to police the sessions of gaol delivery for the first time—whether it was to con-
trol the prisoners or the spectators who crowded the galleries. It may well have
been the former, since the court’s calendar increased strikingly in the years
around mid-century, a speculation that is given some support by the fact that by
1763 (another year of increased crime following the end of the Seven Years’ War)
the number of constables being paid for such work had been increased to eight.
Several days’ duty eight times a year represented a further extension of their
routine work for a handful of men, and work that, at five shillings a day, was no
doubt welcome to those who by then were looking to make some of their living
as constables.^117
But the greatest expansion of the duties performed by constables in the sec-
ond half of the century clearly arose from concern on the part of the City au-
thorities with the policing of crowds—crowds that gathered to witness
celebrations or public punishments, or to protest against an injustice, or demon-
strate in favour of a cause. This was to be particularly the case after the Gordon
Riots and in the demonstrations in support of radical political causes in the
years of the French Revolution. But long before those alarming events, the City
authorities had moved to engage the constables more frequently in such po-
licing work, and to increase the number of officers available. The constables had
long had the duty to police public whippings and especially the pillory. The City
constables had not, however, routinely been on duty at Tyburn, the place of exe-
cution for offenders convicted of capital offences at the Old Bailey. Some of the
sheriffs’ officers, along with the marshal and the six marshalsmen, had the duty
(at least after the Restoration) of escorting condemned men and women to Ty-
burn, because the journey to the execution site began at Newgate in the City.^118
Constables from the county of Middlesex were on duty at Tyburn itself at least
by the 1750 s.^119 By 1763 , however, a number of City constables were also in at-
tendance at Tyburn, when I take it they were first engaged since the aldermen
objected in that year to bills for this service submitted by the City marshal, who
clearly retained the primary responsibility for keeping order at executions.^120 It
seems likely that this was a response to the anxieties voiced by Henry Fielding in
1751 and by others about the way Tyburn hanging days provided opportunity
Constables and Other Officers 155(^117) CLRO, Alchin MSS, Box I, no. 1 ; P.A.R. vol. 12 , pp. 23 – 7 (report of the Committee on
the City Lands ( 1770 ) ).
(^118) V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770 – 1868 (Oxford,
1994 ), 33. The marshalsmen—as officers of the lord mayor’s household—also acted as door-
keepers (and security men of a sort) in the various courts in which he presided: the justice
room in the Mansion House when that was opened in 1752 , the sessions of the peace in the
Guildhall, and the Old Bailey.
(^119) Welch, Observations on the Office of Constable, 28 ; Steven Wilf, ‘ImaginingJustice: Aesthet-
ics and Public Executions in Late Eighteenth-Century England’, Yale Journal of Law and the
Humanities, 5 ( 1993 ), 55.
(^120) CLRO, Alchin MSS, Box I, no. 1.