Bettany
Meanwhile, at the Public Record Office, Rob Davey is searching for information on his criminal ancestors. Reference books help him find his way through a mass of transportation records and now he's having some success. Among the reels and reels of microfilm, Rob finds references to all three ancestors, saying when they were sentenced and on which ships they were sent to Australia. Robert Forrester, John Cobcroft and Richard Ridge. But he can't find the information he most wants - details of the crimes of John Cobcroft and Richard Ridge.

Rob
Now that I've gone into it a little bit and I've started to find some information, I really want to find out what their crime was. Basically, I need to know.

Bettany
The hunt is on, and Rob sets off to the London Metropolitan Archives, home of London's historical records.

I'm in London too, looking for one of the city's oldest prisons. People were punished here for reasons it's hard for us to understand today.

For 300 years, there were prisons on this site in Clerkenwell, Central London. Their main business came to be the incarceration of debtors, one of the few groups of people who were locked up for long periods of time. The debtors shared the prison with people who were just passing through, the suspects awaiting trial.

One of those prisoners was the notorious London thief, Jack Shepherd. In 1724, Shepherd was held here on suspicion of stealing a pocket watch but he managed to stage a Houdini-esque escape. He enjoyed a brief period of freedom before he was re-captured, convicted and then hanged at Tyburn. Throughout the 1700s, the number of crimes for which you could be hanged rose steeply. Even stealing fruit from a tree became a capital offence. The men who were passing these laws in parliament were men of property. The men and women they were aimed at had virtually nothing.

To find out more about the London hanged, I've met up with historian, Ruth Paley. Ruth tells me that the best place to find individual stories is at the Guildhall Library in the City of London.

Ruth Paley
This is the Old Bailey sessions proceedings which is a sort of journalistic pamphlet account of the crimes and the evidence that was given in court.

Bettany
And so it's something that general members of the public would have bought?

Ruth
Yes, this is essentially your 18th century equivalent of ‘True Crime Monthly’. It comes out in small pamphlets, priced four pence, and it's sold on the streets and in various stationers’ shops around London. You have use it in a back-to-front sort of way if you're looking for people who were hanged because, at the end of each session, you do get an overview of the sentences - who was sentenced to death, who was sentenced to transportation, who was sentenced to be whipped. You don't get a sense of whether their sentences were actually carried out and that's particularly important for capital cases because not all those who were sentenced to death would actually hang.

And at the end of this overview we get this little sentence here, John Guest, Tom Smith, and William Beckwith, capitally convicted last sessions, and Robert Tilling, this sessions, were executed on Monday 28th April last. That's April 1760. Here we have an account of Robert Tilling, who stole because he needed some money to impress his girlfriend. He's about 23 years old. He wanted to marry a pious and godly young woman, as he describes her. She wasn't having anything to do with someone who was a mere servant and he had to look as though he was earning rather more money.

Bettany
What are the crimes of the other people?

Ruth
Well, if we go on backwards through this, we come to Beckwith's case. Beckwith was tried for a number of offences. The one he was convicted on was for stealing from an old couple in Hackney. He broke into the house, held the old lady up. In her testimony she said they "rifled and jostled me about and bid me not talk and took three half pence and four farthings out of my pocket, they took them and hit me a blow on the side of my head. I thought they'd beat my brains out. I said don't use me and I'm old enough to be your grandmother".

Bettany
And then what's this bit in brackets?

Ruth
The bit in brackets is an interjection from the short-hand writers. The prosecutor and his wife were a remarkably ancient couple.

Bettany
So the prosecutor is the victim in this case?

Ruth
Yes, that's how 18th century prosecutions worked. You didn't have a Crown Prosecution Service or any kind of professional prosecution service. If you were the victim of a crime and you were fortunate enough to find who had done it, you had to prosecute them yourself.

Bettany
And what about the crimes of the other men who were condemned?

Ruth
Guest and Smith, they're accused of breaking and entering a dwelling house belonging to William Howells, and they stole from there 30 pairs of silver shoe buckles, six pairs of knee buckles and four silver stock buckles.

Bettany
Now why has William Howells got 30 pairs of silver shoe buckles in his house?

Ruth
Well, he's living over his shop. He goes on to describe what happened: "About five in the morning on second of this instance, I heard a noise in my house and when I came down I found the window shutter of my shop was taken down and I saw a hand picking out my buckles at the end of the window".

Bettany
And so what does he do when he sees? Obviously he's in the middle of being robbed.

Ruth
Well, he said "I had no opportunity of laying hold of the hand, the window being glazed on the inside as well without. I called up to my wife and desired her to open the dining room window and call the watch, which she did".

Bettany
Who were the watch?

Ruth
The watch is specifically the force that patrols the streets at night to keep an eye out for crime and disorder.

Bettany
And I presume from this "Guilty, Death" that's the sentence that they got.

Ruth
Yes, that's the sentence. These four we know are going to be executed so they go off back to Newgate to await their journey to Tyburn.

Bettany
These days, the crowds come to Oxford Street to go shopping. In the 1700s, they came for a very different reason - to see the prisoners as they were paraded to the gallows at Tyburn.