ABSTRACT
Crime for our generation has become a commonplace. Conditioned by a bombardment of criminal ‘statistics’, we tend to regard a soaring crime rate and the attendant debates on law enforcement, capital punishment and gun control as the peculiar monopoly of, and to some extent the natural price for, our modern industrialized society. Renaissance Englishmen were no less preoccupied with the prevalence of crime and with fears of lawlessness and disorder. William Lambard, the influential Kent magistrate, echoed the preambles to a dozen sixteenth-century statutes when he lamented in 1582 that ‘sin of all sorts swarmeth and evildoers go on with all licence and impunity’. Historians have in general accepted this broad impression of a violent and increasingly delinquent society. Much of the indictment evidence tends to support those generalizations which sought to explain property crime in socio-economic terms.
