Or she finally got caught.) The Surrey Assizes recorded a charge that on September 8, 1609, “Frythe, Mary of St Olave, Southwark … burgled the house of Alice Bayly at St Olave and stole £7 7s in money, two gold angels, a gold 20-shilling piece, 2 gold half-crowns, a gold ring (6s) and 2 crystal stones set in silver (20d)”. Quite a haul. Moll, however, escped with a not guilty verdict (not as surprising as it sounds, for juries were reluctant to convict women for capital offences). She went on to a lively career and died in a comfortable bed in her old house in old age.

But in her memoir*** (The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith), Mary makes no mention of this. She proud explains her link with the “cutpurses”, although claims to have always been a fence rather than a practitioner; she admits to being a bawd (for men and women she says), but on burglary, nothing. That set me wondering: why would she leave this out of the highlights of her life? Then, further, was she exceptional in being a female burglar? (I hadn’t read of any others.)

The perfect tool for answering at least the second question was readily at hand, in the form of the Old Bailey online (about which I wrote for The Times a few years ago, while seeking my criminal “relatives”). So I set to work on the nicely intuitive search engine. (It has definitely improved since the last time I used it.)

The search was for the crime of burglary, between the start of the records in 1674 and December 1693 (to stay broadly within Mary Frith’s period), and for female defendants. That produced 128 results. (A comparable search for males produced 457 – not so great a difference as I had expected.)

Not all of these, however, are accused of being what you might describe as the traditional “burglar” – the person breaking into a house and taking what they find. A number of cases are more complicated, such as that of Margaret Slath (t16840515-19), whose employer, the distinctly uncharitable Minister of Elin, claimed “when four Men, in the Dead of the Night, broke in and Rifled his House, that he had found her to be so ill a Woman, he greatly Suspected she let in the said Thieves, or left the Door open for them”. Happily Margaret was acquitted, and one assumes she found a new job. The accusation against her seems, however, to have been a common one. (Another example is Martha Tanner t16870406-32.)

So, I went through those 128 cases to identify those that seems to fit a “traditional” burglary charge – the breaking into a house or shop (not a distinction that always means much in this period) and taking away of valuables. I excluded those where so little information is provided that it is hard to get any idea of what happened, or even allegedly happened, (e.g. t16760510-8). Those in which the women seem to have been taken up simply because they were with male sexual partners when they were arrested (often no evidence is provided against them and they are acquitted on that basis) I also excluded. Of course they may well have been as, or more, involved, than their men, but there seems to be no way of recovering that now. To some extent one has to trust the juries to have made reasonable judgements, and in general it seems from the surviving evidence that they did so.

For what I primarily wanted to do was get a sense of how women burglars operated – whether they had “careers”, whether they tended to use particular tactics, or target particular sorts of victims, whether they worked alone, or in all-female or mixed gangs. I came up with 33 crimes in which it seemed reasonably clear what had happened. Of those cases, in 14 the women appeared to be working with men (often their sexual partners), in eight cases two or more women were working together, in nine cases they appeared to be acting alone, and in two cases there were accomplices whose sex was unknown.

Given the limitations of the data (and the fact that the vast majority of crimes in London were unsolved, so the criminals who got caught might not be representative), I’m not going to make too much claim for those figures, but nonetheless, they do suggest that women burglars were far from just accomplices of men, but acted independently, alone or with female compatriots.

Some were so inept that it is tempting to think they were simply desperate women who hardly cared if they got caught or not. The case that comes to mind is that of Anne Miller, who on November 2, 1691 broke through a door and snatched some clothing, but was seen by a man sitting by the fire. As defences go her “she was troubled with the Falling Sickness, and so fell into the house, the door being opened”, unsurprisingly didn’t stand up.

Some seem to have been pure thugs, such as Margery Yoel (t16831212-27), who with another woman (“both disguised in Mens Clothes”) broke into the house of Edward Stone “a poor ancient Man that lived alone” and by threats extracted from him everything of value that he owned. Other cases, like that of Martha Harman with which this article began, were perhaps more youthful larks gone wrong, possibly fueled by alcohol.

But there are cases that look calculated, and might well have generated large profits, enough indeed to support a “career” in burglary. Thomazine Tally (t16871012-21), who seems to have worked alone, was convicted for three thefts of items of considerable value – typical targets for burglars from silverware to clothing. Abigail Hansley and Ruth Night (t16900115-22) were well on the way to robbing a rich clothing shop, equipped with picklocks and a “dark Lanthorn” (common equipment for such endeavours) when disturbed, while Ruth Herne (t16920629-8) had developed her own modus operandi, of breaking glass to get at keys kept inside, then using those to gain access to premises.

So broadly it seems that, perhaps more so than today, burglary was a crime that women could turn to in a wide range of circumstances, and for reasons ranging from desperation to taking up a “profession”. It was, if not an equal opportunity “career”, certainly an option available to female criminals. I concluded that in being a female burglar Mary Frith was unusual, but not so singular as she was in other aspects of her life. That, and the fact that a real contempt for burglars comes through in the text of the Old Bailey records, probably explain why she did not include any reference to this aspect of her life in her memoirs.

Footnotes
* J.S. Cockburn (ed) Calendar of Assize Records Home Circuit Indictments Elizabeth I and James I, HMSO, London, p. 56.
** ibid., p. 113.
*** There are debates about how “authentic” this memoir is. This is not the place to discuss it, but I believe the main section of it to broadly be the product of her dictation.

More about Mary Frith online:
The Case of Moll Frith:
Women’s Work and the “All-Male Stage, Natasha Korda
The Newgate Calendar

A small piece of good news from India on the subject of women:
COUPLES in the western Indian state of Gujarat have added a promise to avoid “female foeticide” to their wedding vows amid growing concern about the effects of selective abortion on the balance between the sexes.
… The decision of the Patels, influential in Gujarat’s diamond industry, to publicise the new vows was remarkable. The state now has only 878 girls aged six and under for every 1,000 boys.
Economic theory would suggest that shortage should push up the “value” of girls – perhaps this effect is showing, at least a little. And most importantly, that might lead in them being treated better.
****
A lovely internet fairy tale, except it is real: a 62-year-old Sussex grandmother starts an internet giant.

JacquieLawson.com, which is gearing up for Valentine’s Day, is the market leader in online greetings cards. Lawson spends weeks designing each card.
Their gentle humour and musical backing have proved so popular that, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, Jacquie Lawson.com had 22.7 million visitors in December, more than double that of its closest rival, AmericanGreetings.com. The success has turned Lawson into a millionaire several times over.

Confess I’ve never heard of it, but then it is not really my sort of thing … Anyway, good on her!

To what was supposed to be a Historical Association talk on People Power, Past and Present this afternoon, but unfortunately that had been cancelled, so we got Victorian War Correspondents instead – still, did learn what to do should I ever decide to take up the trade: make sure you have one camel just to carry your whisky and soda, as did one correspondent, or another employed a female porter who carried 50-60lb of alcohol. The correspondents were never going to run dry. (Not much has changed then.)

The Marxist concept of false consciousness has had a lot of bad press over the past century or so, but you have to wonder just what the one in six Londoners planning to buy a new car who want a 4×4[SUV] are thinking.

Even motorists in Scotland, who faced harsher weather and rougher roads than are found in the capital, were less likely to invest in a four-wheel drive vehicle, with only one in 10 planning to buy one.

Looking around the roads, it strikes me that 4x4s are going the way of Burberry – it is the wealthy working class who are increasingly buying them as a fashion accessory. The problem is that is a large group, to add to the already traditional “Chelsea tractors” (middle-class mothers on the school run) and “suits” – men in white-collar jobs living out some “he-man” fantasy.

There are, I think two answers to this: 1. tax the hell out of them – reflecting the real cost to the amenity of London; 2. Mock the hell out of them, and make them unfashionable.

In related news, a pair of blackbirds (which normally mate in March) have succeeded in raising a clutch of young in the Wirral through mid-winter. That might soon be the breeding season for all birds, since an historical study shows the northern hemisphere’s climate is now the warmest since at least 800AD. (And the study only stops there since that is where the data stops.)

Ten of the 14 records were based on tree-ring data, which went back as far as 800AD, one measured ice cores from Greenland, one involved historical documents from Europe and one covered the chemical composition of sea shells on the east coast of the US. The final set of records came from China and Japan and used a variety of records, from ice cores to historical documents.

… to remind yourself to get in your nominations for the next Carnival of History, which will be here on February 15 – not very far away.

I’m particularly looking for celebrations of women’s lives – and we’ve lost several feminist icons in the past few weeks, so you shouldn’t be short of ideas for subjects. They just need to be written with a broadly historical approach.

But if you’ve written a neat little post on any other subject, then please do send that along to, whether it be about Neanderthals, (yes I consider “history” to include “prehistory” – since I don’t think it has got a carnival of its own), Nigeria or No Man’s Land.

Update: Sorry, forgot to include the nomination address: natalieben AT journ DOT freeserve DOT co DOT uk. (But any other of my addresses will find me.)