By the last decades of the century, when the City’s resources were flowing ever
more freely into policing, large numbers of ward constables were joined by extra
constables to police crowds that could become particularly difficult—for ex-
ample at the pillorying of offenders whose crimes made them likely targets of
popular abuse. On one occasion in 1764 ‘all the constables of the City [and] the
Javelin-Men, in short the whole civil Power’ was assembled.^124 Two decades
later, the possibility of hiring ‘extras’ made for even more formidable forces. At
a pillorying in 1785 ‘the sheriffs... on horseback, with their officers, the two City
Marshals, and upwards of 500 Constables’ were assembled—that is, twice as
many constables as were on the books.^125
Remembering Thomas Garrard’s caution in 1737 about increasing the number
of constables by even a handful, this had been a remarkable transformation of the
basis of this crucial element of the City’s policing forces. It had been made pos-
sible by the sharp increase in the number of paid constables in the first half of the
century. By 1800 such men not only made up two-thirds of the City’s constabulary,
by Patrick Colquhoun’s reckoning, but they had come to be seen by reformers like
him as the necessary foundation of a new system of police. Substitutes,
Colquhoun said in the constables’ handbook he published in 1803 , were not only
acceptable but were actually to be preferred. The office of constable had become
much more demanding since 1660 because parliament had added so many duties
and responsibilities over the intervening period. At the same time, the freemen
who used to take their turns at filling the office as part of their civic duty, were now
too busy to do so. Substitutes were ‘unavoidable’, Colquhoun said, ‘in the present
state of society, where so few are to be found, among the freemen, whose import-
ant pursuits will admit of that labour and attention which is now indispensible on
the part of a Constable, who will do his duty’. The poor men among the freemen
who could not pay the premium required to hire a sustitute served reluctantly,
and did as little in the job as is ‘indispensably necessary’. Substitutes, on the other
hand, could be expected to bring vigour and energy to the post if they were
adequately paid and carefully selected.^126
Colquhoun’s views reflect the sea-change in thinking about policing issues
that had occurred in the eighteenth century. By 1800 the constables of the City
were largely hired men and, in part as a result of that, their numbers could be
increased as problems of crime and public order seemed to require. Such
‘extras’ could also be turned out to confront City-wide problems. These changes
had been facilitated in the second half of the century—when the need for larger
numbers of peace officers became overwhelming—not only by the City’s ability
to pay for larger numbers of extra constables, but also by the presence in the
Constables and Other Officers 157(^124) The Public Advertiser, 22 March 1764 (a reference I owe to Greg T. Smith). Javelin-men
were the City marshalsmen who carried spears on such occasions, and for whom see below.
(^125) Gentleman’s Magazine, 55 ( 1785 ), 917.
(^126) Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Functions and Duties of a Constable, x–xv.