On the evening of 6 October 1793, someone slipped into a London yard and made off with a squawking fortune: eleven tame hens and two cocks. In a city where poultry were both pantry and livelihood, this wasn’t a prank; it was a blow to the family purse. Within weeks, a suspect, William Peters, stood before the Old Bailey to answer for it, and the court heard how a bundle of birds had become a full-blown felony.
The case was tried on 30 October 1793, one of many thefts that crowded the autumn sessions of the Central Criminal Court. The indictment, neat as a ledger, listed each victim in feathers: “eleven live tame hen fowls and two live tame cock fowls”. In an age where every chicken was property and every property sacred, such precision turned squawks into evidence.
The crime and the chase
Witnesses told a familiar story. The owner, one John Young, swore that all thirteen birds were safely roosting when he retired on the night of 6 October. Come morning, the yard was empty, the gate ajar, and the feathers scattered like confetti. A neighbour recalled hearing the soft thump of a coop door and the muffled sound of panic — the kind only chickens make when destiny arrives in a sack.
By breakfast, the culprit was already trying his luck in the market. A poulterer testified that a man matching Peters’s description appeared before dawn, offering to sell a mismatched clutch of fowl at a price too good to be honest. When questioned, the vendor had no name for his “master” and no patience for details. The poulterer’s suspicions, combined with the constable’s timing, led to an arrest later that same day.
The trial at the Old Bailey
In court, Peters — described as aged sixty — faced the charge with the stoicism of a man who had seen London’s darker corners. The prosecution stressed the date (“the sixth day of October”) and the exact number of birds, hammering home the chain of possession. Chickens, the jury was reminded, were not trifles; they were property with a pulse.
The evidence was straightforward: the stolen birds, the attempt to sell them, and the owner’s identification of his flock. Peters said little in his defence — perhaps out of fatigue, perhaps wisdom. The jury deliberated briefly.
The clerk wrote the outcome in the standard hand of Georgian justice:
“GUILTY (Aged 60). Imprisoned twelve months in the House of Correction and fined one shilling.”
— Old Bailey Proceedings, 30 October 1793.
It was a merciful sentence by the standards of the time. Just decades earlier, a poultry thief might have faced branding or transportation; now, imprisonment and a token fine sufficed to mark the offence and spare the gallows.
Why this mattered
London in the 1790s was a city of hungry mouths and narrow chances. For working families, a handful of hens could mean the difference between subsistence and starvation. To steal them was not only theft but an assault on self-sufficiency. The Peters case sits among thousands like it — tiny crimes that fed the machinery of justice and revealed the fragile economics of the poor.
For historians, the record is a small masterpiece: a date, a name, a sentence, and a handful of birds — the ordinary made eternal in ink.
Epilogue
William Peters’s twelve months in the House of Correction would have been far from gentle. Labour, coarse food, and confinement awaited him. His one-shilling fine, if unpaid, might be docked from prison labour earnings. Yet his story outlived him, preserved among the countless voices of London’s forgotten petty offenders — where every cluck, every theft, and every verdict still echoes through time.
Source
R v. William Peters (t17931030-47), trial of William Peters for stealing eleven live tame hen fowls and two live tame cock fowls, 30 October 1793.
Old Bailey Proceedings Online
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