This record is almost certainly not complete in the 1690 s. The aldermen re-
peated their order often enough that a deputy only be sworn with their permis-
sion to suggest that it was not being obeyed in every case. It seems clear, too, that
even if the rules were being followed, the recording of names in the Repertories
was incomplete: in the 1690 s deputies for some wards are included in one year,
those from a different set of wards in the next. The Repertories do, however,
identify someof those who served as deputy constables. Between 1693 and 1710
they record 262 occasions on which a deputy was approved by the court—a
number accounted for by 196 individuals, several of whom served more than
once. I have sought to identify the sixty-eight men who served in the years
1693‒8, restricting the search to these six years so as not to stray too far from the
tax assessment evidence used above, to discover what kinds of men were being
brought into the constable’s office who were (presumably) willing actually to do
the job.
The results of such an examination, not surprisingly, confirm that deputies
were distinctly poorer than the men they replaced. The list does not include
linen drapers and goldsmiths. On the other hand, the deputies do not all appear
to have been verypoor men. The majority of those whose occupations are
known (fourteen of twenty-three) were artisans; at least they were listed as car-
penters, weavers, tailors, coopers, and the like in tax assessments, though it is
unclear what that meant in practice. All but one of those who paid the poll tax
were on the basic rate of a shilling, as one would expect. Of those whose prop-
erty tax assessments are known, they were all towards the bottom end of the
range: more than eight out of ten were rated at twenty pounds or less a year,
compared to about 60 per cent of the elected constables in the two Farringdon
wards, and a quarter of those in Cornhill.
As a group, the deputy constables of the 1690 s were poorer than the elected
constables in Farringdon Within and Without, and much poorer than those in
Cornhill. They matched the lower band of the elected constables in all three
wards. The most suggestive evidence that they were poor men may be the fact
that twenty of the sixty-eight men who deputized in the City in the years 1693‒8
did so on more than one occasion. Matthew Brightridge acted as a deputy in the
ward of Coleman Street in 1693 , 1698 , and again in 1699 ; Robert Christmas did
the same in Bassishaw on four occasions in the 1690 s, and continued regularly
to serve in Anne’s reign; William Thornton was also regularly available in the
last decade of the seventeenth century to fill in for elected men in Cheap; John
Finch andJohn Harwood each acted as deputies on three occasions in the 1690 s
in Cornhill; and Edward Payne turned the post into a career, for he served in the
ward ofVintry in every single year ofWilliam’s reign and well into Anne’s. None
of these men appears to have been assessed for taxes, and were perhaps too poor
to pay. On the other hand, several others among the twenty who deputized
more than once in this period were assessed, though at the low end of the scale:
a tailor in Aldgate, a coffeeman in Farringdon Within, a currier and a joiner in
Constables and Other Officers 145