CKIME AND PUNISHMENT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 219 with them from England had been put on board their ships, so to speak, like the salt pork and the weevilly flour ; and they had to make the best of them. Bad as they were, they f^^^ ^^^ were still the laws of England, and the punishments which "»port®d. they entailed on offenders were not — as they often appear to be — ^the inventions of malignant gaolers, but the de- liberate judgment of the Legislature. Long after Phillip had retired from the scene of his struggles, the laws which imposed the terrible sentences then in vogue remained in force in England. It was a capital offence, for instance, to ^Jj^ pick a pocket — ^technically called " stealing privately from the person "; a capital offence to steal privately in a shop goods to the value of five shillings ; to steal goods to the amount of forty shillings in a dwelling-house or on a navi- gable river; to steal linen from a bleaching-ground ; to break and enter a dwelling-house ; to steal a letter ; to steal a horse, an ox, or a sheep ; to be found begging, if a soldier or a sailor ; to return to England after having been trans- ported, if the term had not expired ; to destroy any tree, plant, or shrub in a garden ; to hunt any deer unlawfully; to appear armed, or with the face blacked or otherwise disguised, in any forest, warren, or place where hares or rabbits were usually kept, or on any high road, open heath, or common. The great number of offences of this descrip- tion which had been declared to be capital felonies seems to have astonished even Blackstone, who loved to extol the Biackstone. humanity of the laws of England. He pointed out in 1769 that ^' among the variety of actions which men are daily liable to commit, no less than one hundred and sixty have been declared by Act of Parliament to be felonies without benefit of clergy.'^*
- Commentaries, 2nd ed., toI. iv, p. 18 ; post, p. 545. The class of
offenders usually executed at T]^burn may be gathered from the following : — '* Yesterday morning, about nine o'clock, the following malefactors were brought out of Newaate and carried to Tyburn in three carts, where they were executed according to their sentences, viz. : — Henry Berthand, for feloniously personating one Mark Groves, the proprietor of £100 three i>er cent, annuities, and transferring the same as if he was the real owner thereof ; William Jones, for stealing in a warehouse, in Aldersgate-street, Digitized by Google
