At any event, for whatever reason, so many aldermen had withdrawn from
the work of criminal prosecution by the 1730 s that the burden had been left al-
most entirely to one man. And when Sir Richard Brocas died, in November
1737 , it was hardly surprising that no alderman stepped forward to take his
place. The vacuum that Brocas’s death threatened was filled by the aldermen
agreeing to share the burden of the work. Within a week, the Court of Aldermen
agreed that those among them who were justices of the peace would band to-
gether to take his place by each attending at the Guildhall for a day in turn to
dispatch judicial business. In so doing, they brought a new regularity to the sys-
tem of prosecution in the City by creating what was in effect the first magis-
trates’ court in the metropolis.
The Guildhall magistrates’ court
Lords mayor had conducted their judicial business in the Matted Gallery in the
Guildhall, as apparently had Brocas during the years in which he had acted vir-
tually alone. The aldermen agreed that that was where they would now sit ‘in
rotation’ from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., Monday to Friday, assisted by a clerk and one of
the four attorneys of the mayor’s court. The town clerk prepared a rota, and by
the middle of December, a month after Brocas’s death, the new system was in
place.^79 Since the magistrates were now sharing the burden of out-of-sessions ju-
dicial work equally, it obviously seemed sensible, and perhaps fair, that all the al-
dermen in fact be made magistrates. The staged increase in the number of
aldermen who served as magistrates that had begun in 1638 , and continued in
the 1690 s and in Anne’s reign under the pressure of work, or as a consequence
of their increasing reluctance to serve, came to its conclusion in 1740 , when the
City authorities petitioned the king to constitute all twenty-six aldermen as
magistrates. The reason they gave was that the duties of justices of the peace had
been so increased in recent decades by many acts of parliament that they had
found it necessary to sit daily by turns, for—they added in a significant phrase—
‘the public administration of justice’.^80 That request was granted in the follow-
ing year, and thereafter, roughly once every five weeks, each alderman acted as
the sitting magistrate in what was known by the early 1740 s as the ‘justices’
room’ in the Guildhall.^81
This was a magistrates’ court in formation. It was not perhaps at first very dif-
ferent from the space that lords mayor had used for their magisterial work. But
lords mayor had shown varying degrees of engagement in that work and there
108 City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution
(^79) Rep 142 , pp. 21 , 29 , 51 , 72. The establishment of the rota on 6 December was noted in the
Gentleman’s Magazine 7 ( 1737 ), 763. It was celebrated by a resolution in the Common Council thanking the
aldermen ‘for their great Care and Pains in attending dayly for the Administration of Publick Justice’
(CLRO: Misc. MSS 64. 6 ). For the Guildhall magistrates court at mid-century and the institution of the
‘sitting alderman’, see Langbein, ‘Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial’, 76 – 81.
(^80) Rep 144 , pp. 266 , 286 – 91. (^81) Rep 146 , fo. 13.