Burglaryes... committed... after the Breaking upp of the Watches... to the
losse and Dammage of many of the Inhabitants’.^44 Complaints were heard by
the Court of Aldermen in 1701 against the beadles of Billingsgate and Bridge
wards for ‘keeping very short watches contrary to the ancient and known laws
of the City’.^45 This was by then an ancient and well-known grievance.
Concern was also being expressed in the difficult years of the 1690 s, when
street crime seemed to be especially common, about the lack of surveillance on
the streets in the evening hours, beforethe watch assembled. From time to time,
and for brief periods, the watch was ordered to be on patrol at such times. In
January 1691 , to take but one example, the sitting lord mayor issued a precept
complaining about the large number of robberies being committed in the
streets in the evening hours before the watch came on duty—at 9 p.m. in the
winter and 10 p.m. in the summer. Such offences were said to be committed ‘by
persons coming out of disorderly alehouses and tipling houses’, and the precept
authorized the aldermen to ensure that from ‘the close of Evening before and
untill the setting of the Watch there may be a convenient number of persons
continually walking about the streets and lanes in your Ward’.^46 In the following
winter, a similar order instructed constables to arrange to have persons with
halberds walking the streets from 6 p.m. until the ‘Grand Watch be set’, almost
certainly without effect, since the City made no offer to pay the extra costs of the
men to be mobilized for such warding duty.^47
By the last decade of the century concerns about dangers in the streets were
so insistent that the mayor and aldermen were in the end forced to confront the
structural problems in the watch, problems of undermanning and short hours
that had clearly become serious in the long transition to a paid force. Over the
course of a decade from the mid- 1690 s the City authorities made several at-
tempts to replace Robinson’s Act and establish the watch on a new footing.
Though they did not say so directly, the overwhelming requirement was to get
quotas adjusted to reflect the reality that the watch consisted of hired men
rather than citizens doing their civic duty—the assumption upon which the
1663 act, and all previous acts, had been based. Because ordinary householders
taking their turn would not have been able to watch every evening, the quotas
set up in 1663 were designed to create an annual pool of eligible inhabitants
from which a number of men would be chosen to watch for a particular night.
But that quota would be too large once it was accepted that watchmen were
salaried, since hired men would likely serve much more frequently, even perhaps
182 Policing the Night Streets
(^44) CLRO: SM 70 , fo. 78. (^45) Rep 105 , p. 294.
(^46) The constables were also to search alehouses and tippling houses for suspicious persons and bring
them before him or another magistrate to be examined ( Jor 51 , fo. 109 ).
(^47) Jor 51 , fo. 119. Not surprisingly, the same concerns were expressed in other parts of the metropolis
about the absence of policing during the evening hours, when the streets were dark but also frequently
crowded since the shops and taverns were open. The Middlesex magistrates ordered constables to set the
watch from ‘sunset to sunrise’ in August 1700 (LMA, MJ/SP/ 1700 /August ( 2 ) ).