offenders and more traffic on the streets. At the same time, and for the same rea-
sons, the expectations held of them by the aldermen or their fellow citizens may
also have been increasing. This may explain why men who could afford to do so
were showing increasing reluctance to take on the business of being a constable
in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Defoe said in 1714 that the office
of constable was one of‘insupportable hardship: it takes up so much of a man’s
time that his own affairs are frequently totally neglected, too often to his ruin’.^103
The lord mayor and aldermen had complained soon after the Restoration
about the number of respectable men who were refusing to serve as constables,
to the ‘disparagement’, they said, of the office.^104 But it seems likely that, while
deputy constables were being engaged then (as they had been at least since the
beginning of the seventeenth century), the decades after 1689 saw a sharp in-
crease in their numbers. More men than ever before appear to have been anx-
ious—and perhaps more able—to pay someone to do their duty for them and
there seems to have been a flight from the office of constable of men in the mid-
dling ranks of London society in a way that parallels the withdrawal of alder-
men from the day-to-day work of the magistracy. It may have been the numbers
of men now anxious to escape from this, and perhaps other local offices, and its
acceptance (under their control) by the City authorities that explains why the
provision of a ‘Tyburn Ticket’—a certificate excusing the holder from taking on
such offices—was introduced as a reward for the successful prosecution of
shoplifters in a 1699 statute supported and indeed crafted by London men.^105
The evidence in the Court of Aldermen’s Repertories about the employment
of substitute constables is much fuller by the second quarter of the eighteenth
century than in the 1690 s, and some of the apparent increase in the numbers of
such deputies may simply reflect this. But the change is too sharp to be merely a
matter ofbetter record-keeping. Had there been as many deputy constables
active in the City in the 1690 s as there came to be by the 1720 s and after, evidence
of that would almost certainly have shown up in the half dozen or so wardmote
inquest books that survive in that period. The increase in substitute constables
over the first quarter of the century seems real enough, and to have occurred on
a massive scale in some wards. The change in the ward of Cornhill, for ex-
ample, was dramatic. Whereas only nine of fifty-eight men elected in the 1690 s
and the early years of Anne’s reign bought their way out of the office, thirty years
later, over 90 per cent of nominated men in Cornhill declined to serve. By the
late 1720 s it appears that nearly a hundred deputy constables were being
appointed in the City every year—an apparently sharp increase from previous
levels that helps to explain why the aldermen were unable to maintain their
close scrutiny of the candidates and why after the first decade of the eighteenth
Constables and Other Officers 147(^103) Daniel Defoe, Parochial Tyranny: or, the Housekeeper’s Complaint.. .( 1727 ) 17.
(^104) CLRO: P.D. 10. 73.
(^105) See Ch. 7. For ‘Tyburn Tickets’, see Radzinowicz, History, i. 192 – 4 ; ii. 155 – 61.