Mondays and Fridays were the great days for bullock-hunting, an inhuman and brutal sport that throve in the neighbourhoods of Hackney and Bethnal Green, with the sanction, if not with the connivance, of the peace officers of those parishes. The procedure of the bullock-hunters was as follows. A fee having been paid to a cattle drover, an animal was selected from his herd, peas were put into its ears, sticks pointed with iron were driven into its body, and the poor beast, when mad with rage and pain, was hunted through the streets with a yelling mob of men, women, and dogs behind it; the weavers left their looms to join in the pursuit, and passers-by continually augmented the crowd, until the exhausted victim could no longer be goaded into any shew of resistance or movement, when it was left to die where it fell, or when sufficiently recovered, to be removed to some butcher's slaughter-house. On Sundays the favourite resort was a field adjoining Bethnal Green Church, and here some hundreds of men and boys assembled during the hours of divine service, to indulge in less exciting games, such as dog-fighting and duck-hunting. On holidays and fair-days these Saturnalian proceedings grew more outrageous than ever. In a letter descriptive of the occurrences that used to take place at an annual fair held in the West-end of London, which the Receiver of the Metropolitan Police wrote to Lord Rosslyn in 1831, occurs the following passage: "It will hardly be credited that within five or seven years ... people were robbed in open day ... and women, stripped of their clothes, were tied to gates by the roadside; the existing police being set at defiance." John Sayer, the Bow Street officer, stated before a Parliamentary Committee, that there were streets in Westminster, especially Duck Lane, Gravel Lane, and Cock Lane, infested by a gang of desperate men, and so dangerous that no policeman dared venture there, unless accompanied by five or six of his comrades, for fear of being cut to pieces. These are not highly coloured fairy-tales, but actual facts as recounted in the Blue-books of the period, recounted moreover without exciting any particular notice at the time. In 1812, the crime of murder was so common, and so much on the increase, that a Parliamentary Committee was appointed to hold an inquiry as to the best means of combating the savage tendencies of the people. Offences against property were even more prevalent than crimes of violence. Spurious coin and counterfeit banknotes deluged the country.[161] In the parish of Kensington alone there were sixteen successful, and three unsuccessful, attempts at burglary in six weeks, and John Vickery, an experienced Bow Street officer, calculated that in one month property to the value of £15,000 was stolen in the City of London, without one of the guilty parties being either known or apprehended.