CHAPTER FOURPolicing the Night Streets
The problem of the night
Constables were not regularly drawn into daytime surveillance. Night was a dif-
ferent matter. It had been recognized for centuries that the coming of darkness
to the unlit streets of a town brought a heightened threat of danger, that the
night gave cover to the disorderly and immoral, and to those bent on robbery or
burglary or who in other ways threatened physical harm to people in the streets
and in their houses. Robbery and murder were ‘the most vile Works of Dark-
ness’, a man reminded the Court of Aldermen in the late seventeenth century,
and though his views were hardly disinterested since he was lobbying to get a
contract to light the City streets, he was repeating a commonplace.^1 The ancient
prayer said at Evensong in the Anglican church for protection against ‘the
perils and dangers’ of the night continued to carry considerable meaning.
The guarding of the City at night had developed around the expectation that
in the evening hours—the period of transition from the working day to the night
proper—the inhabitants of the City would most likely be indoors and preparing
for bed. The urban working day began at first light, and what would now be con-
sidered an early bedtime was natural and essential. Such habits were reinforced by
the shortage and poor quality of artificial light. Most houses could only have been
dimly lit, and the streets of the City would have been very dark indeed, except for
the few hours in which candles barely illuminated the main thoroughfares and
perhaps on cloudless and moonlit nights. The anxieties that darkness gave rise to
had been met by the formation of a night watch in the thirteenth century, and by
rules about who could use the streets after dark. These rules had for long been un-
derpinned in London and other towns by the curfew, the time (announced by the
ringing of a bell) at which the gates closed and the streets were cleared. Only
people with good reason to be abroad could then travel through the City. The
1666 edition of Michael Dalton’s guide to justices of the peace continued to quote
statutes of the fourteenth century that expressed in spirit if not in detail the sense
of restriction in the use of the night streets that continued to be enforced in prac-
tice in the seventeenth century. ‘Every Justice of Peace’, readers were informed,
(^1) CLRO, Alchin MSS, Box B, no. 37.