burglary and housebreaking, ‘of late years become more frequent than for-
merly’, by establishing a statutory reward of forty pounds for the conviction of
burglars and housebreakers, over and above the Tyburn Ticket that had been
granted for their successful prosecution at the end of William’s reign.^55 Passing
a statute to encourage prosecutions—and to encourage accomplices to turn in
their companions by the then familiar offer of both rewards and pardons—
was a good deal easier than enacting preventive measures, given the political
conflict in Westminster.^56
Officials in the City had no doubt been wary of the Westminster Watch Bills
in case they encroached on their jurisdiction and threatened the ancient rights
they were ever ready to defend. But they were also moved by the same concerns
about burglary, and that presumably is why the work of the failed committees of
1700 and 1704 was revived in 1705 and resulted in a new act of Common Coun-
cil to regulate the City watches.^57 A lord mayor’s precept in 1705 on the subject
of robbery and burglary in the City was followed within days by the establish-
ment of a committee of Common Council that met in November and Decem-
ber, gathered information from the wards about how many watchmen they
thought necessary, and, on this occasion, how many ‘stands’—watch-boxes—
they planned to establish, the point of that request being that the committee
wanted to know where each ward intended to station its watchmen to enable
them to judge the adequacy of the numbers proposed. The committee also
gathered information about the number of watchmen who were actually de-
ployed every night, as opposed to the number in the pool from which those
actually on duty would be chosen.
The wards, inevitably, reported that many fewer watchmen were on the
streets every night than the pool of men established by the 1663 act might have
led some to expect. Some deputy aldermen thought it necessary to justify a
smaller watch force than that mandated in 1663 by claiming that their ward’s
population had diminished over the intervening forty years.^58 But the main ex-
planation was that the watch had come to be accepted as a body of hired men.
As we have seen, the 1663 figures were based on what was almost certainly al-
ready an outdated assumption even then, that the watch would still be made up
ofhouseholders doing their year of service and that the annual quota needed to
be a large group from among whom some would be ‘warned’ to watch on par-
ticular nights. About half that number were actually at work when the commit-
tee of 1704 carried out its investigation because they were all in fact paid to
Policing the Night Streets 185(^55) In 10 & 11 Wm III, c. 23 ( 1699 ).
(^565) Anne, c. 31 ( 1706 ). The act did retain one connection with the abortive measures to strengthen the
watch with which it was originally linked: the kin of watchmen who were killed in the pursuit of burglars
or house-breakers were declared to be eligible to receive £ 40 rewards, or the portion to which they were
entitled (s. 2 ).
(^57) Jor 54 , p. 137.
(^58) CLRO, Misc. MSS 245.1: letters from the deputy aldermen ofWalbrook and of Queenhithe.