Eighteen were for burglary and eighteen for forgery

I am currently reading a book by P.D. James (the mystery writer) and T.A. Critchley, The Maul and the Pear Tree, written in 1971 and recounting and reconstructing a brutal set of murders, the Radcliffe Highway murders which occurred in 1811 in dockside London.

James and Critchley paint the picture of the slowly emerging conditions of law enforcement in this period in Britain when virtually all policing occurred at the parish level with only a couple of formalized police forces (all in London) with any sort of routine patrolling responsibilities. They also mention the slowly emerging effort to begin tracking crime.

The people of East London were poor, uneducated and often violent, yet atrocious murder was comparatively uncommon and England had an enviable reputation in Europe for the lowness of its murder rate. In 1810, for example, the first year for which returns were made to the Home Office, broken down by offenses, there were sixty-seven executions, but only nine of these were for murder. Eighteen were for burglary and eighteen for forgery. The figures reflect the low rate of murder detection, but the ratio is significant. Offenses against property were far more common and were as ruthlessly punished as offenses against the person.

Eighteen people executed for forgery? Almost inconceivable. Having lived in Australia for a number of years and with the importance of transport and egregious punishment of property crimes so much a part of their history, I was familiar with this almost incomprehensible aspect of British history. One of the interesting things that James and Critchley do well in The Maul and the Pear Tree is to paint a picture of the day-to-day lives of the people of London in 1811. What is perfectly clear is that virtually everyone, even the moderately prosperous merchants, lived close to starvation and catastrophe. Existence was hand-to-mouth in a fashion which we can theoretically conceptualize but find it hard to really comprehend. When the theft of your loaf of bread meant going hungry for a day or when the making off with your tool box might mean the loss of your livelihood, shelter and food for your family, things begin to come into focus. When 80% lived at the edge of starvation, and most the rest lived within a couple of weeks of disaster, then the reasons for the apparent barbarism of the age begin to become clearer. Property crimes had the capacity to incapacitate or extinguish life to almost the same degree as a physical assault - it begins to make a kind of sense why the two actions - so distinct to us - were treated so similarly in that age.

With as much reading of history as I do, I have never seen this point made and in this instance it is really only an oblique aside to the main story line.

UPDATE: Hans Rosling is a Swedish statistician that does some great work with historical data. Here is a video that captures some aspect of the world's then poverty in comparison to today: 200 years that changed the world with Hans Rosling.