raised the problem of parish governance and gave rise to a struggle between
vestries that were dominated by the wealthy inhabitants, on the one hand, and
the high steward and burgesses of the City, who were appointed by the dean and
chapter of the abbey, on the other.^51 Concern about the watch in Westminster
stirred such a bitter internal dispute about how the city was to be governed that
a group of well-connected inhabitants took the problem of the night watch to
parliament, and got a bill introduced into the House of Commons in December
1703 ‘for the better regulating the nightly watch’ in Westminster and in the
parishes of Middlesex and Surrey within the Bills of Mortality. This failed at
second reading, but the bill was introduced again and the battle continued over
the succeeding three sessions.^52 All were successfully resisted by petitions opposing
the central proposal of all the bills: the raising of a rate for the support of an
enlarged watch.^53
The concerns expressed in the City ofLondon over the last decade of the
seventeenth century about the adequacy of their night watch thus merged early
in Anne’s reign with a much wider set of anxieties in the metropolis. They arose
from concerns about the dangers of violent crime in the streets, and violence
threatened in the course of burglaries. How well-placed those fears were, it is
difficult to know, but there is little doubt that the fear of burglary in the early
years of the eighteenth century drove the efforts of men in Westminster and the
City to establish their night watches on new foundations. That was made ex-
plicit when a bill to establish a £ 40 reward for the conviction ofburglars was in-
troduced into the House of Commons by the sponsors of the third of the watch
bills and was sent after second reading to the committee already established to
examine that bill. It emerged in 1706 as ‘An act for... encouraging the discov-
ery and apprehending of house-breakers’.^54
None of the watch bills got past the committee stage because they threatened
the vested interests of the dean and chapter ofWestminster Abbey. The House-
breaking Act passed in parliament because it threatened no interests and fitted
a pattern of legislation established in the previous decade. It sought to diminish
184 Policing the Night Streets
(^51) Elaine A. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London,
1720 – 1830 ( 1998 ), ch. 2.
(^52) JHC, 14 ( 1702 – 4 ), 272, 298, 339, 461, 488, 491, 496, 498, 500, 503, 514, 520; JHC 15 ( 1705 – 8 ), 58, 62,
69, 117, 119, 122, 125, 132, 139, 142, 200, 204–5, 216, 217–18, 231, 240, 244, 254, 279, 280–1, 298, 303, 375.
(^53) The dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey also claimed that the bills threatened their ancient
rights; and (in the case of the 1706 bill) the churchwardens, overseers, and other inhabitants of the parish
of St Dunstan, Stepney, also petitioned for exemption on the grounds that they would be faced with an
‘unnecessary Charge’. They had always provided, they said, ‘an able and sufficient watch’ which served
their parish well, ‘in so much that, for a long time, they have not had any Robbery, or House-breaking’
(JHC 15 ( 1705 – 8 ), 244, 254).
(^54) For this bill and the statute that resulted as 5 Anne, c. 31 ( 1706 ), see JHC, 15 ( 1705 – 8 ), 202, 214,
217 – 18, 331–2, 353, 374, 376– 7 ; JHL, 18 ( 1705 – 9 ), 293, 297, 311, 320; and below, Ch. 7. The committee also
took up the cause ofJoseph Billers, a self-styled thief-taker, active (by his own account) in the prosecu-
tion of burglars and recommended that he be compensated when he petitioned parliament for ‘Encour-
agement and Protection’ (JHC, 15 ( 1705 – 8 ), 303, 375). For Billers and thief-taking, see Ch. 5.