whole), he dealt with more than 230 accusations of assault. This is very different
indeed from the evidence of Ashhurst’s work in 1694 and of other lords mayor
in the last decade of the seventeenth century. As we saw above (Table 2. 1 ), Ash-
hurst dealt with only 33 assault charges in the first six months of 1694 ; Sir
Thomas Lane, who followed him as lord mayor, heard fewer than that in the
first half of 1695.^70 This does not, however, necessarily signal a major shift in the
kinds of work that magistrates were doing in the City. They had always dealt
with the early stages of assault prosecutions, and the fact that Brocas heard so
many cases in his year as mayor almost certainly has more to do with his own
temperament and the fact that many fewer magistrates were willing to deal with
the petty quarrels of their neighbours in 1730 than they had been four decades
earlier, than with any major shift in magisterial practice. And the way Brocas
disposed of the assault allegations he heard was almost certainly in line with the
way magistrates had long dealt with conflicts that for the most part had not in-
volved serious violence. Certainly, magistrates (and constables coming upon
squabbles in the streets) had long been advised to do their best to bring the par-
ties to agreement, rather that encourage them to bring charges and take their
disputes to court. Brocas’s Charge Book in 1729 – 30 reveals that attitude strongly
at work. Of the cases he heard, he managed to settle three-quarters, bringing
the parties to an agreement presumably on the payment of a sum satisfactory to
the prosecutor or perhaps simply following an apology. In another 10 per cent
of the assault cases, Brocas simply dismissed the charges as frivolous or without
merit, and in the remaining handful, having failed to arrange an agreement, he
committed the accused to trial and took recognizances to ensure that the dis-
pute would be continued before the appropriate court, most often the sessions
of the peace.
There is the possibility that some of this work had been stirred up by Brocas’s
clerk, the man who was to be accused by the City grand jury a few years later of
corruptly encouraging quarrels and criminal charges in order to increase the
fees he could collect—fees for warrants, recognizances, and the like.^71 But it is
difficult to believe that that would explain more than a small proportion of the
cases that came to Brocas’s court in the Guildhall once he had revealed that he
was willing to sit regularly for business of all kinds. Brocas seems quite simply to
have developed an interest in the work. The man who succeeded him in the
mayoralty, Parsons, heard almost no assault cases—or criminal cases of any
kind—and left the work entirely to the two men who were now willing to do it,
Brocas and Billers.
One difference in magisterial practice suggested by Brocas’s work does signal
an important change in the preliminary hearings being conducted in the City
over the previous decades: that is, in the way he dealt with the 92 charges of
felony brought before him. In more than half of these cases, Brocas deposed the
City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution 105(^70) CLRO: Charge Book, 1692 – 5. (^71) See below, Ch. 8.