however regularly they may have made themselves available over a period of
years, they could not create a permanent and a public court to rival the Guild-
hall, certainly not a court that would survive their service as a magistrate.
The Charge Books reveal that the lord mayor dealt with a wide range of busi-
ness in his daily sittings in the Guildhall, by no means all of it criminal in nature.
He sat to do the work a single magistrate could be called on to do in any parish
in England, including settling disputes between parties that were in effect minor
civil suits and dealing with a wide range of administrative problems. He issued
orders with respect to Poor Law questions—granting passes to authorize some-
one’s movement from one parish to another and mediating conflicts between
parishes over settlement cases. He acted summarily to fine men and women
charged with drunkenness or swearing, and dealt with others arrested in the
streets by constables, beadles, watchmen, or the City marshals and charged be-
fore the mayor as beggars, vagrants, or prostitutes, variously labelled idle, dis-
orderly, and lewd persons, or nightwalkers. For the most part they were sent to
the Bridewell, where they would be sentenced when the court met (if they had
not been previously released by the mayor’s warrant) to a period of work and
‘correction’, in the form of whipping.
With respect to more serious criminal matters, the lord mayor’s most import-
ant task was to deal with the complaints of victims of theft or violence, particu-
larly when the offence amounted to felony.^47 The Charge Books reveal Ashhurst
conducting the preliminary enquiry into the cases of 62 accused felons in the
first half of 1694 , most of whom he committed to Newgate ( 34 ) or the Poultry
Compter ( 20 ), or Wood Street Compter ( 2 ) to await trial at the next gaol deliv-
ery sessions at the Old Bailey (Table 2. 1 ). At the same time, Ashhurst bound over
the victims who made the charges, to ensure they would appear at the gaol de-
livery sessions at the Old Bailey to carry on the prosecution.
According to the Charge Book, the lord mayor sent every sworn felony accus-
ation that came before him to trial at the gaol delivery sessions at the Old Bai-
ley. In doing so, he acted in accordance with the law as established in the Bail
and Commitment statutes of the mid-sixteenth century.^48 This legislation had
been designed to tighten up prosecution procedures, to ensure that neither
favour nor other corrupt practices would save an alleged felon from facing his
accuser in the courtroom. It did so by ordering magistrates to take the depos-
itions of the victim of an offence in writing, to examine the accused, to commit
him or her to gaol to await trial, and to bind over prosecutors and witnesses to
carry on the prosecution in the appropriate court.
City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution 95(^47) For pre-trial procedure, see King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion, ch. 4 ; Beattie, Crime and the Courts,
268 – 81 ; Langbein, ‘Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial’, 55 – 81 ; idem, ‘The Prosecutorial
Origins of Defence Counsel in the Eighteenth Century: The Appearance of Solicitors’, Cambridge Law
Journal, 58 ( 1999 ), 314 – 65.
(^48) John Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance: England, Germany, France(Cambridge, Mass., 1974 ),
pt I; Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 270 – 83.