and more of the practical, day-to-day business, including many of the tasks that
we would include within policing.^35
The ward leaders came in time—certainly by the early nineteenth century—
to be seen as self-serving oligarchs and the main impediments to the construc-
tion of broadly based policing forces and other changes being advocated by the
champions of police reform. But a hundred years earlier the institutions of local
control had been the only possible engines of change. We need to resist the fore-
shortening of time that might lead us to accept an early nineteenth-century
judgement as valid for the early eighteenth. The ‘common councils of the
wards’—and the authority and procedures of the Common Council itself that
gave them authority—were the means by which the changing policing needs of
the City were met as the older institutions of governance, the wardmote, and the
personal involvement of the aldermen as the leaders of their wards were being
eroded. Such changes were only possible in the early eighteenth century world
on a small scale and on the basis of existing institutions. In the City, that meant
at the level of the ward.
We will have reason to return to these themes from time to time in this and the
following three chapters. But we will begin this discussion of policing and pros-
ecution practices in the City with an account of the aldermen as magistrates.
The work of the magistracy changed notably in this period, particularly in the
way that pre-trial criminal procedures were conducted. The result was an im-
portant innovation: the creation in the City of London in 1737 of the first magis-
trates’ court in the metropolis. This was the unplanned result of the growing
reluctance of aldermen to undertake magisterial business, of their withdrawal
over several decades from the day-to-day work of the office. We will explore
both elements in this transformation—the changing engagement of magistrates
in the criminal process; and the making of the courtroom setting for the admin-
istration of the preliminary hearing.
London magistrates and the prosecution of crime
The twenty-six aldermen of the City linked its executive and legislative bodies
with the wards, and, through them, with the precincts and parishes. Decisions of
the Court of Aldermen or enactments of the Common Council were commonly
communicated by means of precepts of the lord mayor addressed to each of the
aldermen, requiring them to inform their deputies and other officers of the ward
of the instructions to be carried out. Aldermen were also frequently called upon
to act in quasi-judicial ways, both in their wards and as members of the govern-
ing bodies of the City. In addition, a varying number of them were magistrates,
and on them fell the burden of the judicial work—the indispensable tasks
City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution 91(^35) For the emergence of the common council of the ward and the diminishing administrative role of
the aldermen and the wardmote, see Webb and Webb, Manor and Borough, 605 – 15 , 664 – 5 ; Pearl, ‘Change
and Stability’, 16 , 20 – 7 ; and see below, Chs 3 – 4.