associated with the supervision of Poor Law administration and other aspects of
civic governance, as well as the management of the early stages of prosecution of
criminal offenders, and the duty to assist at the sessions of the peace and the
associated gaol delivery sessions at the Old Bailey. The magistrates were at the
centre of the policing and prosecution efforts in the City.
Who among the aldermen could act as magistrates was set out in the City
Charter. Before 1638 the recorder, the lord mayor, and the aldermen who had
already served as lord mayor—the aldermen who had ‘passed the chair’, as it
was said—were to act as magistrates. In the Charter of that year, perhaps be-
cause of a shortage of qualified aldermen, the next three most senior aldermen
were also designated as magistrates. That number was further enlarged in 1692
when the next six aldermen by seniority were designated magistrates by royal
warrant, and again in 1704 , when four more were added.^36 Finally, in 1741 a sig-
nificant alteration in the work of the magistracy brought this century-long grad-
ual enlargement of the City bench to a conclusion when all the aldermen were
named as magistrates.^37 Before that, the system provided a variable number of
magistrates, a number that depended on how many men remained on the court
after their mayoral year, and a number that must have been adequate for the
City’s needs at some periods, less so at others.
As the leading magistrate of the City, the lord mayor also presided at the ses-
sions of the peace, and, nominally at least, at the Old Bailey. His was the first
name on the gaol delivery commission and in the printed reports of the Old Bai-
ley proceedings, which were dated and organized by mayoral years. His leader-
ship of the community, as its first magistrate, was reflected in the authority his
orders commanded.^38 It was also to be seen in the way the lord mayor took on
much of the burden of the City’s magisterial work by the late seventeenth cen-
tury by sitting regularly in Guildhall as a single magistrate. Many of the other
aldermen who qualified as magistrates also made themselves available to deal
with public complaints and the early stages of prosecutions, sitting for this pur-
pose in their own residences.^39 But in the late seventeenth century the lord
mayor provided the most reliable and regular location at which the public or the
City’s officers could find a magistrate and pre-trial procedure could be initiated,
for his sittings in the Guildhall acquired a permanence that derived from the
office and did not depend entirely on the tastes of the incumbent.
The lord mayor’s work as a magistrate was further given an established
92 City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution
(^36) SP 44 / 341 / 245. (^37) Rep 108 , p. 211 ; Corporation of London, 60 – 1 ; and see below, text at n. 80.
(^38) One can see an indication of this in December 1688 , for example, when the Court of Aldermen was
anxious to make arrangements to get the disbanded soldiers from James II’s army out of the City and on
their way ‘to their own countrys’. The soldiers needed a pass to enable them to do this and it was agreed
that ‘the Lord Mayor’s pass may be of more use to them than that of any other magistrate in the City’
(Rep 94 , p. 76 ).
(^39) See, for example, a warrant from the City magistrate Sir Robert Geffery to the keeper of Ludgate
Compter requiring him to bring a prisoner to his ‘dwelling house in Lyme Street’ to be examined
(CLRO: London Sess. Papers, September 1697 ).