In the relatively few years between 1750 and about 1840, English criminal law underwent a great and significant change. This chain of development has best been stated in a work of fiction by the contemporary British novelist, Daphne du Maurier, with these lines from "My Cousin Rachel": "They used to hang men ... in the old days. Not any more, though." This writing begins in the period which might be termed the "dark age" of criminal law. During this time as many as three hundred and fifty persons a year traveled the road to Tyburn where a rope or a stake awaited them. The crimes of which these men, women and children had been convicted where great in number and ranged in seriousness from murdering the kind to being found in the company of Egyptians or gypsies. Although the movement for general criminal law reform begins first in Italy and France, it spreads very quickly to England. Such men as Sir Samuel Romilly, Jeremy Bentham, Henry Fielding and others are prime movers in the struggle for a more humane body of law and enforcement. Public opinion favorable to the reformers existed throughout the entire period. Henry Fielding's tract on the subject, published first in 1750, expressed the enlightened idea that the roots of crime are to be found in given social conditions; and that crime should thus be stopped at its "fountainhead". These words were well received by almost everyone in the country with the exception of the tradition-bound House of Lords. Proof that the public found the capital statutes to be too numerious and too harsh is to be found in the fact that juries would frequently find that stolen goods of great value had only nominal value, well below the statutory limits. After almost a hundred years of urging reform oon the part of individuals, committees, associations and the general public. Sir Robert Peel becomes head of the Home Office and a "wind that was the breath of the" new age begins to blow with great force against the bloody, but placid, "dark age". Although it is not correct to assume that capital statutes were done away with in the period under review here, it is correct to say that here the foundation was put in place on which such a structure might be built.