lords mayor were at first included in the rotation in the Guildhall magistrates’
room. But they returned to a more independent and more fully engaged role
than this allowed when the Mansion House was opened in the middle of the
century. This had been built at public expense as the lord mayor’s residence dur-
ing his year in office—the house in which he would live, work, and entertain,
and that was required because many of the aldermen no longer lived in the City.
It is of the greatest significance as an indication of the way the preliminary hear-
ing conducted by magistrates was changing by the 1720 s that when the Mansion
House was opened it included a ‘cause room’, later known as the ‘justice room’,
which was to look very much like a courtroom.^86 It was agreed soon after the
Mansion House opened that the lord mayor would hear cases that arose east of
King Street, and the aldermen sitting daily as magistrates in the Guildhall
would deal with those from the western half of the City.
Between the first suggestion in 1728 that a Mansion House be built and its
opening in 1753 another courtroom for magisterial work had been constructed
in the metropolis—built by Thomas De Veil in the house he moved to in Bow
Street in 1740 and made famous by the Fieldings who succeeded him in both the
house and the role as leading Middlesex magistrates.^87 It is revealing of the
changing nature of the preliminary hearing in the second quarter of the eight-
eenth century that both the justices in the City and the most active, crime-
fighting magistrates in the area around Covent Garden to the west of the City
thought it necessary to create structures for this work that were in effect court-
rooms. It suggests just how much that stage of criminal procedure in the me-
tropolis was becoming more actively a source of investigative and prosecutorial
energy. That was developing most clearly in Bow Street. The City would never
develop the kind of active, prosecuting magistracy that emerged in Middlesex
under the inspiration of De Veil and the Fieldings. Given the system of rotating
magistrates manning the Guildhall justice room, and a mayor who changed
every year sitting for criminal business at the Mansion House, it was impossible
for the kind of focused and professional magisterial corps that developed else-
where in the metropolis by the end of the century to take root in the City. In any
case, the City authorities would have resisted—as they revealed in the debates
over the creation of a new form of police—any surrender to an outside author-
ity of their ancient rights to govern themselves. None the less, the City magis-
trates felt some of the need to make their prosecution procedures more effective,
even though the balance of criminal prosecutions swung away from the City in
the middle decades of the century.^88
110 City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution
(^86) I owe my knowledge of the history of the justice room in the Mansion House to Sally Jeffery, who
has written its complex architectural history (The Mansion House, 1 , 15 , 205 , 214 – 17 ).
(^87) For the system of pre-trial developed by the Fieldings at Bow Street, see especially Langbein, ‘Shap-
ing the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial’, 55 – 76.
(^88) See Ch. 8.