When Theft Was Worse Than Murder

The records of the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, tell the tale of one John Randal, who was tried on Sept. 9, 1674. He was charged “with two Indictments, one for Fellony for stealing several pieces of Plate, and other Goods…, and the other for Murder, Killing his House-Keeper.”

That his theft and his murder were described and tried together was natural for a world where the protection of property was a virtue at least on par with the promotion of human happiness. Nearly a hundred years later, in 1769, William Blackstone argued that it is quite reasonable to execute someone convicted of stealing “a handkerchief, or other trifle, privately from one’s person,” even though other crimes that involve goods of higher value are punished less severely.

Blackstone was writing the fourth and final volume of his Commentaries on the Laws of England, whose goal was to justify British justice using the most up-to-date moral reasoning found on the Continent.¹ His conclusion was that 18th-century British law was “so highly finished, it is hard to speak with that praise, which is justly and severely its due.” Two hundred and fifty years later, though, it seems to us a savage thing, preoccupied with property and violent retribution, including both torture and death, rather than any process of intervention, education, or rehabilitation.

It is the responsibility of the historian to reveal the nature and causes of those changes which, although imperceptible in real time, can shift our moral compass so dramatically over centuries. This work has always been done with the help of quantitative reasoning, from chronologies and maps to tabulations of the sizes