It was the weakening sense of obligation to serve on or to pay for the watch
that brought home to the Court of Aldermen and the Common Council of the
City their need for new authority to support the collection of the rate. The only
possible source of such authority was an act of parliament. A statute could au-
thorize the raising of a rate and at the same time provide a simple mechanism to
compel payment. It had the further advantage that the tax could be graduated
in such a way that the wealthy paid more than the poor and yet the base could
be broadened to include more contributors than before. In turning to parlia-
ment, the City authorities were again spurred on (as they had been in 1704 – 5 ) by
the efforts of inhabitants of some of the Westminster parishes to get statutory
support for similar schemes.
The issue had in fact come before parliament in 1720 , raised once again by
the struggle for control and reform of the watch in Westminster and by the wide-
spread concern about dangerous streets.^66 A bill was introduced into the House
of Commons early in that year ‘for the better regulating the Night Watch and
Beadles in the... Counties of Middlesex and Surrey’, which renewed the effort
to create a local rate to support the watch, in the hope—as one of its supporters
wrote—that it would reduce the ‘peril ofbeing robb’d or murder’d if on the
necessary Occasions of Life, we are obliged to be out of our own Doors after ’tis
dark’.^67 The bill was once again opposed by the burgesses of Westminster and
by other Middlesex parishes. It was again watched with care by the lord mayor
and aldermen of London, who established a committee to draft and submit a
clause that would ensure that any bill that passed would not apply to the City.^68
That bill failed, but the failure drew the central government—a government
increasingly active in the prosecution of crime in the 1720 s^69 —into the discus-
sion about the state of the watch in London. The magistrates of Westminster
and Middlesex were called in by the lords justices, who acted for George I dur-
ing his absence in Hanover in 1720 , to be encouraged to consider other ways of
improving the night watch in their jurisdictions in order ‘to prevent robberies
and disorders that happen in the streets’.^70 Secretary Townshend also discussed
the issue of the watch with the experienced Middlesex magistrate Nathaniel
Blackerby in 1725 and sought his suggestions about how street robberies and
housebreaking might be suppressed. Blackerby’s main recommendation was
Policing the Night Streets 189Aldermen in the 1720 s and 1730 s: see, for example, Rep 129 , pp. 72 – 3 ; Rep 132 , p. 466 ; Rep 133 , pp. 15,
50 – 1, 189–90, 205, 272; Rep 137 , pp. 199 – 200. The unwillingness of owners of warehouses and other
commercial buildings to pay the watch charge or provide a person to watch for them emerged as an issue
in the late 1720 s (Rep 133 , pp. 189 – 90 ). Discussion of this matter, and of the parallel issue of payments for
street lights outside public buildings, encouraged a significant broadening of the notion of public duty
and a new conception of local services that was to be embodied within a few years in watching and
lighting acts, as we shall see.
(^66) Reynolds, Before the Bobbies, 11 – 15.
(^67) N.M., A Letter to a Member of Parliament concerning the Bill for Regulating the Nightly Watch in the City of West-
minster and Liberties thereof( 1720 ), 28.
(^68) Jor 57 , fo. 41. (^69) See Ch. 9.
(^70) SP 44 / 28330 August, 3 September, and 20 September 1720.