CHAPTER THREEConstables and Other Officers
The City constables
The forces charged with keeping order in the City of London consisted of con-
stables, the night watch, the beadles, and the City marshals. The beadles—gen-
erally speaking one in each ward—and the two marshals, who were helped by a
half dozen marshalsmen, were paid and uniformed, and to some extent experi-
enced, in that they tended to continue in office from one year to another. The
watchmen, beadles, and marshals were charged with a range of duties, but their
principal tasks centred on maintaining order in the streets, controlling va-
grancy, prostitution, and begging, and preventing disorderly behaviour in gen-
eral. The main body of official peace-keepers were the constables. In 1660 they
were expected to be neither paid nor experienced, but ordinary citizens, serving
for a year in turn, fulfilling the obligations defined in the Statute of Winchester
( 1285 )—or rather the separate statute passed at the same time and to the same
effect for the City of London, under which every male housekeeper (except the
elderly and very poor, since they might be easily intimidated) was ordered to
take a turn to police his community.^1
Although they had the authority to act anywhere in the City,^2 the constables
were ward officers, and most of them almost certainly confined their activities
within their wards. Indeed, they were, even more narrowly, precinct officers.^3
By an arrangement of long standing, enshrined in custom, each precinct elected
its own constable, or in the case of some of the larger precincts, more than one.
In theory, each male householder, except those in receipt of alms, took his turn
to perform a year of service.^4 The election took place at a meeting of the inhab-
itants of the precinct, or of the parish vestry in cases in which parish and precinct
were close to being coterminous. The number of constables in each of the City’s
(^113) Edw. I, stat. 5. (^2) Jor 45 , fos. 425 – 7 (act of the Common Council, 1663 ).
(^3) For precincts in the City, see Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government from the Revolution to
the Municipal Corporations Act: The Manor and the Borough( 1908 ), 586 – 93 ; Valerie Pearl, ‘Change and Stabil-
ity in Seventeenth-Century London’, London Journal, 5 ( 1979 ), 15 ; Alice E. McCambell, ‘The London
Parish and the London Precinct’, Guildhall Studies in London History, 11 / 3 ( 1976 ), 107 – 24.
(^4) In the early seventeenth century constables were supposed to be elected for two years, but the second
year could easily be avoided. After 1660 at least three parishes retained the two-year service obligation
(GLMD: MS 635 / 1 , fos. 83 – 4 , 111 ; MS 4056 / 1 ; MS 5039 / 1 ), though the fine to be excused the second year
(£ 1 –£ 3 ) was lower than the cost of avoiding the one-year period of service that was common in most wards.