Corporation of an officer who could act as a co-ordinator. This was the marshal,
whose changing role in the policing of the City we must examine briefly.
City marshals
There was clearly some ambivalence about what was expected of the constables
during the daylight hours. When vagrants or beggars crowded the streets, or
when anxieties rose about the way the young were wasting their time, or forms
of popular amusements and sports seemed to the authorities to be encouraging
vice and immorality the constables might be ordered to be more actively in-
volved in surveillance and prosecution—to take up vagrants, for example, and
encouraged with fees for doing so. But for the most part in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries constables were not expected regularly to patrol their
precincts. Indeed the more general expectation was that they would remain at
home and be available to respond to requests for help. Any such patrolling of the
streets during daylight hours before the second half of the eighteenth century
was more the duty of two other officers, the city marshals and the beadles.
The marshals were salaried City officers, appointed by the lord mayor and al-
dermen and paid from the Chamber. Among the policing resources of the City
in 1660 the marshals were a relatively recent creation, for they dated only from
the reign of Elizabeth. The office originated in orders from the queen that the
City appoint a ‘provost martial’ to deal with the threatening growth of vagrancy
and ‘masterless men’, and following the establishment of such officers in the
counties by act of parliament.^127 By the second quarter of the seventeenth cen-
tury the appointed man was known simply as the marshal—though occasion-
ally, until after the Restoration, as the provost marshal^128 —and he had acquired
an assistant who was generally referred to as the under-marshal.^129 The marshal
also acquired the support of six ‘marshalsmen’ in the early seventeenth century.
By the end of the century the marshal received a salary of one hundred pounds
from the City, the under-marshall sixty pounds, and the marshalsmen a
shilling a day, or eighteen pounds, five shillings a year, and new livery which
identified them as members of the lord mayor’s household.^130
158 Constables and Other Officers
(^127) A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560 – 1640 ( 1985 ), ch. 9 ; Paul
Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England( 1988 ), 91 – 102 ; Archer, Pursuit of Stability, 223 – 4.
(^128) Rep 71 , fo. 183 ( 1666 ); Rep 73 , fo. 91 ( 1667 ).
(^129) The marshal—technically, the ‘upper marshal’ but usually simply called theCity mar-
shal—retained his superiority, certainly with respect to salary, and it was his office that con-
tinued (and indeed continues to this day) when the under marshal’s post was abolished in the
nineteenth century. I have benefited in what follows from a brief history of the office in an un-
published essay by Betty Masters, ‘The City Marshal’, a typescript copy of which is in CLRO,
Misc. MSS 135. 4. The essay contains a useful list of all the marshals and under-marshals.
(^130) Jor 52 , fo. 50 ; Rep 92 , fo. 165. The attachment of the marshals and marshalsmen to
the lord mayor’s entourage was underlined in 1687 when the aldermen ordered the