ABSTRACT
In the view of the most authoritative overview of transportation to America, the North produced relatively few transportees, less than a tenth of the total for England and Wales. A number of factors may have contributed to this. In part, because of the absence of subsidies for areas outside London and the Home Counties at the outset of the 1718 Act, its implementation in the remoter corners of the country was not promoted by the use of central government resources.1 Consequently, local authorities may have been reluctant to undertake such expensive punishment unaided, although they had no choice about paying for those transported from the assizes. Also, local justices may have agreed with Henry Field-ing’s view that transportation, possessing “such an appearance of extreme severity”, was an unsuitable penalty for petty thieves.2 Nevertheless, transportation was promoted within the criminal law, as a direct punishment for theft and as an alternative to execution when the condemned were reprieved, and continued to feature in repeated legislative measures against vagabonds, for example in the 1744 Vagrancy Act. The 1718 Act, it has been said, represented as significant a development in English criminal justice as any later legislation on imprisonment: it arose from a period of unprecedented revision of the criminal law. In southern England its primary impact was in the decline in the convenient fictions of benefit of clergy, and instead of branding and discharging convicts the courts transported them. The preceding legislation of the later Stuarts had increased the severity of punishments for burglary and shoplifting, and had been directed particularly at servants and the young. The 1718 Act provided a means of allowing convictions for such offences with the possibility of reprieving the more deserving or vulnerably innocent cases.3 No local quarter sessions or assize could remain unaware of the national framework, although the reputation of some counties for severity in using wholesale transportation may suggest that there were considerable
variations.4 In the North-East, between 1718 and 1800, transportation was the final destiny for more than half of those convicted of thefts at the assizes, and about a sixth of thieves convicted at the quarter sessions; thieves made up the large majority of the transportees throughout the century (90%, including Berwick, in fact).5 If there was a shortage of northern transportees, it may have had as much to do with the relatively low crime rates as with sentencing policies, though this may have been an additional factor too, as we shall see. One proviso is needed, however, with reference to any attempt to describe the role of the region within a national picture: while the figures derived from John Howard’s survey are fairly accurate, those gathered in the early nineteenth century are not based on a full listing of North-East transportees, for they are a serious underestimate of those known to have been sentenced and transported from the region. More archival research will be needed before a full assessment of the contribution of the North to transportation is possible.6
