machinery, and marked a new beginning in policing practice.^11 T. A. Critchley,
for example, acknowledged that there had been changes, even improvements,
in the policing of London in the eighteenth century, but none the less formed
from printed sources an entirely negative view of the constables. He came to the
conclusion that the office of constable had originally been a position of import-
ance in the community, but that its status had been undermined in the late medi-
eval and early modern periods as the ideal of personal service was eroded. By
the eighteenth century, he was certain, it had so fallen from its once proud place
of honour, that it was thought fit only for the ‘old, idiotic, or infirm’. Until Peel
put things right, he concluded, London constables ‘were at best illiterate fools,
and at worst [as] corrupt as the criminal classes from which not a few sprang’.^12
Needless to say, he provided no evidence to support such sweeping judgements.
Even in more thoughtful and more thoroughly researched work than Critch-
ley’s, as for example the pioneering, studies of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century policing carried out by Radzinowicz,^13 the emphasis remains on the
problems from which the old system suffered and on the ideas of the re-
formers whose views would in the end culminate in the establishment of Peel’s
New Police.
This account of policing in the metropolis in the eighteenth century as a story
of struggle by proponents of rational administration against entrenched self-
interest has been challenged in recent decades by historians who have cast
doubt on virtually every aspect of that orthodoxy. Recent work on policing prac-
tices in the eighteenth century has uncovered a range of alterations that help to
place the undoubtedly important developments of the first half of the nine-
teenth century into context. The great watershed of 1829 —as with some other
well-established watersheds in this period—has been considerably diminished.
The notion of a new world suddenly unfolding has come to seem too dramatic,
to claim too much for the changes that took place in 1829 (as important as they
were), and to ignore changes that had been underway in attitudes towards
policing and in the forces undertaking it in the eighteenth century metropolis.
Work on the night watch and other aspects of London policing in the second
half of the eighteenth century has revealed that a great deal of what was done in
1829 had long been anticipated, and that changing problems of order and
changing public expectations had encouraged significant transformations in
the policing of the capital.^14
80 City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution
(^11) See, for example, Charles Reith, A New Study of Police History( 1956 ); T. A. Critchley, A History of
Police in England and Wales, revised edn. ( 1978 ). Sir Leon Radzinowicz conceived the history of the police
in broadly similar terms, but his richly researched studies of policing after 1750 laid an important founda-
tion for all subsequent work; see his History, vols. ii and iii. For a useful analysis of the literature on po-
licing history, see Robert Reiner, The Politics of the Police, 2 nd edn. (Hemel Hempstead, 1992 ), ch. 1.
(^12) Critchley, History of Police, 10 , 18. (^13) Radzinowicz, History, vols. ii and iii.
(^14) For recent work on the history of the police in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see
Philips, ‘A New Engine of Power and Authority’, 155 – 89 ; Douglas Hay and Francis Snyder, ‘Using
the Criminal Law, 1750 – 1850 : Policing, Private Prosecution, and the State’, in Hay and Snyder (eds.),