see, some of the most important initiatives with respect to street policing were
undertaken and carried through by leading non-aldermanic members of this
court.
The men who tended to take the lead on issues of this kind developed know-
ledge of and interest in such matters because of their work in the most important
site of policing work and efforts at regulation: the ward. The twenty-six City
wards differed hugely in size and wealth. Gary De Krey has studied their social
makeup in the late seventeenth century on the basis of tax assessments that re-
quired all but the very poor inhabitants of the City to pay a poll tax in 1692 at
either a basic level of a shilling per head or, depending on their wealth and
status, at one of two surtax levels of eleven shillings or a guinea.^32 On the basis of
those returns, De Krey mapped three clusters of wards in the late seventeenth-
century City. In the first place he identified a dozen in what he called the ‘inner’
City, a group of relatively small and wealthy wards, centring on the Bank, the
Royal Exchange, and Guildhall, each with much higher concentrations than
elsewhere of merchants and wealthy shopkeepers and, overall, with populations
in which about six out of ten householders were assessed at the surtax level.
De Krey labelled a second group of wards surrounding this inner core as the
‘middle’ City, that is wards in which perhaps a third of their householders were
wealthy enough to pay the surtax, but that clearly included more artisans and
tradesmen in the basic tax bracket. Finally, the tax assessments confirm that the
‘City without the walls’, the large and crowded wards that had spilled beyond
the confines of the ancient City while remaining under the jurisdiction of the
Corporation, included a much higher proportion of the poor among their popu-
lations. While there were pockets of wealth in most of them, the general char-
acter of these large extra-mural wards is indicated by the fact that 80 per cent
even of their rate-paying populations contributed only at the basic rate of tax.
Wards like Farringdon Without and Cripplegate Without and the three other
wards outside the walls remaining under the City’s jurisdiction were on the
whole much larger, more overpopulated, and poorer than the more settled
wards in the old City.
The wards and their institutions were crucial to the policing of the City. They
had been divided into precincts for administrative purposes since at least the fif-
teenth century—some 230 well-defined areas that varied in size, but that typ-
ically consisted in the older and smaller wards of only a few streets and not many
City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution 89(^32) For De Krey’s analysis of the socio-economic structure of the City based on this tax, see his A Frac-
tured Society, 171 – 3. The 1692 assessments actually divided ratepayers into three groups: in the lowest cat-
egory, everyone except the very poor (those in receipt of alms, for example) was to pay a basic tax of a
shilling per head four times a year; in the second category, shopkeepers, tradesmen, and artisans with as-
sessed worth of more than £ 300 were to pay an extra ten shillings; in the third, merchants, lawyers, gen-
tlemen, and a few others were to pay a surtax of a pound, and another if they kept a coach. Since the
distinction between the second and third groups was status not wealth, I have categorized the assessed
householders in both surtax categories (here, and in a later discussion in Ch. 6 of the character of juries)
as ‘substantial’ ratepayers.