London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800

Product Information

London Lives is a major digital edition of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on the poor and crime. The Old Bailey Online is a digital edition of “the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published”, containing reports of almost 200,000 trials held at the Old Bailey between 1674 and 1913. Sources and Data Poor rate, St Anne King Square ward east (1784), City of Westminster Archives Centre, A/326; Poor rate, St Anne King Square ward west (1784), City of Westminster Archives Centre, A/327; Poor rate, St Anne Leicester Fields ward east (1784), City of Westminster Archives Centre, A/328; Poor rate, St Anne Leicester Fields ward west (1784), City of Westminster Archives Centre, A/329. St Botolph Aldgate, Pauper Examination Book, 1765-68, London Metropolitan Archives, Ms. 2676/4, LL ref: GLBAEP10309, Tagging Level: A Westminster poll books (1780), London Metropolitan Archives: St Margaret and St John WR/PP/1780/1-3; St Anne WR/PP/1780/4-5; Anon., Copy of the poll for the election of two citizens to serve in the present parliament for the City and Liberty of Westminster (1780).

Nicholas Rogers, Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century London: The Vagrancy Laws and Their Administration, Histoire Sociale / Social History, 24 (1991), pp. 127-47. ⇑ For a discussion of the Bristol Corporation see Mary Fissell, Patients, Power and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 4. ⇑ From the 1770s, Bridewell became subject to increasing criticism from the City of London and prison reformers. As with other London prisons, reformers were concerned that prison life corrupted rather than reformed the prisoners, and the apprentices who mixed with them. There were suggestions that the apprentices might be better trained elsewhere, such as the London Workhouse, and that Bridewell should be turned solely into a disciplinary institution. Although the number of arts masters training the apprentices was reduced towards the end of the century, the apprentices remained until 1827. St Clement Danes, Examinations Book, 1752-1753, Westminster Archives Centre, Ms. B1175, LL ref: WCCDEP35811, Tagging Level: BSt Clement Danes, Examinations Book, 1747-1749, Westminster Archives Centre, Ms. B1172, LL ref: WCCDEP35804, Tagging Level: B Anon., The poll book, for electing two representatives in parliament for the City and Liberty of Westminster (1818). Poor rate, St Anne King Square ward (1749), City of Westminster Archives Centre, A/189; Poor rate, St Anne Leicester Fields ward (1749), A/190.

various documents related to bastardy examinations (bastardy bonds, registers of poor children, etc) The passage of the Act for the better Regulation of the Parish Poor Children (1767), sponsored by Jonas Hanway, which required that all parish children under the age of four should be nursed in the countryside at least three miles from London and Westminster, also encouraged the development of a sub-set of contract workhouses, known as baby farms. 17 It was at a farm of this sort that the infant Oliver Twist was confined and starved. In the case of Surnames, the metaphone matching facility excludes the initial letter of each name from its phonetic analysis. This was done on the grounds that the first letter of most name instances is the letter which is most consistently transcribed. We have also excluded consideration of the final two letters of any name where these include the letter s. Substantial testing of the system illustrated that the greatest spelling variance occurred at this location in names of this sort. In the City of London itself the majority of foundations took place in the 1730s, with a series of larger establishments concentrated in the parishes without the walls. These included houses in Christ Church Newgate Street (1729), St Dunstan in the East (1730), All Hallows Honey Lane (1731), St Andrew Undershaft (1733) and St Bartholomew the Great (1737). 9 The registers of boys recruited in the Marine Society between 1770 and 1804. Most entries provide an occupation for the boy's closest relative (often the father) and the boy himself (these occupations have been standardised). This provides good evidence of the types of work available to poor families, and shows the extent of intergenerational continuity in the occupations followed by fathers and sons.Poor rate, St Clement (1784), City of Westminster Archives Centre, B/203; Poor and highway rate, St George Conduit Street, Dover Street and Out wards (1784), City of Westminster Archives Centre, C/361; Poor and highway rate, St George Grosvenor Street and Brook Street wards (1784), City of Westminster Archives Centre, C/380; Poor, highway and scavenger rate, St Margaret Grand ward (1784), City of Westminster Archives Centre, E/504; Poor, highway and scavenger rate, St Margaret Absey ward (1784), City of Westminster Archives Centre, E/505; Poor, highway and scavenger rate, St John (1784), City of Westminster Archives Centre, E/506; Poor rate, St James (1784), City of Westminster Archives Centre, D/105; Poor rate, St Martin (1784), City of Westminster Archives Centre, F/584; Poor rate, St Mary (1784), City of Westminster Archives Centre, G/190; Poor rate, St Paul (1784), City of Westminster Archives Centre, H/112. Event ID: Unique identifier for each event. Searching for this number within this dataset will allow you to find all the individuals connected to a single event. Records which provide narratives of short episodes in daily life, such as are found in the trial narratives of the Old Bailey Proceedings and in depositions and examinations kept in the Sessions Papers (PS) and Coroners' Inquests (CI), often describe working practices. This is particularly true when an injury or death related to a workplace accident or dispute. In addition, the Registers of Admissions (RH) of St Thomas's Hospital include the victims of workplace accidents, with very brief descriptions of their injuries. Within the City, beadles were long-established ward officers. The office was a full-time job with a salary, and many served in the post for years, sometimes also acting as constables. Many had subordinates, called warders, who acted as their assistants. Their responsibilities included a range of policing activities: organising and supervising the night watch; controlling crowds; prohibiting the sale of goods on Sundays; prosecuting nuisances; arresting and prosecuting prostitutes, beggars and vagrants; and even arresting men and women on more serious charges. The Minutes of the Bridewell Court of Governors (MG) include many men and women accused of petty offences who had been committed directly by ward beadles (from 1785, however, beadles lost the power to make commitments on their own).

Subject Person ID: Unique identifier for the individual recorded in this entry as the subject of a baptism, marriage, or burial. To what extent did the London poor engage in multiple forms of employment over the course of their lives? Plebeian Lives and the Making of Modern London, 1690 to 1800 (since re-named London Lives), used recent technical advances in the creation and anWhen John Fielding took over Bow Street following his half-brother's death, he further developed these practices by establishing Bow Street as a central collection point for information about serious crimes which occurred all over the country. An alphabetical register was kept of all crimes and prosecutions, along with a register of stolen goods. Information about stolen goods and wanted criminals was widely circulated, leading eventually to the creation of the Police Gazette. Westminster poll books (1788), London Metropolitan Archives: St Margaret and St John WR/PP/1788/1-3; St Paul and St Martin-le-Grand WR/PP/1788/4; St Anne WR/PP/1788/5; St James WR/PP/1788/8; St Martin WR/PP/1788/15-18; St Clement and St Mary WR/PP/1788/20-21; St George WR/PP/1788/23. Included in this data series are 56,430 names of individual male ratepayers, including their street of residence and the name of their parish. A rateable value– the notional annual rental value of the house – is also given to the nearest pound.

St Clement Danes, Examinations Book, 1749-1750, Westminster Archives Centre, Ms. B1173, LL ref: WCCDEP35805, Tagging Level: B St Clement Danes, Examinations Book, 1776-1779, Westminster Archives Centre, Ms. B1184, LL ref: WCCDEP35808, Tagging Level: A The first step of the projects was to locate and reshape relevant source material in London Lives and Old Bailey Online into new datasets that enable different kinds of exploration and analysis using digital tools. The new datasets are shared under Creative Commons licences for re-use by other researchers. Petitions St Botolph Aldgate, Pauper Examination Book, 1773-75, London Metropolitan Archives, Ms. 2676/8, LL ref: GLBAEP10314, Tagging Level: A

Authors

Beattie, John M. Early Detection: The Bow Street Runners in Late Eighteenth-Century London. In Emsley, Clive and Shpayer-Makov, Haia eds, Police Detectives in History, 1750-1950. Aldershot, 2006, pp. 15-32. St Botolph Aldgate, Pauper Examination Book, 1788-90, London Metropolitan Archives, Ms. 2676/18, LL ref: GLBAEP10300, Tagging Level: Aa O’Gorman, Frank. Voters, Patrons and Parties: the Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England, 1734-1832. Oxford, 1989. In the following document types, only a proportion of the documents have been tagged for locations linked to names (those tagged at level Aa). For an explanation and comprehensive listing of the mark-up applied to different documents, see Tagging Levels. St Botolph Aldgate, Pauper Examination Book, 1752-57, London Metropolitan Archives, Ms. 2676/2, LL ref: GLBAEP10307, Tagging Level: Aa