Before a Professional Police Force Was Created, England Had “Thief-Takers”
Scotland Yard and London Bobbies are well known nowadays. However, England did not get around to setting up a professional police force until the nineteenth century. Before then, to bring a criminal to justice was pretty much an ad hoc affair that often relied on private initiative. Into that void, a profession of so-called thief-takers cropped to partially fill the void. They were private individuals a bit like bounty hunters. However, while bounty hunters were paid by courts to bring in fugitives who skipped their court appearance, thief-takers were paid by crime victims to catch criminals or recover stolen property.
The most famous thief-taker was eighteenth-century master criminal Jonathan Wilde, a man whose career reportedly gave us the term “double-cross”. According to folk etymology, the term “double-cross”, as in deception by double-dealing, originated with Wilde. He reportedly kept a ledger in which two crosses were literally placed next to the names of those who ran afoul of him. Wilde also reportedly gave the phrase its figurative meaning when he pretended to have seen the light, given up his criminal ways, and gone straight. As seen below, he had done no such thing.