On the night of 13 November 1784, around eleven o’clock, a man named James Thomas slipped into the London home of John Parleyman. It was no grand townhouse, but it had something worth stealing: a store of copper, heavy, valuable, and easy to sell by weight.
Under cover of darkness, Thomas broke and entered the dwelling house, made his way to the storage area, and carried off about eighty pounds of copper, bundled into a hemp sack. For Parleyman, this wasn’t an abstract loss; copper meant tools, fittings, and ready money.
Within weeks, suspicion and evidence converged. Whether it was a neighbour who saw him struggling with the suspiciously heavy sack, or a metal dealer who recognised marked copper, Thomas was arrested and committed for trial at the Old Bailey.
The trial at the Old Bailey — 8 December 1784
On 8 December 1784, the court heard the case recorded as R v. James Thomas — a burglary charge, explicitly tied back to “the 13th of November last, about the hour of eleven in the night.”
The indictment (summarised in later records) accused Thomas of:
“Burglariously and feloniously breaking and entering the dwelling house of John Parleyman, on the 13th of November last, about the hour of eleven in the night, and burglariously stealing therein, eighty pounds weight of copper, value forty shillings, and one hempen sack, value one shilling.”
The value mattered. Forty shillings put the offence into serious territory, and “burglariously” signalled a night-time housebreaking — a classic capital crime in 18th-century law.
We don’t have the full verbatim dialogue, but we can be confident about the basic shape of proceedings:
- Parleyman (or his servant) testified that the house was secure on the night of the 13th, and that the copper and sack were present when they retired.
- He then described finding door or window forced, copper missing, and traces of the theft.
- One or more witnesses connected Thomas to the stolen copper — perhaps a constable who found him with the sack, or a dealer who purchased it and later identified him.
Thomas was found guilty, but crucially, the jury or court recorded the offence as “theft under 40 shillings” rather than full, value-heavy burglary — a common way of avoiding the automatic death sentence. He was instead sentenced to transportation, specifically seven years beyond the seas.
By January 1787, Thomas was on a convict transport ship bound for New South Wales — one of the many whose crimes dated in London and whose punishments were carried out on the other side of the world.
Why this 13 November matters
The case of James Thomas is a neat window into late-Georgian justice:
- It shows how a single night’s burglary on 13 November could ripple outward into years of forced labour in a new colony.
- It illustrates the way juries sometimes downgraded value (“under 40 shillings”) to spare a defendant from the gallows while still upholding the seriousness of the offence.
- And it captures the material reality of the time: copper and a sack were enough to tempt a man into risk, and enough to send him halfway across the globe.
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