nals, fled to this quarter. The attempts of the officers to arrest them were resisted by open violence. Every kind of crime was concocted with impunity and every conspirator knew where to look for daring and perfectly unscrupulous agents. It was not until 1723 that the Government ventured to grapple firmly with this great evil. An Act making it felony to obstruct the execution of a writ, and enabling the Sheriff of Surrey to raise a posse comitatus for taking by force debtors from the Mint finally removed this plague-spot from the metropolis, and put an end for ever in England to that right of sanctuary which had for many generations been one of the most serious obstructions to the empire of the law.'

Another and still more important step was the measure which was carried in 1736 for the proper lighting of the streets. Up to this date London was probably in this respect behind every other great city in Europe. The lighting was done by contract, and the contractors, by a singular arrangement, agreed to pay the City 600l. a-year for their monopoly. In return for this they were empowered to levy a rate of 68. a-year from all housekeepers who paid poor rate, and from all who had houses of over 10l. per annum, unless they hung out a lantern or candle before their doors, in which case they were exempt from paying for the public lamps. The contractors were bound to place a light before every tenth house, but only from Michaelmas to Lady Day, and then only until midnight, and only on what were termed dark nights.' The light nights' were ten every month from the sixth after the new moon till the third after the full moon. The system was introduced at the end of the reign of Charles II., and was then a great improvement, but it left the streets of London absolutely unlighted for far more than half the hours of darkness. Under such conditions the suppression of crime was impossible, and few measures enacted during the eighteenth century contributed more to the safety of the metropolis than that which was passed in 1736 enabling the Lord Mayor and Aldermen to erect glass lamps in sufficient numbers throughout London, to keep them lighted from the setting to the rising of the sun, and to levy a considerable and general rate for their maintenance. More than

1 Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, iii. 127-128.

15,000 lamps are said in a few years to have been erected, and it was calculated that, while under the old system London was only lit by public lamps for about 750 hours in the year, under the new system it was lighted for about 5,000.1

Yet, in spite of this great change, street robberies continued for some years to increase, and the inefficiency of the watchmen, and the great multiplication of the criminal classes under the influence of gin, were constant subjects of complaint. The great novelist Fielding, when driven by narrowed circumstances to accept the office of Bow Street magistrate, did much both to call attention to and to remedy the evil. Under the direction of the Duke of Newcastle, he and his brother, who succeeded him in his post, instituted a new police, consisting of picked men who had been constables, and who were placed under the direct control of the Bow Street magistrates. A very remarkable success rewarded their labours. The gang which had so long terrified London was broken up; nearly all its members were executed, and the change effected was so great that Browne, writing in 1757, was able to say that the reigning evil of street robberies has been almost wholly suppressed.' 2 At the same time a serious attempt was made, at once to remove the seeds and sources of crime, and to provide a large reserve for the navy, by collecting many hundreds of the destitute boys who swarmed in the streets, clothing them by public subscription, and drafting them into ships of war, where they were educated as sailors.3 The policeforce soon became again very inefficient, but the condition of London does not appear to have been at any subsequent period as bad as in the first half of the eighteenth century, though the country highways were still infested with robbers. The early Hanoverian period has, indeed, probably contributed as much as any other portion of English history to the romance of crime. The famous burglar, John Sheppard, after two marvellous escapes from Newgate, which made him the idol of the populace, was at last hung in 1724. The famous thief-taker, Jonathan Wild, after a long career of crime, being at last convicted of returning stolen goods to the rightful owner without prosecuting the

'Maitland's Hist. of London, i.

565-567.

2 Browne's Estimate, i. p. 219.

Sir John Fielding on the police of 1753.

thieves, which had lately been made a capital offence,' was executed in the following year, and was soon after made the subject of a romance by Fielding. The famous highwayman, Dick Turpin, was executed in 1739. Another well-known highwayman named M'Lean is said to have been the son of an Irish Dean and brother of a Calvinist minister in great esteem at the Hague. He had a lodging in St. James's Street; his manners were those of a polished gentleman, and the interest he excited was so great that the day before his execution in 1750 no less than 3,000 persons visited his cell. The weakness of the law was also shown in the great number of serious riots which took place in every part of the kingdom. The Porteous riots and the riots against the malt-tax in Scotland, the Spitalfields riots directed against Irish weavers, and the numerous riots occasioned by the Gin Act, and at a later period by the system of turnpikes and by the preaching of the Methodists, were the most remarkable, while the characteristic English hatred of foreigners was shown by a furious disturbance in 1738 because French actors were employed at the Haymarket, and some years afterwards by the sacking of Drury Lane theatre because Garrick had employed in a spectacle some French dancers. Outrages connected with smuggling were in many parts of the kingdom singularly daring and ferocious, and they were often countenanced by a large amount of popular sympathy.3 In Hampshire a gang of deer-stealers, known as the Waltham Blacks, were in the reign of George I. so numerous and so audacious, that a special and most sanguinary law, known as theBlack Act,' was found necessary for their suppression.*

Another crime, strikingly indicative of the imperfect civilisation of the country, was the plunder of shipwrecked sailors, who were often lured by false signals upon the rocks. In some of the Northern countries of Europe, till a comparatively recent period, the law expressly permitted the inhabitants to seize, as a prize, any property that was wrecked upon their coast. In will be found in Harris's Life of Hardwicke.

The goods were stolen, and as soon as a reward was offered restored by a confederate.

2 Horace Walpole to Mann. Aug. 1750. Walpole had himself been robbed by M'Lean. Some curious particulars of the crime of this period

England, without any such permission, it became a prevalent custom. At the close of the seventeenth century Defoe mentions that many Englishmen had been sacrificed abroad in resentment for these barbarities, and he tells us how, when a ship of which he was himself a shareholder was sinking on the coast of Biscay, a Spanish ship refused to give any assistance, the captain declaring, that, having been shipwrecked somewhere on the coast of England, the people, instead of saving him and his ship, came off and robbed him, tore the ship almost to pieces, and left him and his men to swim ashore for their lives while they plundered the cargo; upon which he and his whole crew had sworn never to help an Englishman in whatever distress he should find them, whether at sea or on shore.'1 About the middle of the eighteenth century the crime increased to an enormous degree on many parts of the British coast.2 In order to check it a law had been passed in the reign of Anne and made perpetual under George I., making it felony, without the benefit of clergy, to do any act by which a ship was destroyed, fining anyone who secreted shipwrecked goods treble their value, and enabling the authorities in every seaport town to take special measures for the relief of ships in distress, and in case of success to exact a certain sum from the owners as salvage. It was ordered that this act should be read four times yearly in all the parish churches and chapels of all seaport towns in the kingdom. It proved, however, utterly insufficient, and in the administration of Pelham the plunder of a shipwrecked or distressed vessel was made a capital offence.5 Notwithstanding this enactment, however, the crime was by no means suppressed. It was the especial scandal of Cornwall. In visiting that county in 1776, Wesley learnt that it was still as common there as ever; he severely censured the connivance or indifference of the gentry, who might have totally suppressed it, and he also found the custom very general on the western coast of Ireland."

12.

3

Wilson's Life of Defoe, i. 209. 2 Coxe's Life of Pelham, ii. 272. 12 Anne II. c. 18; George I. c.

Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, iii. pp. 39-41.

26 George II. c. 19. • Wesley's Journal, Aug. 1776.

A Swedish ship being leaky put into one of our harbours. The Irish, according to custom, ran to plunder her. A neighbouring gentleman hindered them; and for so doing demanded a fourth part of the cargo. And this, they said, the law allows.' -Wesley's Journal, June 1760.

revenue.

grown

The long list of social reforms passed under the Pelham ministry may be fitly closed by the Marriage Act of Lord Hardwicke, which put a stop to those Fleet marriages which had become one of the strangest scandals of English life. Before this Act, the canon law was in force in England, and according to its provisions the mere consent of the parties, followed by cohabitation, constituted, for many purposes, a valid marriage; and a marriage valid for all purposes could be celebrated by a priest in orders at any time or place, without registration and without the consent of parents or guardians. Stamped licences were indeed required by law, but not for the validity of the contract, and their omission was only punished as a fraud upon the In such a state of the law atrocious abuses had up. A multitude of clergymen, usually prisoners for debt and almost always men of notoriously infamous lives, made it their business to celebrate clandestine marriages in or near the Fleet. They performed the ceremony without licence or question, sometimes without even knowing the names of the persons they united, in public-houses, brothels, or garrets. They acknowledged no ecclesiastical superior. Almost every tavern or brandy shop in the neighbourhood had a Fleet parson in its pay. Notices were placed in the windows, and agents went out in every direction to solicit the passers by. A more pretentious, and perhaps more popular establishment was the Chapel in Curzon-street, where the Rev. Alexander Keith officiated. He was said to have made a very bishopric of revenue' by clandestine marriages, and the expression can hardly be exaggerated if it be true, as was asserted in Parliament, that he had married on an average 6,000 couples every year. He himself stated that he had married many thousands, the great majority of whom had not known each other more than a week, and many only a day or half a day. Young and inexperienced heirs fresh from college, or even from school, were thus continually entrapped. A passing frolic, the excitement of drink, an almost momentary passion, the deception or intimidation of a few unprincipled confederates, were often sufficient to drive or inveigle them into sudden marriages, which blasted all the prospects of their lives. In some cases, when men slept off a drunken fit, they heard to their astonishment that, during its

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