Author’s Note
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Author’s NoteAt the beginning of the 19th Century the penalty for robbery of any sort was very severe. A person was hanged for “privately stealing in a shop, warehouse and coachhouse or stable to the amount of five shillings.”
Poaching a hare or a pheasant meant as a merciful sentence, transportation in a convict ship to New South Wales, for seven years.
The prisons were filthy shambles, the police were inadequate, badly organised and poorly paid, which meant they were often corrupt.
A boy arrested for minor pilfering could be sent to prison, flogged, then turned out without a penny in his pocket.
Select Committees set up in 1817 produced numerous petitions to Parliament but the Reform Bill was many frustrating years ahead.
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