kinds. Shops, taverns, coffee-houses, pleasure gardens fed an enlarging public
life that led over time to a richer and more self-confident urban culture.^65 One
element in that cultural transformation was the decision by much larger num-
bers of wealthy businessmen than ever before to remain rooted in the urban
world—not to sell up and invest in land as security and for the status that broad
acres had traditionally conferred. The strong tendency was for the large over-
seas merchants and other wealthy men of business in the City, among whom
the aldermen were prominent, increasingly to satisfy their social ambitions not
by investing their fortunes in estates, but by buying a villa or a small house and
some acres in the suburbs, or perhaps a house in the fashionable West End. The
consequence of such men remaining in the City and passing their businesses on
to their sons or other relatives—as Nicholas Rogers has shown—was the growth
of a City patriciate and an advance in ‘mercantile respectability’ as the big bour-
geoisie of the metropolis took their place in the emerging polite culture.^66
Even if aldermen moved their residences out of the City they could have con-
tinued to attend to their aldermanic and magisterial duties as they had in the
past, since one might presume that some of them kept houses in town, and some
could have heard cases in the halls of their companies or some other public
space in their wards. More important was the larger transformation in the so-
cial position of aldermen, and the possibility that their wealth, style of life, and
their sense of place in society detached them to some extent from the daily con-
cerns of those who continued to live in the City. As we will see, the aldermen
were increasingly inclined to leave the detailed work of ward administration to
their deputies and the common councilmen. That seems all of a piece with their
apparent reluctance to take on the magisterial side of the office in the early
decades of the eighteenth century.
It is possible, too, that the work of the magistrates may have become more
complex, perhaps more difficult, or uncomfortable, over time. Certainly, the
widespread concern about violent crime being committed by men in gangs had
given rise to a variety of efforts to encourage the detection and prosecution of
102 City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution
(^65) For aspects of this large subject, see Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 69 ; Neil McKendrick,
John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-century
England( 1982 ), pt I;John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods( 1993 ), ch. 1 ;
John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century( 1997 ); Roy Porter,
London: A Social History( 1995 ), ch. 7 ; Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class, ch. 10.
(^66) Rogers, ‘Money, Land and Lineage’, 437 – 54 ; Andrew, ‘Aldermen and the Big Bourgeoisie’,
359 – 64 ; Horwitz, ‘Middle Class Revisited’, 263 – 96 ; Peter Earle, The Making of the Middle Class: Business,
Society and Family Life in London, 1660 – 1730 ( 1989 ), 34 – 51. For an interesting discussion of the acquisition of
gentlemanly status by a group of wealthy London merchants in the middle decades of the eighteenth
century, see David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic
Community, 1735 – 1785 (Cambridge, 1995 ), pt III. For the distancing of rural magistrates from the popula-
tions they served, see E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common( 1991 ), 44. There is more than a hint of such so-
cial distancing in the decision made in 1782 , when the justice room in the Mansion House was moved to
build a new entrance to the courtroom so that ‘genteel people’ coming to visit the lord mayor could avoid
contact with vagrants and other persons of the lower classes (Sally Jeffery, The Mansion House(Chichester,
1993 ), 215 ).