constables across the board in the eighteenth century, even in the face of an in-
creased burden of work, so long as the basis of service remained the obligation
of a fixed number of inhabitants to accept the office for a year. When the alder-
men contemplated such a general increase in 1737 , following changes in the
night watch which had some effect on the constables’ duties, the legal advice
they received discouraged them from altering the customary arrangements.
Thomas Garrard, the common serjeant, was asked whether the Common
Council could appoint ‘a greater number of Constables to be Elected in any
ward than they have been used to elect. Or how and in what manner and by
what authority may the present number of Constables in all or any of the wards
be Encreased.’ Garrard’s reply was discouraging. ‘The power of appointing
Constables by a Corporation’, he wrote, ‘must arise from Custom or Charter
and as the Charter is silent in the present case, I have searched the Books of the
Common Council and Court of Aldermen to see whether there be any Custom
to this purpose.’ He had found the three occasions on which the number of con-
stables had been increased slightly in the seventeenth century, but concluded
that these ‘precedents are modern and as I conceive not sufficient Evidence to
support a Custom’. The issue for Garrard came down to the legal basis upon
which service as a constable—or payment in lieu—could be enforced. If the
number was increased and a man refused to serve, ‘how will he be compelled if
not Elected according to Custom, for in an indictment against him it must be
alleged that he was duely chosen, which cannot be true in fact.. .’.^9
Garrard’s conclusion was that the authority to increase the number of con-
stables could only be acquired by an act of parliament that could alter the basis
upon which the constabulary was raised and supported. For reasons that re-
mained unstated, no such general solution was sought, even though the City
obtained statutes in just this period to create new financial structures for the sup-
port of the night watch and of the system of street lighting, as we will see in the
following chapter. One can only speculate that a force of constables, supported
by taxes and thus capable of being enlarged at will, was more likely to produce
anxieties about the power of government than a force of paid watchmen, who
commanded no power to intrude and harass.^10 And that may have been
particularly the case in 1737 , considering the way that Walpole’s Excise Bill had
been received four years earlier. That legislation had been vehemently opposed
in part because of the prospect it seemed to threaten of an increased number of
excise officers in the country and thus an extension of the power of the
executive, and what was conceived as a massive increase in the government’s
patronage and power to corrupt. The opposition to that threat was supported,
indeed led, by ‘country’ opinion in the City, and it is certain that the same
opposition forces inside and outside the metropolis would have pounced on any
Constables and Other Officers 117(^9) CLRO, Misc. MSS 141. 8. (^10) For watchmen, see below, Ch. 4.