Article: "Intended as a terror to the idle and profligate": embezzlement and the origins of policing in the Yorkshire worsted industry, c. 1750-1777.

On 3 April 1785, officials from the House of Correction in the ancient Cheshire salt-making town of Middlewich conveyed Martha Pimlott, a poor single woman, to the nearby market town of Knutsford. There, they carried out the directives of a Justice of the Peace named Samuel Finney, subjecting the prisoner to a time-tested judicial ritual of humiliation and pain: a public whipping. Stripped to the waist and in full view of neighbors and the assembled community, Pimlott received precisely thirty stripes on her bare back. Employed as a handspinner of worsted yam, a common form of wage labor for women in much of Cheshire, Pimlott's transgression was a particular form of ...