How effectively the City constabulary carried out this work is difficult to
judge. Contemporary testimony—stray complaints about individuals in the late
seventeenth century and early years of the eighteenth, more generalized criti-
cism of the system as a whole after mid-century—was mainly negative, and did
much to colour historical work on the policing of London before Peel.^16 In
recent years, however, as more extensive research has been undertaken, there
has been more emphasis on the ways in which the established system had been
adapting over a long period to new circumstances and expectations. I hope to
build on this work, and in this and the subsequent chapter to probe innovations
in London policing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their conse-
quences, and the way changes were shaped by the available resources, and by
the economic and political circumstances and the broader culture in which
policing functioned. To that end, I begin in this chapter with the constables of
the City, investigating first their duties and authority, and going on to examine
the kinds of men who served in the post. We will conclude with brief consider-
ations of the work of two other officers who shared peace-keeping duties in the
City with the constables: the marshals and ward beadles.
Authority and work
The constable’s oath imposed obligations and granted powers which derived
both from the common law and a wide range of statutes.^17 His most general
obligation was to preserve the peace in his neighbourhood by preventing in-
fractions that might lead to its being breached, and by calming situations in
which they had already taken place. As Saunders Welch said in his guide to the
duties of his fellow constables (written after he had served as high constable of
Holborn for many years) it was their duty ‘to secure and protect the innocent
from the hands of violence; to preserve the public peace to the utmost of your
power, and to bring the disturbers of it to condign punishment’.^18 They were ex-
pected to keep their precincts under surveillance, not so much by daytime
patrolling—that was more the job of the ward beadle and the City marshals—
as by a more general oversight over their neighbourhoods, and by reporting be-
haviour that it was taken for granted would lead men into crime if it was not
checked. It was not just a matter of rhetoric but of profoundest belief that im-
morality inevitably led men into crime to support their bad habits. It was part of
the constable’s duty to help to prevent this bad behaviour. A constable would
also be expected to respond when called upon by someone who had been the
120 Constables and Other Officers
(^16) For work on the police of London in the eighteenth century, see Ch. 2 , text at nn. 11 – 15.
(^17) See, Kent, English Village Constable, 19 – 20 ; and ch. 2 , passim, for an excellent analysis of the deriv-
ation and scope of constables’ powers. For eighteenth-century London constables in particular, see the
Treatise on the Office of Constableby Sir John Fielding in his Extracts from such of the Penal Laws as particularly
relate to the Peace and Good Order of this Metropolis(new edn., 1762 , pp. 321 – 67 ; from notes left by Henry Field-
ing), and Saunders Welch, Observations on the Office of Constable( 1754 ).
(^18) Welch, Observations on the Office of Constable, 3.