every evening. None of this was said directly, but it was surely the problem that
had bedevilled the raising of the watch over the late seventeenth century, since
there were no established guidelines as to the number of watchmen to be raised
other than those established in the act of 1663. The corruption of the constables
was merely a symptom of a much larger problem. What were required (it came
to be agreed in practice) were realistic quotas for each ward and the establish-
ment of a means of paying for them.
Efforts by lords mayor in 1692 and 1695 to instigate a thorough examination
of the watch were clearly resisted, but by the end of the decade the defects of the
watch finally became so intolerable as the level of prosecuted crime mounted at
the end of the Nine Years’ War that a committee ‘to regulate the watches of the
City’ was agreed to and began a process that resulted in a new act of Common
Council.^48 The committee began its work by collecting information from every
ward, precinct by precinct (gathered and confirmed by the deputy and common
councilmen) on the number of inhabitants ‘capable to serve or to send a person
to the watch’, i.e. those who could be called upon either to serve or pay.^49 These
officials were also asked how many watchmen they thought were needed to pro-
vide adequate surveillance in their wards. All the information gathered and the
quotas proposed were summarized in a draft of a new act.^50
Nothing came of this, presumably because of disagreements among the
wards—large and small, rich and poor—about the number of men to be hired.
A second committee took the matter up again in 1704 , moved to do so by com-
plaints about the level ofburglaries and robberies which the aldermen were cer-
tainly receiving early in Anne’s reign and which were, as ever, blamed on the
inadequacy of the watch. Indeed, burglary was a sufficiently widespread con-
cern over the entire metropolis in these years that reform of the watch became
an issue in other jurisdictions, particularly in some of the large and fashionable
Westminster parishes in which local policing arrangements were coming under
intense criticism from a dominant core of wealthy, aristocratic, and politically
important inhabitants. Their policing issues were the same as in the City, but
there was an additional complication in Westminster in that the watch issue
Policing the Night Streets 183(^48) It is possible that the efforts we have seen being made by the Court of Aldermen in the 1690 s and
the first decade of the eighteenth century to control the appointment of deputy constables (Ch. 3 ) was
connected in part with their anxiety to improve the watch. There is a suggestion in a lord mayor’s pre-
cept of 1708 , in which the appointment of several unqualified deputy constables is blamed for the failure
of the watch to keep night walkers and malefactors off the streets at night, that the aldermen made such
a connection ( Jor 55 , fo. 15 ).
(^49) CLRO, Misc. MSS 31.1(Minutes of the Committee, 27 May 1701 ). The returns from several wards
are scattered through a number of manuscript classes in CLRO, including the Papers of the Common
Council ( 1701 ); Alchin MSS, Box N, no. XCIII; Misc. MSS 9.1; Misc. MSS 11.30; London Sess. Papers,
July–September 1701.
(^50) See CLRO, Misc. MSS 9.3(‘Watches: abstract of Mr Newland’s Bill for the C[ommon] C[oun-
cil]’). When the Common Council agreed that the committee should prepare a bill, all the aldermen and
their deputies were added to the committee, obviously to ensure that no ward’s interests were ignored
(CLRO, Papers of the Common Council, 29 April 1701 ).