plausible enough evidence to get him sent to the Poultry Compter.^136 The mar-
shals continued into the eighteenth century to arrest prostitutes and vagrants
and others they deemed to be causing trouble in the streets. In the three years
1729 – 31 , for example, the marshal charged a total of seventy men and women
with various offences before the lord mayor—mainly for vagrancy or prostitu-
tion, for assault or making a disturbance in the streets, for selling illegally, or
contravening other regulations. A quarter of these offenders had been named in
a lord mayor’s warrant that the marshal—or his hired men—carried out, and
another third involved the bringing of accused offenders from the Bridewell or
one of the compters.^137 The marshals continued to be ordered to police the
streets in various ways—to arrest hawkers selling ‘scandalous books and papers
highly reflecting on the government’ ( 1701 ), or to be diligent in taking up
vagrants and beggars, especially children ( 1733 ).^138 And they were mobilized in
1745 when the City faced the threat that a Jacobite army might reach its gates,
and were even issued with pistols.^139
Given their City-wide authority and broad supervisory powers under the
general direction of the lord mayor and the Court of Aldermen, the marshal
might have emerged in the early part of the eighteenth century as the manager
of the City’s policing forces, as an early form of police commissioner. That he
did not do so was almost certainly due in large part to the shift in effective con-
trol over policing matters from the lord mayor and aldermen to the leaders of
the wards in the early decades of the eighteenth century. We have seen that the
choice of deputy constables came under the control of the Common Council of
the wards; in the next chapter we will see that the disposition of the watchmen
and the organization of the street lights did so too. The marshals were given par-
ticular tasks from time to time by the mayor and aldermen, but by the second
quarter of the eighteenth century the day-to-day management of the local
policing forces rested very largely in the hands of the ward authorities.
The marshals also acquired a reputation for corruption. Opportunities to
profit from their post arose from the breadth and range of their powers, and en-
couragement to do so from the significant cost of the office: the purchase price
was 800 pounds by the early decades of the eighteenth century. Seventeenth-
century marshals were accused of negligence by the Court of Aldermen, but not
of corruption, or at least not to the extent that that charge was to be brought
against their eighteenth-century successors. If they did become more grasping
after 1714 than before, it may be because they lost a major source of patronage
that they must have counted on to help recoup the price of the office when the
lord mayor, after a prolonged dispute, made good his claim in 1723 to dispose of
the six marshalsmen’s places.^140 That would not explain the behaviour of a man
160 Constables and Other Officers
(^136) CLRO: Charge Book, 1695 – 9 , fo. 94. (^137) CLRO: Charge Book, 1728 – 31.
(^138) Rep 106 , p. 21 ; Rep 137 , p. 98. (^139) Rep 149 , p. 256.
(^140) Rep 127 , fo. 264.