regular—and the opportunities to add to it by lawful and more shady ways
sufficiently obvious—to attract men who were in a social bracket distinctly a cut
above the watchmen. Beadles whose social standing can be identified in the
1690 s were householders paying tax at a modest level. The post was also suffi-
ciently prestigious and valuable that men settled into it for years on end and be-
came well-known figures in their communities. Edward Payne was typical in
being beadle of Vintry from 1690 to 1713 , for example, and Robert Christmas
was beadle of Bassishaw also through most of the reigns of William and Anne.
But this is also a measure of the influence of the ward managers on the appoint-
ment. Beadles were clearly useful to them, and they would naturally have been
anxious to keep an incumbent who did the job reasonably well.
The beadles were identified with the watch, but that was by no means their only
set of duties. Their work must have varied from ward to ward, and perhaps from
time to time under the regimes of successive aldermen and their deputies. In gen-
eral terms they were agents of the City’s central administration as well as of the
ward executive. They acted as the link between the decision-makers and the in-
habitants of the ward, communicating orders from the lord mayor, the Court of
Aldermen, the Common Council, and the ward leaders to the constables or other
officers, and on occasion directly to the householders. They were called upon to
distribute important information, including changes in the statute law that had a
direct bearing on the City and implications for its citizens. They had done so well
before 1660. On one occasion in the late sixteenth century, for example, when
there was considerable fear of riots and disorder by apprentices, Archer has
reported that the beadles were sent to ‘visit every householder to transmit the
order that apprentices were to be kept indoors’ over a two-month period.^158 The
beadles were still expected to carry such messages—or to arrange to have them
carried—a century later. At the time of the lord mayor’s procession in October
1697 , for example, and in anticipation of the usual raucous celebrations on that
day, the beadles were required to go ‘from house to house’ in their wards to warn
every inhabitant not to allow children and servants ‘to make, throw, or fire any
Fire-Works in the Streets, or out of their Houses, Balconies, or other Places.. .’.^159
The beadles continued to carry out this crucial task of communicating orders
from the City’s central government in the eighteenth century, though by then
often they were being asked to take printed notices around, to post them up in
public places, or to publish them in the newspapers—all of which reveals the au-
thorities’ expectations about the literacy of the City’s householders, at least of
the heads of families whose servants and apprentices needed to be monitored
constantly. When parliament passed the act removing theft from a dwelling
house of goods valued at forty shillings in 1713 —an act aimed specifically
against thefts by servants—the Court of Aldermen ordered that the relevant
clause be printed and ‘by the Beadles delivered to every Housekeeper, that all
Constables and Other Officers 165(^158) Archer, Pursuit of Stability, 216. (^159) CLRO: P.D. 10. 99.