Guilty to the Value of Ten Pence

For a century and a half, English juries kept thieves off the gallows by writing down a price everyone in the room knew was false. In 1833 a peer stood up in the House of Lords, said so, and produced a count. This page checks his count against all 197,751 trials in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, and finds that 91.4% of every value a jury ever stated is one of four numbers, each sitting one step below a line that carried a death sentence.

Artificial Wasteland · 28 July 2026 · source: the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913

On 28 June 1780 Richard Dorrell stood at the Old Bailey accused of stealing five iron bayonets from the Tower. The armourer who identified them was asked what they were worth. "Pretty near two shillings," he said, "rather under that." Pressed again, at a low valuation: "not more than one shilling, as they are damaged." The jury then returned its verdict, and the clerk wrote it down:

GUILTY of stealing to the value of 10 d. Old Bailey Proceedings, t17800628-3

Ten pence. Not eleven, which would have served just as well arithmetically. Ten. The line that mattered ran at a shilling: above twelve pence the theft was grand larceny, a felony that carried death at common law, and below it the theft was petty larceny, which did not. The jury had not valued the bayonets. It had chosen a side of a line and then worked backwards to a number, and the number it worked back to was the one juries had been working back to since before anyone in that room was born.

Blackstone had already given the practice its name, eleven years earlier, in the Commentaries:

It is true, that the mercy of juries will often make them strain a point, and bring in larciny to be under the value of twelvepence, when it is really of much greater value: but this is a kind of pious perjury, and does not at all excuse our common law in this respect from the imputation of severity, but rather strongly confesses, the charge. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book IV, ch. 17 (1769)

So the phenomenon is not a discovery. It was visible to everyone at the time, and Old Bailey Online, whose transcription this page is built on, says so plainly on its own background pages: "In many cases the reduced value of the goods was blatantly implausible, but the jury engaged in such 'pious perjury' with broad judicial and public support in order to save lives."

What follows is the measurement. Where exactly the false numbers fall. How far they sit from the true ones. Which number a given defendant received, and why that one. What happened on the day Parliament moved the line. And, at the end, a check against the only other person known to have counted this, who did it by hand in 1833.

Four numbers

Take every value a jury stated in a verdict anywhere in the corpus. Not a sample: every one the printed record contains, 5,388 of them across 240 years. Then count how often each exact number appears.

These are not prices. They are the places you could stand and not be hanged, and they correspond one to one with Acts of Parliament. A fifth number, 9s, appears 48 times and belongs to a threshold that vanished in 1691.

Notice also how far under each line they sit. The 1699 shoplifting Act bites at "the Value of Five Shillings or more", so 4s 11d was safe; juries wrote 4s 10d. Blackstone puts petty larceny at goods "to that value, or under" twelvepence, so a shilling itself was safe; juries wrote ten pence. A number chosen to be just barely legal would hug the line. These numbers are not hugging a line. They are a formula, handed down.

The same goods, priced twice

The obvious objection is that stolen property in eighteenth-century London might simply have been worth about ten pence rather often. The corpus answers this itself, because every one of these trials contains a second valuation of the very same goods: the one in the indictment, sworn by the prosecutor before the trial began.

In the 1,992 trials where both numbers survive, the prosecutor's valuations spread across 165 distinct values and carry 5.34 bits of information. Their commonest figures are 2s, 1s, 5s and 10s, which is what a distribution of real prices looks like: round, broad, unremarkable. The jury's valuations of the identical goods, in the identical trials, use 29 distinct values and carry 1.45 bits. Four numbers cover 96.3% of them.

The jury's price for a stolen coat conveys less than a third as much information as the prosecutor's price for the same coat, because it is not a price. It is a verdict wearing a price's clothes. Where the two disagree, the median markdown is 6.5×. The largest is a 1689 indictment laying goods at £37 against a jury that found the thief guilty "to the value of 10 d.": a markdown of 888×.

The instrument

Set the dials yourself. Above the axis, in blue, is what prosecutors alleged the goods were worth. Below it, in gold, is what juries said. The red lines are the statutory thresholds. Nothing here is modelled or smoothed: each bar is a count of how many times that exact number of pence appears in the printed record. Values above 120 shillings are off the end of the axis; they are 3.2% of all stated values.

Which number you got depended on which Act was hanging over you

This is the part that closes the case, and it needs no statistics beyond counting. The thresholds were not general. Each belonged to a specific statute covering a specific offence, and Blackstone lists them in a single passage: benefit of clergy is denied "1. In all larcinies above the value of twelvepence, from a church, or from a dwelling-house, or booth, any person being therein … 3. In all larcinies to the value of 40 s. from a dwelling-house, or it's outhouses, without breaking in … 4. In all larcinies to the value of 5 s. from any shop, warehouse, coachhouse, or stable."

So if the numbers were habit, or roundness, or the price of second-hand cloth, every kind of thief would attract the same figures. If they were the law, a shoplifter and a housebreaker standing before the same jury in the same week would get different numbers.

A pickpocket gets 10d and essentially never 39s. A shoplifter gets 4s 10d or 10d and, across the entire corpus, is given 39s exactly once. A defendant charged with theft from a dwelling house gets 39s, and after 1827 gets 99s. Same court, same juries, often the same afternoon. The number tracks the statute and nothing else.

1827: Parliament moved the line, and the number moved with it

The cleanest experiment in the corpus was run by Parliament. The Larceny Act 1827 (7 & 8 Geo. 4 c. 29) provides at section 1 "That this Act shall commence on the First Day of July in the present Year", abolishes the distinction between grand and petty larceny at section 2, and at section 12 makes it capital to "steal in any Dwelling House any Chattel, Money, or valuable Security to the Value in the whole of Five Pounds or more; every such Offender, being convicted thereof, shall suffer Death as a Felon."

Five pounds is a hundred shillings. A jury genuinely appraising goods would not notice. A jury reverse-engineering a number from a threshold would have to move, and would have to move on a particular Tuesday.

The last sitting at which every such verdict still went to 39 shillings was 31 May 1827. The first at which a jury wrote 99 was 12 July 1827. The statute took effect between those two dates. By the following year the older number was gone entirely.

The prosecutors, meanwhile, were pulling the other way. Under the old Act an indictment had to allege 40 shillings or more to reach the capital charge at all, and in dwelling-house cases between 1713 and 1826 the value 40s appears in indictments 217 times against 5 for 39s. One shilling, contested from both ends of the courtroom: the prosecutor puts the goods at forty, the jury puts them at thirty-nine, and the shilling between is a man's life.

Somebody else counted this, in 1833

On 2 August 1833 the House of Lords debated robberies in dwelling houses. Lord Suffield rose to argue that the severity of the law was corrupting the juries administering it, and he had done the arithmetic:

Such a state of the law induced Juries to violate their oaths. He held in his hand a list of 555 perjured verdicts delivered at the Old Bailey in fifteen years, beginning with the year 1814, for the single offence of stealing from dwellings, the value stolen being in these cases sworn above 40 s., but the verdicts returned being to the value of "39 s. only." If required, he could produce the name of every one of these 555 prisoners … It deserved remark, that when the Legislature raised the sum to 5 l. in June, 1827, the Juries at the same time raised their verdicts to 4 l. 19 s., still keeping it low enough to save the offender's life. Lord Suffield, HL Deb 2 August 1833, vol 20 cc277–83

Fifteen years beginning with 1814 is 1814 to 1828. Counting the same charge over the same window from the printed Proceedings gives 524, which is 94.4% of his figure. Two counts of the same thing, made 193 years apart, one by a peer working from court records with a clerk and a pen and the other by a machine reading a marked-up corpus, and they agree to within six per cent.

The gap is the right size and points the right way. Of those 524, the printed Proceedings state the figure 39s in 349 and give no value at all in 152, because the printed accounts are abridged and often drop the number the manuscript record would have carried. Suffield, working from the records rather than the pamphlet, would have had them all. He also says he could name "every one of these 555 prisoners"; the trials behind our 524 verdicts carry 617 defendants between them.

His arithmetic is not flawless. He offers 11,064 jurymen alongside the 555 verdicts, and those two figures cannot both describe twelve men on each of 555 juries, which would be 6,660. We have not been able to reconstruct what he was counting.

Four months earlier, in the Commons, Mr Lennard had made the same observation without the list:

Under the old law, Juries were in the habit, in a great number of cases, of finding the property stolen under the value of 40 s.—namely, 39 s. And what did they do now? Why, they found it to the value of 99 s. Mr Lennard, HC Deb 16 April 1833, vol 17 cc156–78 em-dash-ok

Which is exactly the shift plotted above, described from the floor of the House of Commons six years after it happened, and confirmed here to the sitting of the court. Lennard is not right about everything: he gives the housebreaking evasion figure as 4s 11¾d, and the printed Proceedings show that number four times in 240 years while the actual mode for housebreaking is 4s 10d.

What the shilling bought

Restrict to trials that leave no room for ambiguity: theft from a dwelling house, while the 40-shilling threshold stood, with exactly one offence, one verdict and one sentence recorded, so the sentence is unmistakably the consequence of that verdict on that charge.

The comparison is not a controlled experiment and should not be read as one: a partial verdict removed the mandatory death sentence as a matter of law, so the near-zero figure on the left is close to definitional, and juries chose whom to spare, which is selection of the strongest kind. The number that carries the weight is the one on the right. 40.5% is what waited for a defendant the jury did not extend the formula to. Four in ten went to the gallows list.

When the reason went, the practice went

If the four numbers were a custom of valuation, dismantling the Bloody Code would leave them untouched. If they were a device for defeating the death penalty, they should die when the death penalty for theft died.

At its height in the 1720s, 63.1% of all guilty theft verdicts at the Old Bailey were partial verdicts of this kind. Nearly two convictions in three came with a fictional price attached. The practice then declines for a century as capital statutes are repealed one by one, and after 1834 it stops. Not tapers: stops. In the 20,338 guilty theft verdicts of the 1840s there is not one.

Which is the whole argument, made by the data rather than about it. A custom does not end on a date. A workaround ends when the thing it was working around is gone.