one made up of unpaid citizens, a point accepted in practice in legislation
passed by the Common Council in 1705 , though it was not articulated in as
direct a way. The second was the recognition that this force could not be sustained
without a major shift in the way local services were financed. This led to the
City’s acquis-ition of taxing power by means of an act of parliament in 1737
which changed the obligation to serve in person into an obligation to pay to
support a force of salaried men.
The same broad forces and the same pattern of change underlay another
major transition in this period in a second element of night policing: that is, the
way the City streets were illuminated after dark. This entailed in the first
place a remarkable increase in the number of lights in the City streets, the times
at which they were lit, and a change in the character of the lights themselves—
a transformation that began in the late seventeenth century and that had made
a significant difference to the public life of the City by the middle decades of
the eighteenth. As in the case of the watch, this, too, was accomplished in two
broad stages. The first was a change in the way street lights were provided and
supported, and the substitution of oil lamps for candles—a consequence in
part (though, the story is more complicated than that) of anxieties in the last
decades of the seventeenth century about the problem of night-time crime,
especially burglary and street robbery. These changes (again, as in the case of
the watch) put a strain on the system by which the streets had been illuminated
for centuries, and at the same time enlarged the public’s expectation of the
levels of lighting that ought to be provided. The second stage also paralleled
the transition to a publicly supported watch force, for the expansion of street
lights similarly required the City authorities to obtain authority from parlia-
ment to shift entirely from the customary obligation of a few citizens to provide
lights outside their houses for a limited number of days and hours to an obliga-
tion on many more citizens to contribute to a local rate that would sustain an
entirely different lighting system. This transformation in street lighting and the
linked change in the underlying character of the watch, both at least in part
responses to the problems of night-time policing, form the subject of this
chapter.
The making of a paid night watch
The Statute of Winchester ( 1285 ) continued to provide the legal foundation of
the night watch in the seventeenth century, and watching continued to be the
obligation of all householders, just as unpaid service in other ward offices or on
juries continued to be a matter of civic duty. As in the case of the office of con-
stable, it was possible for those called upon to take their turn at watching to pay
for a substitute, and it is clear that by the seventeenth century the vast majority
of householders had accepted this option to be released from the inconvenience
of staying up at night, doing duty that brought little honour, in a post that carried
Policing the Night Streets 173