Cripplegate Within. It seems reasonable to think that all these men were willing
and available to be deputy constables because they may have drawn some local
standing from acting so regularly, and because they regarded it as a job that
helped them patch together a living.
A complete record of deputies in the 1690 s, if that could be obtained, would
almost certainly reveal that even more substantial middling men than our fig-
ures show bought their freedom by hiring a substitute when their turns came to
act as constable. But it seems unlikely that a verylarge number would have done
so without that being apparent in the wardmote inquest book itself. Most of
those elected, even men of considerable standing in their communities, seem to
have served out their year as constable in the 1690 s and in Anne’s reign. They
also participated in the political and administrative life of their communities.
Serving in an office for a year in their precincts, parishes, wards, or on the wider
City stage was not an unusual experience for the male, ratepaying, inhabitants
of the City—a circumstance that helped to sustain the City’s resilience, and its
sense of itself as a political and civic community. The men who were elected as
constables of Cornhill in the decade and a half after 1690 were the kinds of men
who regularly accepted responsibility for the ordering of the communities they
lived in. Most had had experience (and would go on to have more) in the gov-
erning of their parishes as members of the vestry or as churchwardens and over-
seers of the poor, and, under the leadership of the alderman and his deputy, of
the ward. They served on juries; and more than 80 per cent of the constables
elected in Cornhill had served in the various ward offices. Their acceptance of
such offices and their willingness to fill active posts and to sit on juries suggests a
willingness to participate in local affairs, to act in and help to govern their com-
munities.^101 Some of them did so, we might presume, out of self-interest, out of
a desire to impose their vision of order on the community; for others it may have
been a way of confirming their place in the community or because they believed
in these forms of local self-government.^102
The office of constable was almost certainly more demanding, however, than
most other parish posts. And, as I suggested earlier, it seems to have become
even more demanding in the early decades of the eighteenth century, as po-
licing problems became more difficult to deal with, as the population of the me-
tropolis rose, and there appeared to be more serious crime and more dangerous
146 Constables and Other Officers
(^101) Beattie, ‘London Juries in the 1690 s’, 214 – 53.
(^102) Joan Kent found that similarly respectable men acted as constables in rural parishes and market
towns about a century earlier (English Village Constable, ch. 4 ). For some men in London, the office may
have been useful as a way of conferring local standing—granting a form of respectability that, for ex-
ample, William Bird appealed to in petitioning the king to pardon his wife after she was convicted of theft
and threatened with execution. Bird, a tailor living in St Andrew’s, Holborn, based his plea on the
grounds that the charge was malicious, the result of a private quarrel. But he also called upon his own
standing in the community. He had been a householder in St Andrew’s for more than thirty years, he
said, ‘and has borne all parish offices and been always in good repute’—a claim supported by the con-
stable, churchwardens, and other inhabitants of St Andrew’s. Hester Bird was granted a free pardon
(CSPD 1682 , pp. 207 , 220 ).