Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century crime: highwaymen, smugglers and protest
A Society in Transformation
Between c1700 and c1900 Britain changed beyond recognition. The population roughly quadrupled. The Industrial Revolution drew millions from countryside to factory towns. Roads were turnpiked, canals cut, and from the 1830s railways began to bind the country into a single national market. New wealth in banks and warehouses created new things to steal; new kinds of work created new ways to protest. Crimes did not vanish — theft and assault continued — but new categories of crime appeared, and old ones (such as the witchcraft prosecutions abolished in 1736) faded away. This lesson examines three: highway robbery, smuggling, and the criminalisation of trade-union activity that produced the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
Highway Robbery: Rise and Fall
Highway robbery peaked in the early eighteenth century. Long stretches of unlit road between towns gave armed men on horseback the chance to stop coaches at pistol point and demand purses, watches and jewellery. The most famous — Dick Turpin, hanged at York in 1739 — was in life a violent burglar and horse thief; the romantic legend of the ‘gentleman of the road’ was largely a Victorian invention.
By the 1830s and 1840s highway robbery had collapsed as a serious problem. Several changes explain this. Turnpike trusts produced better-lit, busier roads, with more passing traffic and toll-keepers. Banking reforms, especially the spread of bank notes and cheques in the early 1800s, meant travellers carried less gold and silver. Mounted patrols, set up by the Bow Street Runners under the Fielding brothers, swept the main roads out of London. Above all, railways — from the 1830s — allowed long-distance travellers to move faster than any horse, and entirely off the road network. The conditions that had made highway robbery possible were systematically dismantled.
Students who lean on Victorian novels often glamorise highwaymen as polite, well-dressed robbers who only stole from the rich. The reality was harsher. Most highwaymen were violent: they threatened, beat and sometimes killed their victims. Dick Turpin himself was a member of the Essex Gang of farm-burglars who tortured householders to find hidden money — not a romantic hero. The legend grew after his execution because cheap printed broadsides made ‘gentleman of the road’ ballads sell. Treat highway robbery as a serious property crime, not as folklore.
Smuggling and Social Crime
Smuggling grew rapidly in the eighteenth century because the government raised customs duties on tea, brandy, lace and tobacco to fund foreign wars. By the 1780s smuggled goods were so common in coastal counties — Cornwall, Sussex, Kent — that local communities cooperated openly with the gangs that landed them. Whole villages benefited: tea drunk in a Cornish kitchen had often crossed the beach the night before. The state regarded smuggling as a serious crime; many local people regarded it as a tolerable way of dodging unfair taxation.
Historians describe this as social crime — crime in law that is accepted, or even popular, in the wider community. Poaching of game on landowners’ estates was social crime in the same sense: the 1723 Black Act made poaching of deer or game while disguised a capital offence, but most rural villagers regarded a snared rabbit as legitimate winter food. Smuggling declined sharply after the 1840s, when free-trade reforms — begun by Sir Robert Peel in the 1840s and carried further by William Gladstone in the 1850s — cut customs duties on imported goods. With the profit margin gone, the trade collapsed.
Smuggling and poaching were ‘social crimes’: serious in law but tolerated or supported by local communities. Smuggling thrived because eighteenth-century customs duties were high; it collapsed after free-trade reforms in the 1840s removed the profit.
The 1736 Witchcraft Act: Crime Re-defined
A different kind of change is illustrated by the end of witchcraft prosecutions. The 1736 Witchcraft Act repealed the older 1604 Act and re-defined the offence: it was now a crime to claim magical powers as a fraudster, not to actually be a witch. By 1736, judges in central courts had largely stopped accepting the kind of evidence Hopkins had relied on, and educated opinion regarded witchcraft prosecutions as embarrassing. The Witchcraft Act 1736 thus marks a turning point — not a change in human behaviour but a change in what the state would call a crime. By 1900 even the new Act was being used only against fortune-tellers and was finally repealed in 1951.
Students often assume that the 1736 Act marked a moment when British people, top and bottom of society, stopped believing in witches. The reality is more uneven. Educated judges and lawyers had grown sceptical decades earlier. Belief at village level lasted much longer; informal accusations and even attacks on supposed witches continued in some areas into the early nineteenth century. The 1736 Act reflected a shift in legal opinion among the elite, not in popular belief. The point to make is that legal change came before popular change.
Trade Unions and the 1797 Unlawful Oaths Act
The 1799 and 1800 Combination Acts banned workers from combining to demand higher wages. They were repealed in 1824, partly because Parliament accepted that combinations were inevitable in industrial society. After 1824 trade unions were therefore legal in Britain. Yet they remained politically suspect, especially after the 1832 Reform Act had given the vote to middle-class men but not to working-class men. Local landowners and magistrates feared that unionised farm labourers would demand higher wages and refuse to work; in 1832 Earl Grey’s Whig government, with Lord Melbourne as Home Secretary, was already alarmed by rural unrest.
The Tolpuddle Martyrs, 1834
In the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset, six farm labourers led by George Loveless agreed in 1834 to form a ‘Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers’. Their aim was to keep wages from being cut from seven shillings a week to six. As part of joining, members swore a secret oath of loyalty to one another. The local landowner James Frampton denounced them to the government. They were arrested under the Unlawful Oaths Act of 1797 — an obscure law originally aimed at naval mutineers — not for forming a union, which was already legal.
At their trial in March 1834, the six men were sentenced to seven years’ transportation to Australia. They became known as the Tolpuddle Martyrs. The harshness of the sentence triggered a national protest campaign: a London demonstration in April 1834 was reported as 100,000 strong, and a petition gathered 800,000 signatures. The pressure paid off. In 1836 the men were granted a free pardon by the new Whig government, and most returned to Britain by 1838. The case became a landmark in trade-union history: not because it expanded the law — the prosecution had been an old-law manoeuvre — but because it galvanised public sympathy and made the labour movement politically respectable.
Trade unions had been legal since 1824. The Tolpuddle Martyrs were therefore prosecuted under an obscure 1797 Unlawful Oaths Act, not for forming a union. They were sentenced to seven years’ transportation in 1834 and pardoned in 1836 after a national protest campaign.
What Changed, and Why
Across this period, the underlying picture is the same: definitions of crime change as society’s priorities change. Highway robbery declined because better roads, banking reform and railways made it impractical, not because moral attitudes against robbery changed. Smuggling declined because lower customs duties removed the profit, not because villagers suddenly judged it immoral. Witchcraft was decriminalised because educated legal opinion shifted; popular belief lagged behind. Trade-union activity moved from secrecy and prosecution (1797–1834) to public respectability (after 1836) because the politics of organised labour, not the law itself, changed. The list of crimes is always partly a portrait of who holds power.