work came to depend on the willingness of two men to take on the whole bur-
den. Sir Richard Brocas, who was lord mayor in 1729 – 30 , and Sir William
Billers, who served as mayor 1733 – 4 , were by far the most active magistrates in
the early years of the decade. By 1733 they were between them doing most of the
committing to the Bridewell as well as to the City gaols. Indeed, they so mon-
opolized the work that their clerks profited immeasurably from the fees they
collected for copying warrants, depositions, and the other necessary paper sur-
rounding the criminal process. They were in fact charged by the City grand jury
in 1733 with using their monopoly to stir up prosecutions and, in league with
others, to encourage malicious prosecutions for the sake of rewards that could
be earned by the conviction of serious offenders.^61 Whatever truth there might
have been in the charge, the fact that the clerks had drawn such attention to
themselves is an indication of the dominance that had fallen to Billers and Bro-
cas because of the withdrawal of other qualified aldermen from the criminal
work in the City. Even more strikingly, in the middle years of the decade virtu-
ally the entire burden of magisterial work of this kind in the City was left in the
hands of one man, Brocas. In 1736 and 1737 (until he died in November of that
year) he was theCity magistrate: in his last full year of work he was responsible
for 81 per cent of the recognizances taken; he committed 87 per cent of those
sent to the Bridewell; and 91 per cent of those sent to gaol to await trial. In the
1690 s, by contrast, even the most active magistrate was responsible for no more
than a quarter of commitments to the Bridewell or Newgate or of the recog-
nizances taken.
Brocas’s death in November 1737 , still in harness, produced a crisis that re-
quired a drastic solution. Without someone to carry the burden as he had
done—and no one stepped forward—a new system was required, or perhaps
rather a restoration of the old system under which the work was shared more
broadly. It now had to be mandated since, left to themselves, the aldermen could
not be relied on. Brocas’s death brought a new order to the magisterial work of
the City, and created in an institutional and more bureaucratic form the kind
of system in which the magistrates had been willing to share the duty. The death
of Brocas in fact saw the emergence of the first consciously created magistrates’
court in the metropolis.
Why this shift in the behaviour of the City magistrates occurred in the early
eighteenth century is not easily answered. Their declining commitment to the
work of the office, it must be said, was part of a general problem, for magistrates
were failing to act, or were at least reluctant to take up, the duties expected of an
active magistrate, all over the country in the eighteenth century, in rural and
urban communities alike. The commissions of the peace were everywhere en-
larged while the number of active justices shrank, leaving the burdens of the of-
fice to those willing to take them on because they had a taste or temperament for
100 City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution
(^61) See below, pp. 398 – 400.