necessary. In 1692 and the following few years they brought dozens of indict-
ments against the drivers of hackney coaches (including on at least one occasion
three women)^37 for ‘obstructing and pestering’ the streets, for plying for trade in
unauthorized places, and for standing in and feeding their horses in Cornhill
and Cheap and several other wards at the centre of the City. Some of the coach-
men, in turn, challenged the validity of the act and brought actions of trespass
and false imprisonment—actions that the City solicitor was instructed to de-
fend, just as other constables were defended from time to time against charges
arising out of the lawful use of their authority.^38
The aldermen similarly empowered other men as constables for special pur-
poses in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and conferred the
office on a number of officials to arm them with the authority to carry out a par-
ticular task. The porters of the workhouse established in Bishopsgate Street by
the Corporation of the Poor after 1698 to centralize the relief and employment
of the poor in the City were named as constables, for example, to enable them
to arrest vagrants in the streets and commit them to the workhouse, and to en-
able them to control ‘disorderly’ inmates who, along with children, were held
there.^39 So, too, were the porters of Bethlem and Christ’s hospitals, a man em-
ployed to keep London Bridge clear of hawkers and street sellers, and the men
hired to keep the entries and stairs of the Royal Exchange clear of ‘Lewd
Women and other idle Persons’. Along with the man employed by the farmer of
the markets to keep order in the City markets, they were all sworn as constables,
as the aldermen said, for their ‘better Enablement to suppresse any Irregular-
ities or disorders’.^40
These supplementary appointments helped to overcome some of the rigidity
inherent in a structure based on the customary obligations of householders to
provide a year of service. (They also remind us that, however weak the constabu-
lary of the early modern world might appear to have been, the office itself was
potentially powerful in that it conferred powers of compulsion not available to
126 Constables and Other Officers
(^37) CLRO: Charge Book, 28 February 1694.
(^38) CLRO: London Sess. Papers,January 1693 (case of Richard Landman); London Sess. Papers,
September 1693 (papers marked ‘B. R. Landmanv. Tomlinson’). Several wards appointed officers in the
eighteenth century to deal with traffic problems, often called warders or assistant beadles (CLRO, Misc.
MS 64. 4 , 16 February 1713 / 4 , 4 November 1737 ). An act of parliament of 1715 ( 1 Geo. I, stat. 2 , c. 57 )
aimed to establish general regulations for hackney coaches, carts, drays, and wagons within the Cities of
London and Westminster and the Bills of Mortality, and in particular to prevent the maiming and
wounding of pedestrians. For evidence from the records of the Court of Aldermen of their ongoing
attempts to regulate hackney coaches in the City through the first half of the eighteenth century, see
CLRO, Alchin MSS, Box I, no. 1.
(^39) Rep 107 , p. 563 ; Rep 112 , p. 20 ; CLRO, Papers of the Court of Aldermen, 1703 ( 19 October 1703 ).
On the Corporation of the Poor, see Stephen Macfarlane, ‘Social Policy and the Poor in the Later
Seventeenth Century’, in A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay (eds.), London, 1500 – 1700 : The Making of the
Metropolis( 1986 ), 252 – 77 ; and Timothy Hitchcock, ‘The English Workhouse: A Study in Institutional
Poor Relief in Selected Counties, 1696 – 1750 ’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1985 ).
(^40) Rep 95 , fo. 266 ; Rep 97 , p. 235 ; Rep 98 , p. 213 ; Rep 103 , fo. 178 ; Rep 122 , fos. 99 , 107 ; Rep 123 ,
fo. 119.