Restoration.^33 In 1682 the council passed an act for the regulation of hackney
coaches that again sought to limit their number, insisted that they be licensed,
established their tariff of charges, and set out the places they could wait for
hire—orders that in general tried to ensure that hundreds of hackney coaches
would not block the streets and cause havoc in their competition for cus-
tomers.^34 Inevitably, the constables were instructed to see that the act was put
into effect. But they were not fitted for such work. Hackney coachmen had a
reputation for being rough and abusive, well able to defend what they thought
were their rights. As a grand jury complained in 1689 , the large numbers of
coachmen who plied for trade around the Royal Exchange in Cornhill (the hub
of the City by the late seventeenth century, and with so many merchants, finan-
ciers, and traders around, a good place for cab business), left their horses and
coaches in the street just as they pleased and used ‘fowle language’ to those who
complained. They had become ‘a very great grievance’.^35
Householders doing their annual turn as constables were not likely to con-
front such men on their own. And in any case, it was not part of the constable’s
duty to be on patrol through the day, or to engage in the kind of traffic control
that the Common Council act of 1682 envisaged and that was clearly becoming
a necessity in some parts of the City. There was developing by the late seven-
teenth century a certain tension, even contradiction, between on the one hand
the expectation that constables would be at home during the day, engaged in
their ordinary work, so they could respond to those who needed their help; and
on the other the increasing pressures for them to be out suppressing vice wher-
ever it was found, dealing with traffic, arresting vagrants, and generally main-
taining order. The need to regulate the hackney coachmen in Cornhill and
Cheapside and around Guildhall exposed that issue because the problem
pressed so relentlessly. The task required more full-time attention than most
constables could give it, certainly not the shopkeepers and tradesmen and other
respectable men who, as we will see, continued to serve as constables in the inner
wards of the City at the end of the seventeenth century.
Within a few years of the passage of the 1682 act the aldermen saw the neces-
sity of hiring a special force if the act was going to be put into effect. By 1692 four
‘streetmen’ and a number of assistants had been appointed ‘to prevent the dis-
orders of hackney coachmen’, and in particular to control their numbers and
prevent the quarrels they provoked ‘to the manifest breach of their Majesties
peace and scandall to the government of the City’.^36 The streetmen were
sworn in as constables, and were thus not only invested with authority, includ-
ing the power to arrest those who refused to obey the act, but also given the
support of the City authorities if they were challenged. Both soon proved to be
Constables and Other Officers 125(^33) Jenner, ‘Early Modern English Conceptions of Cleanliness and Dirt’, 170 – 1.
(^34) Act of Common Council, 13 March 1682.
(^35) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, July 1689.
(^36) Rep 92 , p. 220 ; CLRO: London Sess. Papers,January 1693.