may cause night-watch to be duly kept, for the arresting of persons suspect, and night-
walkers (be they strangers or others) that be of evil fame or behaviour.... All such
strangers, or persons suspected, as shall in the night time pass by the Watch-men... may
be examined by the said watchmen, whence they come, and what they be, and of their
business, etc. And if they find cause of suspition, they may stay them... the watchmen
may deliver such persons to the Constable, and so to convey them to the Justice of
Peace, by him to be examined, and to be bound over, or committed, untill the offenders
be acquitted in due manner.^2
Such controls continued to be exercised in the late seventeenth century. Guard-
ing the streets to prevent crime, to watch out for fires, and—despite the absence
of a formal curfew—to ensure that suspicious and unauthorized people did not
prowl around under cover of darkness was still the duty of the night watch and the
constables who were supposed to command them. The expectation that when
night came the streets of the City would be largely deserted continued to shape
the provision of urban services well into the eighteenth century. The inhabitants’
duty to hang out a candle on houses on the main streets provided light, a lord
mayor said in 1676 , for the ‘Convenience of all whose Affairs may occasion them
to Walk abroad at seasonable hours in the dark of the Evenings’.^3 But in 1676 , and
for decades after, those candles were to be lit only until the watch came on duty—
at 9 p.m. in the winter, 10 p.m. in the summer. After that, the assumption was that
few people would have legitimate reason to be on the streets. In 1735 a man seek-
ing to obtain a contract to provide lamps that would illuminate the streets through
the night told the aldermen that such lighting would be useful ‘for the Preserva-
tion of the Lives, Limbs, Properties and Business of Physicians, Surgeons, Mid-
wives, Nurses, Servants, Market-Folks, And such as must come to or through
London all Hours of the Night.. .’.^4 It was natural to him to think of such people
as having legitimate reasons to be out at night, and by implication others—
except, always, gentlemen, or anyone who could make a claim of respectability
that would put them above suspicion and reproach—not to have reason to travel
around the City in the dark. The time after which questions might be raised
about people using the streets almost certainly changed over the early modern
centuries, but for long, the old curfew time—when the watch came on duty—
seems to have remained as a natural time to have the streets cleared. The magis-
trates at the City sessions of the peace (at a time when they thought taverns were
allowing drinking late into the night and harbouring ‘housebreakers, robbers’
and other lewd and debauched men and women) were repeating an established
notion when they ordered constables and watchmen in 1701 to prevent drinking
or gaming in public houses after 10 p.m. on winter evenings or 11 p.m. in the
summer.^5 Similar ideas lay behind the petition from a group of Middlesex
magistrates, concerned about the problems of robbery in London in 1725 , who
170 Policing the Night Streets
(^2) Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice ( 1666 ; 1 st edn., 1618 ), 173. (^3) CLRO: P.D. 10.64.
(^4) CLRO, Alchin MSS, Box B, no. 37. (^5) CLRO: P.A.R. Book 5 , fo. 5.