constables and other officers turned out for such duty was increased signifi-
cantly across the century. After 1750 it was common for several hundred officers
to be in attendance.
Without a close study of what had been expected of the constables before
1660 and the extent to which they had then been involved in street policing, it is
impossible to say with any certainty that their duties had been significantly ex-
tended in the late seventeenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth.
But there is a suggestion in the City records of that period of a piling up of work
or at least an increased expectation of what they ought to be doing in the face of
ever-increasing problems on the streets. If that is the case, it would help to ex-
plain—though it is not likely to be the whole explanation—a striking change in
the composition of the constabulary that we will examine in the following sec-
tion: that is, an evident reluctance on the part of men who could afford to buy
their way out, to take on the post of constable, leaving it increasingly to poorer
men who were willing to serve as a deputy for a fee. There is in the century after
the Restoration a very considerable increase in the numbers of such deputies in
the City constabulary. But before we leave the subject of the constables’ duties
we need to examine their involvement in two matters that had long been part of
the constable’s work that no one holding the office had been able to evade en-
tirely, or that were at least regarded as central to the work of the office and of im-
portance to the ordering of the City, and that must have produced regular if not
continuous business for many of the men who held the post.
One of these routine duties was the regulation of the night watch, and more
generally, the policing of the City at night. As we have seen, there was some am-
bivalence about what was expected of the constables during the daylight hours.
When vagrants or beggars crowded the streets, or when anxieties rose about the
way the young were wasting their time, or forms of popular amusements and
sports seemed to the authorities to be encouraging vice and immorality the con-
stables might be ordered to be more actively involved in surveillance and pros-
ecution. But they were not expected regularly to patrol their precincts. Night
was a different matter. Darkness brought danger to the streets of the capital, the
danger most immediately of robbery and burglary and other assaults that
threatened physical harm to people in the streets and in their houses. The con-
stables had very particular duties with respect to the control and surveillance of
the City’s streets during the hours of darkness, a subject to which we will return
when we look at the night watch.^52
The second business that was likely to engage constables in a way that was dif-
ficult to evade entirely arose from the administration of the criminal justice sys-
tem in which their involvement was crucial. It is perhaps in this area that the
greatest differences are to be found between the responsibilities of the constabu-
lary in the eighteenth century and the modern police, for it was not until the
130 Constables and Other Officers
(^52) Below, Ch. 4.