the job entirely to elderly and infirm men who could find no other work. This
has never, however, been investigated. In our examination of the work of con-
stables in the City of London in the late seventeenth century and first half of the
eighteenth, it would seem wise to begin by trying to identify those who were
elected to office and, as far as it is possible, those who actually served.
Well over twenty thousand men served as constables in the City between the
Restoration and the middle of the eighteenth century. I have taken as a sample
those elected in three wards in the 1690 s, when the tax records make it possible
to identify the occupations of many of them and to some extent their social
status.^65 There is, unfortunately, no complete record of serving constables in this
period. The wardmote books, which include the names of those elected, and the
ward presentments to the Court of Aldermen, which communicated the names
to the governors of the City, are far from complete. They do survive reasonably
well in the 1690 s and into the early eighteenth century for the wards of Cornhill,
Farringdon Within, and Farringdon Without, wards that also have the advan-
tage of being in the inner, middle, and outer parts of the City, respectively.^66
Along with the tax assessments of 1692 and 1694 , these records allow us to get
some sense of the kinds of men who were elected and those who served for those
wards in the last decade of the seventeenth century.
In Cornhill four constables were chosen every year, one in each of four
precincts. Cornhill was a small ward at the very heart of the City. In 1696 only
269 households were contributing to a watch rate, for example, and that is likely
to account for all but the very poorest households. Two hundred and forty-two
of these households were headed by men, who presumably formed the pool
from which constables would be elected.^67 In the smallest of the four precincts,
only 45 men were heads of households in 1696 , and thus eligible to serve as
constable: the other precincts contained 51, 57,and 89. To judge by tax as-
sessments in the 1690 s, Cornhill was also one of the wealthiest wards in the City.
136 Constables and Other Officers
(^65) Assessments for taxes provide some evidence of the wealth and occupations of the rate-paying popu-
lation of the City in the 1690 s. The most important for our purposes are those of 1692 (the poll tax) and
1694 (the 4 s. aid). For the 1692 tax, see above, Ch. 2 , n. 32. The aid authorized by parliament in 1694 was
charged at the rate of four shillings in the pound of assessed wealth both real property and stock. I have
followed Gary De Krey in using the annual value of real estate owned as a more reliable guide to wealth
than personal goods and trade stock (Gary De Krey, ‘Trade, Religion, and Politics in London in the
Reign of William III’, Ph.D. thesis (Princeton University, 1978 ), 326 – 8 ).
(^66) The names of those elected can be recovered from three sources: minutes of the meetings of vestries
or precincts in which the initial elections of constables took place; the wardmote books, which record the
names of constables confirmed at the ward meeting; and the presentments that the wardmote subse-
quently made to the Court of Aldermen, which included the names of the constables elected for the fol-
lowing year. None of these records is complete for the late seventeenth century. A smattering of parish
records and wardmote books has survived (held in the GLMD); ward presentments are held in the
CLRO and survive in incomplete runs until 1704 , after which they are complete for virtually every ward
in the City.
(^67) Cornhill wardmote inquest minute book (GLMD, MS 4069 / 2 ); John Smart counted only 180
houses in 1741 (Table 3. 1 )—a measure (if both counts were reasonably accurate) of the way the inner
wards of the City were already losing resident population by the second quarter of the eighteenth century.