substitutes between the meeting of the wardmote in December and the swear-
ing in of constables on 8 January. No record exists of those transactions.
The names of some of those who agreed to serve as deputy constables in the
second half of the seventeenth century can be recovered from the handful of
wardmote inquest books that have survived and from a few letters of recom-
mendation supporting appointments.^81 A more complete account becomes
possible in the 1690 s and after, as a result of the determination of the Court of
Aldermen to exercise more direct control over the appointment of deputies.
The aldermen had always asserted the right to approve the substitution of a
deputy for the elected constable: at least since the reign ofElizabeth deputy
constables had served in London only with the approval of the lord mayor.^82 In
theory this oversight was transferred by an act of the common council of 1621 to
the aldermen, the deputy alderman, and the common councilmen of the
relevant ward.^83
After the Restoration the Court of Aldermen made a gesture towards pro-
hibiting deputies altogether, but a total ban was clearly unworkable, and the
procedures established under the 1621 act essentially remained in place.^84 In the
1670 s and 1680 s aldermen and their deputies, and occasionally common coun-
cilmen, can be found writing to the mayor or the deputy registrar of the mayor’s
court, before whom constables took their oaths of office, to approve the ap-
pointment of deputy constables in their wards.^85 That rather loose and informal
system was modified in significant ways after 1689 , when the aldermen made an
effort to assert their supervision over the appointment of deputies. This may
have reflected their concern about the evidence that crime and disorder were
increasing after the Revolution, particularly perhaps the insistent complaints of
grand juries and the societies for the reformation of manners about the preva-
lence of vice and immorality. But they may also have sensed that the move to
escape from office was becoming more pronounced in the 1690 s—in a period in
which policing problems were particularly difficult. Whatever the cause, it is
clear that the aldermen became anxious to tighten up the rules governing the
appointment of deputy constables and to improve the quality of the City’s
policing forces.
They did this in several ways. In the first place they attempted to give new life
to a rule laid down in the 1621 Common Council act that required a man elected
Constables and Other Officers 141(^81) Wardmote inquest books dating from the last decades of the seventeenth century are available in
the GLMD for the following wards: Aldersgate (MS 2050 ), Bridge (MS 3461 / 3 ), Candlewick (MS 473 ),
Cornhill (MS 4069 / 2 ), Portsoken (MS 2648 ), and Vintry (MS 68 ). There are papers dealing with the ap-
pointment of constables, 1670 – 1711 , in CLRO: Misc. MSS 17. 16. It is difficult to discover how many
deputy constables were being appointed in the decades after the Restoration. On a list of constables that
appears to include those who took the oath of office in 1683 , twelve names are crossed out and replace-
ments written in the margin. They may be deputies; if so they represent 5 % of the whole body (CLRO:
Misc. MSS 19. 12 ).
(^82) Archer, Pursuit of Stability, 222. (^83) CLRO, Alchin MSS, Box E, no. 57.
(^84) CLRO: P.D. 10. 73 (Precept of the Lord Mayor, 25 November 1661 ).
(^85) CLRO: Misc. MSS 17. 16.