Whatever their role at the City’s gates, the principal task of the watch in 1660
and for long after continued to be the control of the streets at night—imposing
a form of moral or social curfew that aimed to prevent those without legitimate
reason to be abroad from wandering the streets at night. That task was becom-
ing increasingly difficult in the seventeenth century because of the growth of the
population and the variety of ways in which the social and cultural life of the me-
tropolis was being transformed. The shape of the urban day was being altered
after the Restoration by the development of shops, taverns and coffee-houses,
theatres, the opera, pleasure gardens, and other places of entertainment. These
all depended on attracting customers from the middling as well as the upper
ranks of the urban population. They remained open in the evening and, in-
creasingly, extended their hours of business and pleasure into the night. With
shops remaining open until 10 p.m.^13 and places of entertainment even longer,
the main streets of the City took on new life—and a constantly expanding life—
after dark. The idea behind the curfew—the 9 p.m. closing down of the City—
was not so much abolished as overwhelmed.
The watch was inevitably affected by this changing urban world since policing
the night streets became more complicated when larger numbers of people
were moving around. And what was frequently thought to be the poor quality
of the watch—and in time, the lack of effective lighting—came commonly to be
blamed when street crimes and night-time disorders seemed to be growing out
of control. There was nothing new in this: Paul Griffiths has noted a concern in
the early seventeenth century about the dangers on the streets and complaints
about the weaknesses of the constables and the watch.^14 But such anxieties were
not only more intense after 1660 ; they were also accompanied by the comple-
tion of changes in the way the watch was recruited that had a fundamental
effect on the nature of night-time policing. These changes were similar to those
occurring in the constabulary (and in its own very different way in the magis-
tracy) since they sprang from the growing unwillingness of men to undertake the
unpaid duties that had sustained the urban community for centuries. In the case
of the watch, it seems likely that large numbers of men had avoided night-time
service by paying for a substitute well before 1660. Indeed, substitution had
become so common by the late seventeenth century that the night watch was
virtually by then a fully paid force.
The implications and consequences of changes in the watch were worked out
in practice and in legislation in two stages between the Restoration and the
middle decades of the eighteenth century. The first involved the gradual recog-
nition that a paid (and full-time) watch needed to be differently constituted from
172 Policing the Night Streets
(^13) A man who wanted a contract to take away the City’s night soil in 1688 said that his men would
work at night, beginning at 10 p.m. ‘just at the shutting up of all shops’ (Edmund Hemings’s proposal in
CLRO, Papers of the Court of Aldermen, 1688 ).
(^14) Paul Griffiths, ‘Meanings of Nightwalking in Early Modern England’, The Seventeenth Century, 13
( 1998 ), 218 – 20.