Apart from any religious movement, many laymen, among whom Burke holds a high place, strove to soften the hardness and cruelty of the age. There was need of their efforts. The criminal law was fearfully severe. Early in the reign as many as 160 crimes were capital felonies, and the number was constantly augmented. A theft of more than the value of twelve pence by picking a pocket was punishable by death. This severity led to an increase of crime. The injured would not prosecute, juries would not convict on clear evidence, judges recommended to mercy, and criminals were emboldened by the chances of escape. The heavy punishments attached to light offences tended to multiply serious crimes; for a thief who knew that he might be hanged was tempted to commit murder rather than be caught. Though only about a fifth of the capital sentences were carried out, executions were terribly numerous, especially between 1781 and 1787. In 1783, at two consecutive executions, twenty persons were hanged together. Ninety-six were hanged at the Old Bailey in ten months in 1785, and at the Lent assizes of that year there were twenty-one capital sentences at Kingston, twelve at Lincoln and sixteen at Gloucester, and in each town nine persons were hanged. Executions were popular spectacles; 80,000 persons are said to have been present at one at Moorfields in 1767, and over 20,000 assembled at Tyburn in 1773 to see a woman burnt--she was previously strangled at the stake--for the murder of her husband. The ghastly procession to Tyburn was stopped in 1783, and executions were ordered to be carried out in front of the prison; and in 1790 the burning of women was abolished. Otherwise, in spite of Burke's efforts, the criminal law was not materially ameliorated till the next century. The punishment of the pillory was one of its worst abuses. When inflicted for some popular act, such as libelling a minister, the offender was treated as a hero, but if a man's crime outraged the moral sense of the mob, he was exposed to horrible barbarity. Two men were pelted to death, in 1763 and 1780, on the pillory in London. After the second of these murders Burke brought the matter before parliament; he was supported by Sir Charles Bunbury, who quoted a similar case at Bury, but the punishment was not abolished. Whipping was constantly inflicted, not merely on men but on women, and in public as well as privately. The poor were brutalised by cruel and indecent punishments, and were far too much under the power of magistrates, some of them vicious and ignorant men, who had summary jurisdiction in a large number of criminal cases. [Sidenote: _PRISONS AND POLICE._]