accused and perhaps for stolen property, during which he might if necessary use
force to break into a house to secure the accused. Constables were also obliged
to take some of those arrested by the night watch to Bridewell or before a magis-
trate.^56 Without constables, the criminal justice process could not have func-
tioned as it did. As Saunders Welch said, ‘The legislature may enact laws,
magistrates may issue their processes; but the execution, the effect of all this, de-
pends wholly upon the integrity and activity of the officers under them’.^57 It is
simply not true, as is sometimes said, that early modern England was governed
without police.
How well and efficiently constables carried out this work is impossible to say.
There is simply no evidence that would enable such a judgement to be made,
other than occasional—and in this aspect of their work, it must be said, very oc-
casional—comments and complaints, and no standard of comparison. Perhaps
offenders escaped because of the fumbling and incompetence, the indifference
and timidity of constables. We cannot know. What isknown is that several hun-
dred accused felons went to trial at the Old Bailey every year, and in virtually all
of these cases a constable must have been involved at some stage of the process.
Not all accused persons were initially arrested by a constable, but many of those
brought to trial had been caught red-handed and, as numerous depositions
reveal, constables were commonly sent for when alleged offenders were being
held after a burglary or theft, a serious incident of violence, or some other mat-
ter. Hundreds of examples can be found among the surviving depositions of the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A grocer of Fleet Street, given
a bad shilling by a customer, sent for a constable who searched the accused and
found seven more; a shopkeeper who suspected a parcel of goods he was offered
had been stolen, caused the accused to be detained until he found a constable;
the son of a merchant deposed that he spent an evening with a prostitute in an
upstairs room of a tavern until he was attacked by her accomplice armed with a
sword, whereupon, he said, ‘the constable and watch were sent for’; a woman
who suspected that one of her maids had given birth to an illegitimate child and
had killed it ‘sent for a Constable and a Midwife’ to carry out an investigation.^58
In these cases, and many more at every session of the Old Bailey, the constable
took these accused to be examined by the lord mayor or another magistrate. Just
as commonly, constables brought in suspects after receiving a justice’s warrant
to search for a particular offender. A man whose maid servant had left his ser-
vice ‘in a secret manner’, taking several watches and forty yards of silk, traced
132 Constables and Other Officers
(^56) In his year-end account rendered to the precinct meeting in St Katharine By the Tower in 1664
(a parish on the edge of the City), a constable included a charge of £ 1. 8 s. 0 d. for taking prisoners on four-
teen occasions to Newgate, Bridewell, and the New Prison; in the early eighteenth century the con-
stables were given two pairs of handcuffs to help them carry out such tasks and for their use in what
appears to have been a recently built watch-house (GLMD, MS 9680 , fos. 148 , 289 ).
(^57) Welch, Observations on the Office of Constable, 1.
(^58) CLRO: London Sess. Papers,July 1710 (Nicholls),July 1713 (Hatcher), February 1692 (Towse),
February 1692 (Danniel).