oversight and accountability were not exercised effectively at any level, they had
a good deal of discretion as to how and when they used their authority. They
could be held accountable for something done illegally, and they could be fined
for negligence in particular cases,^22 but they were not easily punished for general
inactivity.
They also had to live in their precincts when their year of service was over, a
consideration that was likely to have made most of them reluctant to take too
aggressive a role as a prosecutor of unlicensed alehouses, of prostitution or other
immorality, or indeed of any offence that did not have an identifiable victim.
Most would have avoided making enemies in their neighbourhoods in the way
John Beese did in 1700 by his active support for the campaigns against vice and
immorality. As constable of St Sepulchre’s (a rich area for such activity), Beese
was obviously out on patrol when he found William Knowles drinking at 1 a.m.
in a public house. Asked what he was doing, Knowles said he was ‘drinking a pot
of drink’, and he went on to tell Beese that ‘he was a blockhead and a rascall for
asking him... and he would spend five hundred pounds to ruin him and doe his
business after his time was out’—that is when he was no longer a constable.^23
Such resistance did not need to be as aggressive and threatening as this to dis-
courage constables from too much activity since they must have understood that
there was a limit to the interference in local life that would be tolerated in a com-
munity. Officious busybodies—too much throwing around of weight—would
not likely be admired, no matter what or who was the target.^24 As Wrightson ob-
served of an earlier period, there was an inevitable tension between the de-
mands of the office—and the orders handed down by the City government, the
central government, or the Old Bailey bench—and the limits on action that the
constables’ membership in the community imposed.^25 In the circumstances, it is
likely that most newly elected constables did not look for trouble—an attitude
suggested by the regularity with which the Court of Aldermen repeated the
order that constables should place their staffs of office or a painted lathe outside
their doors to identify themselves, ‘according to ancient custom’.^26
The mayor and aldermen thus frequently found it necessary to encourage
122 Constables and Other Officers
(^22) Joan R. Kent, ‘The Centre and the Localities: State Formation and Parish Government in Eng-
land, 1640 – 1740 ’, Historical Journal, 38 ( 1995 ), 373 – 4.
(^23) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, August 1700.
(^24) John Disney (who was anxious for constables to put the laws against vice and immorality into effect)
observed in the early eighteenth century that constables were ‘afraid ofbeing strict upon the Faults of
the Neighbourhood lest they should lose the good Will of their Neighbours, and expose themselves to the
Revenge of those that are to succeed them’ (A Second Essay upon the Execution of the Laws against Immorality and
Prophaneness( 1710 ), 154 – 5 , quoted in Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Pol-
itics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis(Cambridge, 1987 ), 21 ).
(^25) Keith Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in Seventeenth-
Century England’, in John Brewer and John Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law
in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 21 – 46 ; and see also Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and
Social History( 1996 ), 11 – 12.
(^26) CLRO: P.D. 10. 73 ( 1661 ); Rep 97 , p. 141 ; Rep 104 , p. 95 ; Rep 123 , fo. 347.