time—as when John Rivett, the beadle of Billingsgate ward, was charged along
with a constable in 1701 with having ‘connived att and incouraged persons keep-
ing Bawdy houses’.^168 And the beadles were occasionally lumped in with the
marshals and constables when complaints were made by grand juries and simi-
lar bodies about the way the laws with respect to the sale of goods on Sundays,
or the problems of vagrants and beggars, or other nuisances in the streets were
not enforced because of the partiality or connivance of these officers.^169
It is likely that beadles sought to profit as they could and that most failed to do
their job as conscientiously as they might have. On the other hand, they were
under more scrutiny than many other officers, if only because they were paid,
and their duties were clear and essential. It is hard to believe that beadles could
have slacked off entirely and retained their places over a long period. They were
too important to the deputy aldermen to be entirely unwilling to respond when
called upon to deal with a problem in the streets or to issue warnings or to dis-
tribute information to the inhabitants, and the like. The same might be said for
their most important continuing duty, to provide the organizing force that
would ensure an effective watch.
It was this night-time role as much as anything that confirmed the place of the
beadles in the policing arrangements of the City. For, as we have seen, the prob-
lem of street crime and the threat of burglary and robbery during the hours of
darkness was a continuing source of disquiet and of pressure for change and im-
provement in the way the law was framed and administered. And this was to be
the source of a further set of changes in the policing of the City in the late seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries that require investigation—changes in the
way the streets were watched and lit at night and that made a difference to the
City’s appearance, to the way life could be lived, and that at the same time
extended the reach and responsibilities of City government.
To pursue these subjects, we need to examine two other areas of policing in
which the constables and other ward officers were involved: the maintenance of
order in the streets at night; and the efforts undertaken in the decades after 1689
to increase the number of offenders arrested and brought to trial. These larger
contexts of policing also affected the kinds of work constables were called upon
to do; indeed, they were likely to have been high on the list of reasons why men
who could afford it were more anxious in this period to pay for a substitute when
their turn came to take up the constable’s staff for a year. Those fundamental
changes in the policing environment form the subjects of the next two chapters.
168 Constables and Other Officers
(^168) Rep 105 , pp. 202 , 213. (^169) Rep 142 , p. 28.