The Steal Read Online Free

did it, compelled by no hunger, nor poverty, but through a cloyedness of well-doing, and a pamperedness of iniquity.... Nor cared I to enjoy what I stole, but joyed in the theft and sin itself.” Augustine and his friends never even tasted the pears. They fed them to the hogs.
    To put an end to this sort of chicanery, the Byzantine emperor Justinian amplified the amount of restitution required, concluding that thieves caught red-handed should pay four times as much as the object’s worth, whereas those caught later on without the object should merely pay double. Justinian also made the first observation about the crime’s clandestine nature. In “Concerning Theft,” a chapter in The Justinian Institute , his legal textbook on the subject, he attributes the Latin word for theft, furtum , to the jurist Marcus Antistius Labeo, who connected it to furvus, the word for black, since theft mostly happens secretly at night.
    After the Inquisition, English judges began sentencing thieves to be branded on the thumb instead of the face, since the latter, it was acknowledged, condemned criminals to a life of crime. In France, the brand was in the shape of a V, for voleur .
    Christian thinkers in this era sought to soften the law’s severe sentences for petty theft when it arose out of necessity. On stealing to satisfy hunger, Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote, “It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another’s property in a case of extreme need: Because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need.”
    Aquinas also examined the relationship between theft and shame. He concluded that theft was sometimes synonymous with shame; it could sometimes arise out of shame, and sometimes cause shame. He perceived, in other words, the complex web between shame and stealing that still haunts and confounds. Distinguishing between theft and robbery, Aquinas noted that guileful theft is considered more serious because thieves steal at night—a concrete manifestation of their shame. He went on to observe that robbery, which happens during the daytime, is punished more severely.
    Aquinas was not the only Christian writer to object to the law’s punishing petty theft by death. Responding to the regular hanging of thieves caught in the act, Thomas More asks in Utopia , “Be we then so hasty to kill a man for taking a little money?”
    For the next three centuries, the answer was yes.

THE LIFTING LAW
    In Elizabethan London, milliners, mercers, pawnbrokers, booksellers, opticians, cheese mongers, bird sellers, curriers, serge makers, soap boilers, sailcloth makers, and linen weavers opened beautiful stores with glass windows to display their wares, inviting theft. The first shoplifters, called “lifters,” were roving bands of men. In 1591, the year that Shakespeare began the Henriad, the history plays in which “thieves and robbers range abroad unseen,” a privately printed pamphlet, The Second Part of Cony Catching , described the lifters—and the act itself—the “lift.”
    The Second Part of Cony Catching (the title refers to a con artist “catching” a dupe) was written by Robert Greene, a rake, playwright, journalist, and friend of Shakespeare and Marlowe who died the following year at age thirty-four. In the chapter “The Discovery of the Lifting Law,” Greene, under the pretense of being shocked by this vile crime, instructed would-be “shoplifters”—lifts—how to carry it off.
    “Attired in the form of a civil country gentleman,” the lift should stride into the store, wearing only hose and doublet (cloakless, he would avoid suspicion), and call to the merchant, “Sirrah, reach me that piece of velvet or satin or that jewel chain or that piece of plate.”
    The lift should continue to ask the merchant to pile more and more goods on the counter, and eventually, while the merchant’s back was turned, a second thief should creep into the store, grab some of