reconceptualization involved, the change of the watch from a force of house-
holders taking their turns to guard their neighbourhoods to a body of paid men
doing it as a job. It was to be some forty years before they could begin to do so
and eighty years before the machinery could be put in place that would bring
effective financial support to this force.^20
Robinson’s Act also affirmed that the hours of watching would be from 9 p.m.
to 7 a.m. in the winter months, and 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. in the summer. Those ap-
pointed to watch on a particular night were to meet the constable on duty at a
place to be arranged: permanent watch-houses seem not as yet to have been
common in many of the wards, though they were to be found necessary over the
following decades. Nor was there any mention in the act of watch-boxes or
‘stands’, though such structures were likely to have been in use then; they were
certainly being established in the following decades as fixed points throughout
the wards from which the watchmen were supposed to patrol their beats.^21
The act of 1663 confirmed the watch on its old foundations, and left its effect-
ive management to the ward authorities.^22 From time to time, a concern with
some pressing issue—anxiety about vagrancy, prostitution, the state of crime, or
a threat of violence—might engage the attention of the mayor or the Court of
Aldermen in the business of the watch. During the panic over the Popish Plot
and the fear of a Catholic uprising, for example, the aldermen established a
committee to look into the regulations governing the watch and to consider what
might be done to improve them. The beadles of each ward were required to
attend on three occasions with lists of the names of inhabitants eligible to serve.^23
But once that particular anxiety and the conflict generated by the Exclusion
Crisis passed, the wards were once again left to organize things as it suited them,
with only an occasional reminder from the Guildhall about their duties under
the 1663 act.^24 In those circumstances, as in so many other areas of administra-
tion, what actually happened on the ground varied from ward to ward.
The important matter to be arranged in the wards was who was going to
serve and on what basis. How the money was to be collected to support a force
of paid constables, and by whom, were crucial issues. The 1663 act left it to the
ward beadle or a constable and it seems to have been increasingly the case that
rather than individuals paying directly for a substitute, when their turn came to
176 Policing the Night Streets
(^20) See below, pp. 184 – 97.
(^21) A critic of the watch said in 1679 that they were ineffective in part because ‘their stands are at soe
great a distance’ one from the other (CLRO, Misc. MSS 10.13).
(^22) It did, however, require the inhabitants of each ward to pay their beadle a salary and in turn for-
bade him from pocketing the wages of watchmen who did not turn out for duty—one of the obvious and
long-standing sources of under-manning. Another act of Common Council passed on the same day
required beadles to be elected from a short-list of two nominated by the aldermen ( Jor 45 , fos. 425 – 7 ).
(^23) Jor 48 , fos. 359, 380; Jor 49 , fos. 156, 176. For some of the returns submitted to the committee, see
CLRO, Misc. MSS 112.15(names of householders and lodgers in Bridge Ward, in St Andrew’s, Holborn,
and in St Sepulchre’s, with their trades). Other returns made for the committee for the nightly watch in
1678 and 1680 are in CLRO, Misc. MSS 83.2.
(^24) As an example: Rep 86 , fo. 47 ( 11 January 1681 ).