second half of the nineteenth century (well after the establishment of the new-
model police forces in the metropolis by Sir Robert Peel) that the police had any
significant involvement in the prosecution of criminal offences.^53 The oath of
office of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constable, and every explication
of it, makes it clear that there was no expectation that a constable would inves-
tigate a crime, discover the perpetrator, formulate and bring the charges. Those
are the most crucial activities—not to think for the moment about differences in
organization, efficiency, technology—that the modern police have added to the
formal responsibilities of the constabulary of the eighteenth century City. The
unpaid and part-time London constable in 1700 could not be called on to do
what was still thought to be the victim’s work of discovering offenders and
bringing (and paying for) the prosecution.
Two provisos need, however, to be added. First, constables could be hired,
just as any other private citizen could be hired, to help find offenders, without
that being thought to diminish their ability to fulfil their obligations. They could
also use their office to engage in free-enterprise thief-taking, an activity much
encouraged by the establishment of statutory rewards in this period. We will
have reason to return to that subject when we look at active constables and
examine thief-taking more broadly.^54
The second proviso concerns the administration of the criminal law. The
process of prosecution depended heavily on the victims of crime, who made the
crucial decisions about initiating charges and who were responsible for dis-
covering offenders and paying fees as cases went through their various stages.
But the essential elements of the criminal justice machinery depended on
public resources and public authority.^55 The constables, in particular, were
crucial, indeed indispensable, agents of criminal administration. They had the
authority to use physical force to make arrests, to get accused offenders before
justices, and subsequently to gaol. If they received a complaint that an offence
had been committed and a suspect was being held, they were obliged to go the
scene, take the accused in charge, and, along with the victim and any witnesses
there may have been, take him or her before a magistrate. If the charge involved
theft or serious violence, and the magistrate committed the accused to Newgate
or to another gaol to await trial, the constable was the only officer with the
necessary authority to receive the magistrate’s warrant and to carry out the
instruction—using force if necessary to ensure that his prisoner did not
escape, and being liable to serious penalties if he did. The escorting of accused
felons to the magistrate and to gaol might be preceded by the constable’s
being ordered under a magistrate’s warrant to carry out a search for the
Constables and Other Officers 131(^53) Douglas Hay and Francis Snyder, ‘Using the Criminal Law, 1750 – 1850 : Policing, Private Prosecu-
tion, and the State’, in Hay and Snyder (eds.), Policing and Prosecution, 36 – 47.
(^54) See Ch. 5.
(^55) John H. Langbein, ‘Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial: A View from the Ryder
Sources’, University of Chicago Law Review, 50 ( 1983 – 4 ), 55.