With some important exceptions,^15 however, much of that work of revision
has tended to accept a chronology that dates the onset of serious changes in the
policing forces from the middle decades of the eighteenth century with the ar-
rival of Henry and John Fielding as magistrates in Bow Street. The reason for
this is clear. The Fieldings were not only active and engaged magistrates who
sought new ways of uncovering and prosecuting serious offenders in London
and beyond: they were also effective publicists of their own work. They used the
press extensively in the encouragement of prosecutions and Sir John published
several pamphlets that set out and defended the measures they took to enlarge
and improve the policing of the capital.^16 They articulated the notion of police
as crime-fighters and set out the framework of a discourse that others adopted.
There is no doubt that the Fieldings put the idea of policing—or at least some
aspects of policing—on the public agenda. But, it is important to recognize that,
as inventive and important as they were, Henry and John Fielding inherited
practices that had been changing significantly for more than half a century
when they came to Bow Street. What those practices were and how they
emerged over the late seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth—
at least as they are revealed by the policing of the City of London—form the
subject of this and the following three chapters. My aim in examining the pros-
ecution and policing practices of this period is not, however, simply to push back
the dating of changing ideas about policing to the late seventeenth century.
Rather, my intention in studying what I think were significant developments in
the detection and prosecution of crime, in the nature of the constabulary and
the night watch, and in the effectiveness of street lighting is to understand their
importance in their own time and context.
The policing of the City of London in the century after the Restoration had
at least four broad, overlapping, objectives and consisted of several elements
that were at best loosely co-ordinated. In the first place, policing was peace-
keeping—the maintenance of order in society, particularly public order in the
City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution 81Policing and Prosecution, 3 – 52 ; Paley, ‘Middlesex Justices Act of 1792 ’; idem, ‘Thief-takers in London in the
Age of the McDaniel Gang, c. 1745 – 1754 ’, in Hay and Snyder (eds.), Policing and Prosecution, 301 – 41 ; idem,
‘ “An Imperfect, Inadequate and Wretched System”? Policing London before Peel’, Criminal Justice His-
tory, 10 ( 1989 ), 95 – 130 ; John Styles, ‘The Emergence of the Police—Explaining Police Reform in Eight-
eenth and Nineteenth Century England’, British Journal of Criminology, 27 ( 1987 – 8 ), 15 – 22 ; Palmer, Police
and Protest; Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History, 2 nd edn. ( 1996 ); Andrew T. Har-
ris, ‘Policing the City, 1785 – 1838 : Local Knowledge and Central Authority in the City ofLondon’, Ph.D.
thesis (Stanford, 1997 ); Reynolds, Before the Bobbies.
(^15) Especially Reynolds, Before the Bobbies; J. J. Tobias, Crime and Police in England, 1700 – 1900 ( 1979 ),
33 – 43 , also pointed to the importance of the reform of the watch in Westminster in the second quarter of
the century.
(^16) See, for example, Henry Fielding’s account of his work in The Covent-Garden Journal( 1752 ), in The
Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register-Office, ed. by Bertrand A. Goldgar (Oxford, 1988 );
and John Fielding, A Plan for Preventing Robberies within Twenty Miles of London, with an Account of the Rise and
Establishment of the real Thieftakers( 1755 ). And for this subject, see John Styles, ‘Sir John Fielding and the
Problem of Criminal Investigation in Eighteenth-Century England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 5 th ser., 33 ( 1983 ), 127 – 50.