asked the secretary of state to order that the soldiers of the king’s guards stationed
in the metropolis be kept off the streets after 10 p.m.^6
Michael Dalton included in his guide to justices the injunction from a statute of
1417 that ‘in great Towns walled, the Gates shall be shut up from the Sun-setting
untill the Sun-rising’.^7 This was no longer the practice in the City of London,
though, again, the ideaof having gates to close had not yet been abandoned at
the Restoration. Had it been, the City would presumably not have gone to the
trouble and considerable expense of rebuilding Newgate and Ludgate when
they burned down in the Great Fire of 1666. They did rebuild them—though at
the same time widening the passages for traffic and constructing postern gates
(that is, side gates) for foot passengers.^8 A guard of sorts was still occasionally
mounted at the gates, and they were closed at night in times of particular
trouble—as for example, during the anti-Catholic hysteria of the Popish Plot in
1678. But that was clearly unusual by then, as the aldermen revealed when they
found it necessary to claim that they made the order ‘pursuant to the Ancient
Constitution’.^9 They also ordered the deputy alderman and the common coun-
cilmen of the wards in which the gates were situated to guard them in person,
presumably because—ancient constitution or not—the inhabitants no longer
accepted this as a customary obligation, and could neither be forced to serve nor
to pay for a substitute.^10
The gates were also guarded in the late seventeenth century, when crime or
street disorders appeared to be on the increase. In 1700 the wardmote of
Farringdon Within appealed to the City for help to pay for two men to mount
an evening watch at Ludgate and Newgate to prevent ‘Quarrells and picking of
Pockets’.^11 And the postern gates at the main entrances to the City were also
given a special force of watchmen in 1716 , when street crime and violence were
thought to be particularly serious and the areas around the gates (or perhaps the
congestion they caused) seemed to provide cover for groups of pickpockets or
gangs of robbers. But these men, who became permanent, were needed mainly
to keep foot traffic moving and to prevent crowds forming.^12
Policing the Night Streets 171(^6) SP 35 / 67 /8. (^7) Dalton, Countrey Justice, 173.
(^8) T. F. Reddaway, The Rebuilding of London after the Great Fire ( 1940 ), 106 – 9.
(^9) Rep 84 , fos. 4 – 5 ; CLRO: P.D. 10.81. For the history of watches at the gates, see Donald Rumbelow,
I Spy Blue: The Police and Crime in the City of London from Elizabeth I to Victoria( 1969 ), 25 – 7.
(^10) There was some thought in 1681 that this might become permanent, but there was clearly little chance
of that (CLRO: P.D. 10.81). During the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 , as the army of Charles Edward ap-
proached ever closer to London, the aldermen also thought then of ‘securing the gates’ as well as ‘the av-
enues’ of the City. On this occasion, the force they called on was the City’s trained bands (Rep 149 , fo. 437 ).
(^11) CLRO, Wardmote Presentments, 1700. The gates may have been closed at what were thought to be
other times of danger into the early years of the eighteenth century. It was reported in 1709 , for example,
that complaints had been made to the aldermen that ‘divers Gentlemen, and Others, passing to and fro,
in the Night, about their lawful Occasions, have been stopp’d in their Coaches at Aldgate and Newgate,
and the Gates not readily open’d by the Watchmen (as they ought to have been) and that not without
Suspicion of their Demanding and Receiving Money, in Breach of their Trust, and Neglect of their
Duty’ (The Post Boy, 25 – 7 January 1709 ).
(^12) Jor 56 , fos. 237, 246; CLRO,Journal of the City Lands Committee, vol. 14 fos. 59, 63, 124.