It seems certain that the changing demands on magistrates in the metropolis
by the 1720 s persuaded those who planned the Mansion House—as it per-
suaded the prosecution-minded De Veil and the Fieldings—that their work
could best be conducted in a court-like setting, a court that separated and pro-
vided space for the main actors: for the victim, witnesses, the accused, and the
clerical staff. The impulse to conduct such an enquiry was evident before magis-
trates’ courts were built. But the form of the institution—as it is illustrated, for
example, in Sir John Fielding’s Bow Street court in 1779 —did surely make such
an enquiry easier to conduct compared to the less-structured process it must
have been earlier.^89 Fielding’s room may or may not be accurately rendered, but
the main features of its uses as a court are likely to be broadly correct. Sir John
is shown sitting in an armchair at one end of the room, with four of his fellow
magistrates and a clergyman. A clerk sits at a table in front of them. The accused
stands at some distance behind a bar, with what appears to be a fashionably
dressed audience on either side (though some of them may be prosecutors and
witnesses and one appears to be holding a constable’s staff ). Other members of
the public are in a gallery on one side the room.^90
What is being illustrated in this engraving is a weekly session held every
Wednesday at the Bow Street court at which Fielding and other magistrates con-
ducted a second examination of prisoners who had been committed during the
previous week. As Fielding explained, the funds provided by the government
supported the attendance of at least one magistrate at the Bow Street court every
day between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., and 5 p.m. until 9 p.m. On Wednesdays, how-
ever, ‘three or more Justices’ sat between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. to hold a petty ses-
sion and ‘to re-examine all such Prisoners as have been committed in the
preceding Week.. .’.^91 Such re-examinations could have several results. Bring-
ing the prisoners back to the court, however briefly, must have helped to clear up
other offences and at the same time, if other victims of these defendants came
forward with further charges, to bolster the prosecution’s chance of success when
the trials came on at the Old Bailey.^92 A critic who thought this procedure
unwarranted and illegitimate, William Augustus Miles, claimed that Fielding
valued it simply as an opportunity to demonstrate his skill as an examiner before
City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution 111(^89) The Malefactor’s Register; or, The Newgate and Tyburn Calendar, 5 vols. ( 1779 ), iii. frontispiece (reproduced
in Langbein, ‘Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial’, 74 ).
(^90) On the Fieldings’ work in Westminster, see Langbein, ‘Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal
Trial’, 60 – 76 ; Radzinowicz, History, iii, chs 1 – 2 ; Babington, A House in Bow Street, 50 – 1 and figs 9 – 12 ; John
Styles, ‘Sir John Fielding and the Problem of Criminal Investigation in Eighteenth-Century England’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 33 , 5 th ser. ( 1983 ), 127 – 50 ; idem, ‘Print and Policing: Crime and
Advertising in Eighteenth Century Provincial England’, in Hay and Snyder (eds.), Policing and Prosecution,
55 – 112.
(^91) Sir John Fielding, Extracts from such of the Penal Laws as Particularly relate to the Peace and Good Order of this
Metropolis(new edn., 1762 ).
(^92) Langbein has pointed out that the public pre-trial proceedings developed by the Fieldings at Bow
Street was intended to help in the gathering of evidence, with the ‘clearing’ of other crimes by the same
accused, and with the recovery of stolen goods (‘Structuring the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial’, 60 – 7 ).