purpose and to deal with disputes about their location.^60 Their establishment
went hand in hand with the expansion if not the creation in the late seventeenth
century of watch ‘stands’ and regular ‘beats’. In requiring watchmen to be sta-
tioned in their watch-boxes at places that would allow them ‘to maintain a cor-
respondence with each other’ and enable them to come to each other’s aid, the
act of 1705 legislated this aspect of the watching system for the first time.^61
The 1705 act accommodated some of the structural changes that were shap-
ing the way the watch was raised without changing its duties. It confirmed, for
example, that watchmen should carry halberds, even though they had clearly
ceased to do so in practice. It also retained the established hours of duty ( 9 p.m.
to 7 a.m. in the winter months, and 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. in the rest of the year) des-
pite the fact that arguments had been made for mounting a watch much earlier
in the evening. Indeed, almost immediately there was pressure to rethink that
aspect of the act. In November 1706 a group of inhabitants of St Paul’s Church-
yard in the ward of Farringdon Within complained to the aldermen about the
number of robberies on coaches and people on foot taking place in their area
‘in the Evening’, before the watch came on duty. Similar reports were received
from the wards of Castle Baynard and Farringdon Without—that is, from some
of the most crowded places in the City. The deputies and common councilmen
of all three wards were asked to consider whether the act passed in the previous
year would accommodate a watch being set ‘as soon as it begins to grow darke
in the before mentioned and all other Places within their said Wards usually In-
fested with such Malefactors’.^62 It was clear that it would not, since the numbers
of watchmen had been reduced. Nothing came of this momentary panic,
certainly nothing in the way of permanent policing at such times.
Further complaints about the watching system established on the basis of the
1705 act were inevitable, given its lack of flexibility and the failure to tackle
(possibly to recognize) the problem of how the money was to be raised to pay the
force of hired men. And complaints inevitably followed when the problems the
watch was supposed to prevent not only failed to diminish but seemed to in-
crease in number—as increase they did from time to time, and would have
done, whether there was a fine watch force or none at all. They were particularly
prevalent in the quarter century of peace between the end of the War of
Spanish Succession ( 1713 ) and the beginning of the naval war against Spain in
Policing the Night Streets 187(^60) Rep 74 , fos. 82, 120–1, 126, 228– 9 ; Rep 86 , fos. 183, 193; Rep 87 , fos. 6, 45. In 1676 the dean and
chapter of St Paul’s and the inhabitants of Castle Baynard ward came to an agreement that would allow
the ward to build a watch-house on ground belonging to the chapter to the south of the cathedral
(GLMD, MS 25739 A).
(^61) The City also adopted a system of monthly watchwords following the act—setting out a secret way
for one watchman to identify another if they met in the dark. One year’s table of ‘monthly City Words’
(names of English towns) survives for November 1705 –September 1706 (Bodleian Library, Rawlinson
MS D. 862 , fos. 76 – 87 , my knowledge of which I owe to Tim Wales). It is signed by Queen Anne, pre-
sumably on the model of the watchword given to the guard at royal palaces, where it continued to make
some sense. It seems not to have survived in the City.
(^62) Rep 111 , p. 11.