serve, the eligible householders were asked to contribute to a watch fund that
supported hired men. In Billingsgate, for example, where such collections were
being made in the 1670 s, a quarter of the money raised went to pay the beadle’s
salary, and the remainder to support the watchmen.^25 The Common Council of
other wards also adopted a watch rate by the end of the seventeenth century.^26
Well into the eighteenth century, local circumstances—particularly the
wealth and social character of the ward—continued to dictate the kind of watch
that would be raised and the way it would be supported. In very large wards, the
watching system was virtually impossible to control. Farringdon Without, for
example, was so large that each of its nine parishes or precincts had ‘power to
act separately as to Watches as if they were so many wards’ and the result was a
patchwork of systems. In some, a general fund was raised; in others individuals
who chose not to serve continued to pay to hire watchmen in their stead. It was
difficult in the poorer parts of the City to raise the necessary money, but the
sheer size of many poor wards also prevented the deputy aldermen and others
from keeping tight control over the constables and beadles who collected the
watch rate and who from time to time were found to have deliberately kept the
watch under-manned in order to pocket some of the proceeds.^27
It was obviously easier for the wealthier wards to support paid watch forces
than the poorer parts of the City, and it was in the former that the ward governors
got more control after the 1663 act and, in some, developed what appear to have
been workable arrangements—at least on paper—to collect watch money and
to put a more effective watching system in place. But even in more manageable
places the system of hired watchmen was not working well by the late seven-
teenth century when anxieties rose about the dangers on the night streets. When
the City marshal was asked by the lord mayor in July 1696 to survey the watches
and report the number of watchmen on duty, he praised the ward of Cornhill,
but found the watch arrangements to be ‘defective’ in most wards. Virtually
everywhere he looked there were fewer watchmen on duty than the act of 1663
required and they left their posts earlier than the rules allowed.^28
Policing the Night Streets 177(^25) Rep 78 , fo. 53.
(^26) The act of 1705 recited that it was the custom of the City for all householders, free or not, to take
turns watching, to nominate a substitute, or to pay the alderman, deputy, and common councilmen to
provide a substitute—a payment that would be collected by a constables or the beadle (CLRO: P.A.R.
vol. 7 , p. 65 ).
(^27) CLRO, Misc. MSS 9.3. In the equally large ward of Farringdon Within similar difficulties were ap-
parent. Soon after the Restoration the constables in several of‘the lesser precincts’ complained that they
could not ‘raise sufficient for the charge of their night watches’, by which they meant presumably that
there were not enough men qualified to watch or able to pay for their extensive watch force. They also
claimed that the ‘greater precincts’ in the ward refused to contribute towards the watch charges of their
poorer neighbours as they had formerly done. The alderman, deputy, and common councilmen (the
‘common council of the ward’) were ordered to examine the constables’ accounts and find a solution in
this case, but it is clear that problems of that kind were endemic (Rep 68 , fo. 212 ). So, too, were simple re-
fusals to serve or to pay (Rep 70 , fo. 49 ; Rep 76 , fo. 191 ). Shoemaker, for example, reports that 75 men
were indicted in Middlesex in 1663 – 4 for refusing to serve on the watch (Prosecution and Punishment, 130 ).
(^28) Rep 100 , fo. 168.