The demand was no doubt fostered by the extraordinary prevalence of crime. Criminal records would probably be read with avidity at times when ruffianism was in the ascendant, and offences of the most heinous description were of daily occurrence. New crimes cropped up daily. The whole country was a prey to lawlessness and disorder. Outrages of all kinds, riots, robberies, murders, took place continually. None of the high-roads or bye-roads were safe by night or day. Horsemen in the open country, footpads in or near towns, laid wayfarers under contribution. Armed parties ranged the rural districts attacking country houses in force, driving off cattle and deer, and striking terror everywhere. The general turbulence often broke out into open disturbance. The Riot Act, which was a product of these times, was not passed before it was needed. Riots were frequent in town and country. The mob was easily roused, as when it broke open the house of the Provost Marshal Tooley in Holborn, “to whom they owed a grudge for impressing men to sell as recruits to Flanders.”[141] “They burnt his furniture in the street; many persons were killed and wounded in the affray.”[142] Now political parties, inflamed with rancorous spirit, created uproars in the “mug houses”; now mutinous soldiers violently protested against the coarse linen of their “Hanover” shirts; again the idle flunkies at a London theatre rose in revolt against new rules introduced by the management and produced a serious riot.[143] In the country gangs of ruffians disguised in female attire, the forerunners of Rebecca and her daughter, ran a muck against turnpike gates, demolishing all they found. There were smuggling riots, when armed crowds overpowered the custom’s officers and broke into warehouses sealed by the Crown; corn riots at periods of scarcity, when private granaries were forced and pillaged. A still worse crime prevailed--that of arson. I find in ‘Hardwicke’s Life’ reference to a proclamation offering a reward for the detection of those who sent threatening letters “to diverse persons in the citys of London, Westminster, Bristol, and Exeter, requiring them to deposit certain sums of money in particular places, and threatening to sett fire to their houses, and to burn and destroy them and their families in case of refusal, some of which threats have accordingly been carried into execution.”[144] Other threats were to murder unless a good sum were at once paid down. Thus Jepthah Big was tried in 1729 for writing two letters, demanding in one eighty-five guineas, in the other one hundred guineas from Nathaniel Newnham, “a fearful old man,” and threatening to murder both him and his wife unless he got the money. Jepthah Big was found guilty and sentenced to death.