her, got a warrant, and accompanied a constable who searched her new lodg-
ings, found the goods, and took her into custody; a weaver got a warrant and
went with a constable to carry out a search of the lodgings of a man and woman
he suspected of breaking into his house and stealing muslin and ribbons.^59
For the most part, the constables did not expect to go much beyond this limited,
though crucial, involvement in apprehension, the first stage of prosecution.
Occasionally they can be found helping the victim to collect evidence, by, say,
taking the accused round to pawnbrokers and other shopkeepers to be identi-
fied as the person who had offered them goods for sale.^60 And, when there was
no victim or relative to take the lead in gathering evidence, as in the case, for ex-
ample, of the finding of the abandoned body of a dead new-born child, they
might be ordered—as on one such occasion in 1689 —‘to make diligent search
for the Mother and Murderer of the Child’, and to bring for examination before
a magistrate any woman lately delivered of a child who seemed suspicious.^61 At
times of particular anxiety about crime, more highly organized systems of sur-
veillance were imagined, in which constables would send monthly lists to just-
ices of hostlers living in their precincts who let out horses for rent and who might
be equipping highwaymen, along with lists of pawnbrokers and buyers of goods
who might be acting as receivers. The royal proclamation of 1690 , in which this
was ordered, was addressed to the problems ofburglary, robbery, and murder
during a panic about the increases in such offences, the kinds of serious crimes
that most alarmed the citizens ofLondon. It went on to suggest that constables
should engage in even more thorough surveillance of their communities by
making lists of all ‘suspected persons, where they lodge and where they resort’,
and to search regularly for those suspected to be ‘of evill life and guiltie of any of
the said heinous offences’.^62
Those things did not happen. But constables could not have avoided all en-
gagement in the process of criminal prosecution—ignoring their neighbour’s
request that they take someone in charge who had been caught shoplifting, or
ignoring a magistrate’s warrant. However inactive they would have preferred to
be, they must have expected to be involved in such ways at least occasionally
during their year in office. It is impossible to discover how frequently constables
were so engaged because there is no complete record of their work. To some
extent, how busy they were depended on their own commitment to the work and
to the precinct and ward in which they lived. It also may have depended to some
extent on whether they were elected constables doing their year of required ser-
vice, or were men who had volunteered to take such a man’s place and who were
in a real sense hired officers. And to explore further the issue of how actively
engaged in the business of the office City constables were we need to examine
Constables and Other Officers 133(^59) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, February 1696 (Dudley), October 1692 (Abraham).
(^60) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, December 1710 (Thomas).
(^61) Jor 51 , fo. 20. For other such orders in the following years, see fos. 25 , 117 ; Jor 52 , fo. 102.
(^62) Jor 51 , fos. 107 – 9.