These days, of course, England is not a country that would impress Ms Chase nearly so much. The level of crime would astonish her – as would the reaction of the authorities, passive in the face of burglary, active only in their efforts to prosecute the householder who uses ‘unreasonable force’ in an attempt to defend property that the state can no longer be bothered to protect.

Writing in a recent issue of the London Spectator Charles Moore suggests an alternative approach to scare criminals away, quoting a technique used by one ‘bloody Brown,’ a neighbor of the 19th Century journalist C.J Apperley:

“His garden had been frequently robbed of much of its choicest fruit, and he, being an old soldier…was one not to be trifled with on such occasions…He applied to a dissecting room in London and obtained the leg of a human being, fresh cut from the body, on which he put a stocking and a shoe, and then suspended it in a man-trap over his garden wall. The act obtained him the sobriquet I have mentioned, but his fruit was afterwards safe.”

There’s a lesson there for us all.