twenty-six wards was thus largely determined by the number of their precincts,
and by the late seventeenth century that bore no relationship to the size of the
ward or the population to be served. The number of constables varied from the
two in Bassishaw to eighteen in Farringdon Without—and varied too in what
one might call the ‘coverage’ they provided, the population or the area they
served. Because the wealthier, longer settled, and more stable wards in
the ‘inner City’ tended to contain a large number of small precincts, they were
served by (and were required to provide) more constables per head than the
more mixed and more populous wards outside the central area. They were
better policed, certainly, than the large wards outside the walls which had not
developed the finely graded political structure of the more ancient parts of the
City as their populations increased rapidly in the late seventeenth century
and after.^5
The wide differences in policing that these arrangements produced are
shown in Table 3. 1 , which lists the established number of constables in the City
after 1660 , as set out in an act of Common Council, along with an estimate of
the number of houses in each ward made much later but accurate enough in
broad terms to reveal the great disparity in the distribution of constables. The
differences across the City are striking, ranging as they do from the twenty-five
houses per constable in Bread Street to the several hundred in the wards outside
the walls. Virtually all the wards designated by De Krey as being in the ‘inner’
core head the list: indeed, the nine wards with the fewest houses per constable
were all clustered at the centre of the City, and the remainder of the ‘inner’ City
wards and all those in the ‘middle’ group had much lower rates of houses per
constable than the five outside the walls. If the constables chosen for the year ac-
tually did the work they were supposed to do, the inner City would seem to have
been very well served. It should have been relatively easy to find a constable in
the wards of Bread Street or Bridge, for example, in which precincts averaged
just a few dozen houses, somewhere perhaps between a hundred or two hun-
dred people.^6 And having found a constable, it was perhaps easier in a small
ward to get him to respond to problems since he would be likely to know the
people involved. This is no doubt what a man who was helping a victim of a rob-
bery meant when he said that he ‘could get a Constable presently, for [ he] was
known thereabouts’.^7 In Cripplegate Without, on the other hand, in which four
constables were raised in a ward that contained close to 2,000houses in 1741 , or
in the other wards outside the walls, the situation was entirely different. Those
seeking constables in an emergency in those wards would have faced a more
difficult task.
Constables and Other Officers 115(^5) For the inner, middle, and outer divisions of the City (based on De Krey, A Fractured Society, 171 – 6 ),
see above, Ch. 2 , text at n. 32.
(^6) For an analysis of the social order in a wealthy inner-City parish, see Peter Earle, The Making of the
English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660 – 1730 (London, 1989 ), 244 – 8.
(^7) OBSP, April 1737 , p. 107 (Moreton).