that the City-wide authority of the office combined with increasing demands
being made of the constables and other officers was providing the marshal with
new opportunities to take a leading role in some aspects of the policing of the
City. When a particularly serious outbreak of street violence occurred in 1744 ,
committed by a gang of armed men in an area that spread from the western end
of the City into Westminster and it seemed wise for the magistrates of the two jur-
isdictions to co-ordinate their reponses, it was the marshal, Edward Jones, who
acted for the City in concert with Sir Thomas De Veil, the magistrate at Bow
Street.^148 The marshal’s role in City policing was considerably enhanced as the
result of a further struggle in the early 1770 s over the right to appoint the six
marshalsmen, a right the marshals had lost to the lord mayor in 1723. The further
conflict led to a new establishment of the small policing force under which pur-
chase was abolished and the marshals and their men were given salaries. The
result was to enhance the marshal’s role at the centre of City policing.^149
The wide ambit of their authority led to the marshals being given the leader-
ship of a day patrol of ten men when that was established in 1785.^150 And their
duty to arrange for crowd control at celebrations and processions, many of
which they led, on horseback, wearing their scarlet uniforms and with their
marshalsmen in attendance in the livery of the lord mayor’s household and
carrying their spears (their ‘javelin men’), gave the marshals an enhanced role in
the policing of the City streets and other public places as crowds and crowd be-
haviour took on a more threatening character over the second half of the cen-
tury. Already by the middle decades of the century, as we have seen, the
marshals had been given the task of hiring constables to attend at the Old Bai-
ley and Tyburn and at sites of other public punishments, and payments for such
appointments began to appear regularly in their accounts. This became a major
feature of policing in the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the early
years of the nineteenth as large numbers of ‘extra’ constables came to be de-
ployed at hangings, particularly after the gallows were moved to Newgate in
1782 , and at the two other common forms of public punishment at which large
crowds gathered by the end of the century—the pillory and whipping.^151 By
1789 a committee of the Common Council thought of the marshals as the nat-
ural leaders of the City’s peace-keeping forces, urging them ‘to conduct them-
selves... as High-Constables of this City; and as far as in them lies to preserve
the Peace and good Order of the Police’, that is to be ready to lead the con-
stables and others to suppress riots.^152
These further developments of the marshals’ policing role in the City were
relatively short lived, however. As a consequence of the policing and penal
162 Constables and Other Officers
(^148) Gentleman’s Magazine, 14 ( 1744 ), 505.
(^149) Rumbelow, I Spy Blue, 88 – 92 ; Harris, ‘Policing the City’, esp. ch. 3.
(^150) Harris, ‘Policing the City’, 63 – 7. (^151) Harris, ‘Policing the City’, 75 – 87.
(^152) CLRO: P.A.R., vol. 12 , pp. 30 – 4.