Book for 1728 – 33 —the only surviving account of the lord mayor’s work as a
magistrate between 1705 and the mid- 1750 s. This lone volume is helpful on the
issue of constables’ work for, unlike the records that survive from the late seven-
teenth century, it includes the names of constables who brought suspects to the
Guildhall to be examined. It provides only the briefest note of the matters at
issue, but it does reveal how many and how often constables had business to con-
duct before at least one of the City’s magistrates. In 1730 , the year in which
Richard Brocas served as mayor, 148 individual constables brought suspects
before him ( just under two-thirds of the City’s constabulary), some on several
occasions. These included suspects who had been picked up by the watch and
kept overnight in the watch-house or for longer periods in one of the sheriffs’
compters; others who had been charged with an offence by the victim of an
alleged crime, and some who had been arrested by the constable in pursuance
of a magistrate’s warrant. The offences involved ranged from the most serious
felonies to the most trivial misdemeanours, many of them forms of disorderly
conduct on the streets, especially at night—street-walking, brawling, causing a
disturbance, drunkenness, and the like.
The volume includes business in only about thirty weeks in Brocas’s term,^111
and he was in any case only one of several magistrates who might have dealt
with criminal business that year; Sir William Billers, seems to have been equally
busy, though it is impossible to discover who among the constables took suspects
to his door, and in what numbers. The Brocas record does, however, offer some
insights into the patterns of constables’ work. It provides evidence, for example,
that, as one would expect, some constables were more actively engaged in the
business of the office than others. In 1730 most of the constables who appear in
the Charge Book do so on only one or two occasions. But thirty-three of the 148
men made more than four appearances, eight of them more than ten. Together,
these men account for more than half the defendants brought to Brocas’s atten-
tion.^112 Ten or more appearances before the lord mayor in seven months or so,
even the twenty-four made by one of these men, do not suggest a feverish level
of policing work. But, relatively speaking, when we remember that close to a
hundred constables do not appear in the Charge Book at all, the busiest of these
152 Constables and Other Officers
(^111) Several weeks of business went unrecorded because one of the four attorneys regularly failed to
keep notes; and Brocas spent at least eight weeks in his mayoral year in attendance at the Guildhall ses-
sions of the peace and the Old Bailey, during which he did not sit as a magistrate.
(^112) Constables are named on 466 occasions in the charge book for 1730 (bringing many more suspects
than that since they frequently brought more than one). The numbers involved are at follows:
No. of constables Times named Total appearances % of whole
89 1 – 2 115 24. 7
26 3 – 4 89 19. 1
25 5 – 9 154 33. 1
8 10 – 24 108 23. 3