continued to increase in the second half of the century; Patrick Colquhoun esti-
mated that they made up ‘nearly two-thirds’ of the body of City constables in
1803.^106
The data set out in Table 3. 3 suggest a broad correlation between the pro-
portion of reasonably wealthy householders living in a ward and the percentage
of elected men who opted to pay for a deputy. The highest percentages of
deputy constables in the four years examined around 1730 were to be found in
the smaller and richer wards in the central part of the City; at the bottom were
the wards at the other end of the scale with respect to population, size, wealth,
and the number of constables assigned to deal with their manifold problems.
Three of the bottom five were large extra-mural wards; the two that were within
the walls were populous and poor.
Perhaps the most important point about the change that had occurred is the
apparent flight from local office of the kinds of respectable men who seemed still
to have been prominent among the constabulary in the late seventeenth cen-
tury. The largest proportion of substitutes were employed in the wards in which
men in the middling ranks of London society had been content to serve their
year as constable fifty years earlier. There were fewer deputies in the largest
wards not because none of their inhabitants could afford to pay, but, as we have
seen, because the parish and ward authorities insisted that the only way to
escape service as a constable or other officer was to pay a fine at the parish or
precinct level and thus contribute essential revenue to parishes that otherwise
would not be able to meet their Poor Law payments. In a petition to the alder-
men in 1715 the churchwardens of the parish of St Anne Blackfriars, in the ward
of Farringdon Within, complained that a man had been allowed to bring in a
substitute constable at the wardmote instead of fining to be excused the office—
an entirely new practice, they claimed, that threatened their Poor Law rev-
enues. Because of the large numbers of lodgers in the parish and of poor to be
supported, the parish had long depended on ‘the fines which were got at Christ-
mas’ (that is, at the meeting to nominate officers for the coming year). They
wanted the aldermen to order that no one be sworn as a constable of the
precinct ‘but those only who were duly chosen in their vestry’, preventing a pri-
vate arrangement between the nominated man and a substitute from which the
parish would not benefit. It was so ordered.^107
What appears to have been the sharp reduction in the number of substantial
shopkeepers and tradesmen serving as constables in the early decades of the
eighteenth century had important implications for several aspects of the po-
licing of the City. In the first place, it may well explain the hostility towards the
Constables and Other Officers 149(^106) Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Functions and Duties of a Constable, x.
(^107) CLRO, Papers of the Court of Aldermen, 1715 ( 11 January 1714 / 15 ). Another man who wanted to
‘execute the office by a deputy’ was told by the vestry of the parish that he had to ‘perform the Duty of
that Office in Person or pay the accustomed Fine for his Refusal’ (CLRO, Misc. MSS 64. 4 (petition of
Samuel Batt, 1722 / 3 ) ).