Causes of crime across the eras
Why Do People Commit Crime?
The causes of crime have never been simple. Across 1,500 years of British history, what drove people to break the law reflected the pressures of their age — hunger and poverty, religious conflict, economic dislocation and, more recently, the temptations and tools of the modern world. Understanding the causes of crime is not just about judging wrongdoers; it is about understanding the society that produced them.
Medieval Poverty and Survival Crime
In the medieval era, the great majority of people lived on the edge of subsistence. A failed harvest could tip a family from poverty into starvation within months. Petty theft — stealing food, livestock or tools — was overwhelmingly the most common crime, and much of it was driven simply by hunger. Famine years, such as the Great Famine of 1315–1322, saw theft rates rise sharply across England as communities struggled to survive. Warfare compounded the problem: armies marching through the countryside looted supplies and left devastated villages in their wake, pushing more people into desperate criminality.
The two dominant causes of crime in the medieval era were poverty — particularly famine and harvest failure — and the disruption caused by warfare. Petty theft of food and livestock was by far the most common offence.
Tudor Inflation and Economic Pressure
The sixteenth century brought new economic stresses. A dramatic rise in population — England’s population roughly doubled between 1500 and 1600 — pushed up the price of food and land. Wages, however, failed to keep pace, leaving the poor worse off in real terms. This period of inflation created widespread hardship. Many landlords also converted arable land to sheep pasture, requiring fewer labourers and driving thousands off the land. The displaced and unemployed drifted to towns, where they were feared as potential criminals. Parliament responded with a series of Poor Laws, but these created their own problem: to be in the wrong place without work was itself made a crime through vagrancy legislation.
The Protestant Reformation, beginning in England during Henry VIII’s reign in the 1530s, made religious belief a political act. Catholics who refused to attend the new Protestant church services faced recusancy fines and, at times, execution. Conversely, under Mary I (1553–1558), Protestants were burned as heretics. The same actions — attending a particular form of worship, owning a forbidden Bible translation, harbouring a priest — were crimes under one regime but virtuous acts under another.
Fears of witchcraft also intensified during this period. Economic hardship, religious anxiety and superstition combined to produce witch panics, particularly in the 1640s when Matthew Hopkins operated as Witchfinder General in East Anglia. Historians estimate that around 300 people were executed as witches in England between 1560 and 1680. These prosecutions reflected social tensions as much as genuine belief in the supernatural.
Industrialisation and Urbanisation
The Industrial Revolution, gathering pace from the 1760s onwards, transformed both the nature and the scale of crime. Rapid urbanisation created overcrowded cities where poverty was concentrated and traditional community controls broke down. In pre-industrial villages, everyone knew their neighbours; anonymous city life made it far easier to commit crime and escape detection. Towns such as Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds grew at astonishing speed: Manchester’s population rose from around 25,000 in 1772 to over 300,000 by 1850.
Rapid urban growth in the nineteenth century concentrated poverty, created anonymous communities and overwhelmed the old parish-based systems of law enforcement. These conditions made certain crimes — particularly pick-pocketing, prostitution and street robbery — far easier to commit than they had been in rural communities.
The disruption of traditional livelihoods also created collective crimes driven by desperation. The Luddite movement (1811–1813) saw framework knitters smash textile machinery in the Midlands and North of England — their livelihoods threatened by mechanisation. The Swing Riots of 1830 involved agricultural labourers destroying threshing machines across the south of England. These acts of disorder were crimes in law, but to participants they were legitimate protests against economic injustice. Both movements were suppressed with military force, with transportation and execution used as deterrents.
Twentieth-Century Pressures
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries new causes emerged. The rise of the motor car created entirely new categories of crime — speeding, drink-driving and vehicle theft. Consumer society generated new targets for property crime and fraud. The two World Wars disrupted social norms and left many ex-servicemen traumatised, contributing to rises in violent crime in the 1920s and 1940s. Drug-related crime grew from the 1960s onwards as heroin, cannabis and later cocaine became more widely available. More recently, the internet has produced cybercrime — fraud, identity theft and hacking — on a scale impossible for earlier generations to have imagined.
Throughout all these periods, continuities exist alongside the changes. Poverty has been a constant driver of crime from Anglo-Saxon England to the present day. Social exclusion, the absence of legitimate opportunity and the perception that the law serves the powerful have recurred as themes across every era. What changes is the form that crime takes, not the underlying human pressures that produce it.