ordinary citizens.) But a handful of special appointments could not diminish the
underlying problems created by the pressures for a more active constabulary.
Traffic on the streets was only one of a multitude of problems that accompanied
the growth of the city in the late seventeenth century and that were more often
than not added to the constables’ responsibilities.
The problem of vagrancy raised intense concerns from time to time because
of the vagrants’ detachment from the institutions of work and family that inte-
grated men and women into the society, and what was thought the strong likeli-
hood that they would turn to crime. When the streets appeared to be
particularly disorderly, grand juries and the Court of Aldermen commonly
blamed the constables for their indifference and pushed them to join the City
marshals and the ward beadles to help keep at least the thoroughfares clear. It
was a constant theme that, as a lord mayor’s precept complained in 1676 , ‘the
streets are pestered with vagrants and beggars’ because the constables were fail-
ing to apprehend them as their oaths required; and as a grand jury said in 1695 ,
in the middle of a very difficult decade for the poor ofLondon, the neglect of the
constables explained why ‘the streets have not been cleared of nightwalkers and
vagrant persons which are so destructive to this City and the happiness of it’.^41
From time to time the constables were also turned out to control crowds in the
streets, most commonly on days of celebration or on other days in the festival
calendar, from time to time to deal with more violent crowds. A well-established
calendar of celebration and holidays brought large numbers of people into the
City streets at certain times during the year and provided the authorities with a
variety of policing challenges.^42 Some were relatively benign. The traditional
games of throwing at cocks on Shrove Tuesday and the bonfires of Guy Fawkes’
day regularly drew orders from above that required the constables to turn out
the watch during the day and commonly to set a double watch at night to con-
trol the danger that occasionally arose. The concern may have been mainly to
ensure that squibs did not start fires and that bonfires did not get out of control;
but there were also times when the very assembling of crowds was thought to be
undesirable by the City authorities, particularly at times of political conflict, or
Constables and Other Officers 127(^41) CLRO: P.D. 10. 64 ; London Sess. Papers, January 1695. Constables might indeed neglect to take
up vagrants, but it was difficult for them to ignore men and women against whom warrants were issued
by magistrates, requiring the constables to pass them out of the City and into the next county. Some
wards found this a particular burden. The authorites in Bridge ward, for example, where vagrants with
passes entered the City from Surrey, complained about the costs of passing vagrants in 1700 (CLRO,
Ward Presentments: Summaries, I, 56 ). A constable in Bridge ward submitted a bill with his charges for
passing vagrants in a three-month period in 1704 which included six women with children, a man and
woman with a child, a pregnant women ‘brought to bed’ and kept a month, five ‘sick’ men and women,
some of whom he lodged overnight. His charges of more than £ 5 were for conveying them across the
City to Temple Bar, Bishopsgate, or Aldersgate, several of them by coach (CLRO: London Sess. Papers,
April–May 1703 ).
(^42) David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart Eng-
land( 1989 ); Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400 – 1700 (Oxford, 1994 );
idem, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain(Oxford, 1996 ); Nicholas Rogers, Crowds,
Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain(Oxford, 1998 ), 22 – 4.