stable and even a quasi-professional element within the official policing forces
of the City. This was to be considerably enlarged across the metropolis in the
second half of the century. But it was very clearly in process of formation well
before 1750 , and to some extent in association with the private activities of thief-
takers. Thief-taking was regarded at the very least with ambivalence, and from
time to time with outright hostility; by the last decades of the century the
activities of thief-taking detectives were raising fundamental constitutional
questions about the threatening power of the executive—attitudes that were to
have an influence on the way policing and the police idea were to take shape in
the nineteenth century.^23
The story of policing in the City in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries can be told only in strands. There was no police force, no ‘system’ of
policing, and in any case some of the most important developments were taking
place outside the official structure. It is my hope that in studying in turn the
magistrates of the City, the constables, the night watch and street policing, and,
finally, thief-taking, I will be able to sketch the nature of each of those institutions
and at the same time to glimpse the way in which they were all experiencing
changes in the late seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth. No
grand plan guided these changes, nor did they follow ideas set out as a conse-
quence of public debate. They were more immediate and reactive than that—
reactive to some extent to anxieties about the perceived nature of crime on the
City streets, but also, more broadly, to changing expectations in the middling
ranks of the London population of what policing could achieve. Beyond that
there were other large shifts in the City that were eroding the ways policing had
been organized, changes in particular in the kinds of unpaid work that men
were willing to undertake as part of their civic duty. Such changes had been
underway in the seventeenth century, but they came to something of a head in
the first half of the eighteenth.
There was thus no single, massive, alteration in the institutions of policing
over the century with which we are concerned. But when Henry Fielding es-
tablished his policing project for Middlesex at Bow Street in the middle years of
the century, the accumulation of changes over the previous decades had pro-
duced a policing establishment in the City of London attuned to the changing
character of metropolitan society and very different from that in place at the
Restoration of the Stuart monarchy a hundred years earlier.
Policing the City
The policing of the early modern City of London depended on three principal
institutions: the Court of Aldermen; the Court of Common Council; and the
Courts of Wardmote. The main administrative divisions of the City, crucial to
86 City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution
(^23) Radzinowicz, History, ii. 326 – 46 ; Philips, ‘A New Engine of Power and Authority’, 155 – 89 ; Palmer,
Police and Protest, 60 – 2 , 69 – 73.