Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 1 (2009), pp. 70–108

Building on the earlier work of Edwards and Beattie and using Wales as a focus area, this paper asks why horse-stealing was so common in Georgian Britain. It shows that it was partly due to a plentiful supply of horses, particularly field horses, which in Wales tended to be concentrated in the eastern central counties, an area that played an important role in horse-breeding. Thieves were often adult males, in their late twenties or thirties, employed in agricultural occupations, and only rarely were they hardened criminals. They were attracted to stealing horses for a variety of reasons, only one of which was profit. Indeed, horse theft was a relatively lucrative crime, even though thieves often sold the stolen animals at discount. The high level of theft, however, also reflected the fact that there was little economic incentive for horse owners to protect their animals, particularly the less valuable ones; from the individual owner's point of view, the risk of theft was not that great and protection was often expensive. 

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