What emerged from that was the conviction that the problems surrounding the
watch were by then too deep-seated to be solved simply by more vigorous man-
agement. This committee of Common Council put forward a solution that was
clearly driven by the men who ran the wards—the deputy aldermen and com-
mon councillors—a solution that required an accession of authority by act of
parliament to raise a local rate for the support of the watch so that personal
obligation could be abandoned as the basis of the system.
The ward leaders had come to that conclusion by the late 1720 s because by
then the problem of non-payment of watch money had reached serious propor-
tions. The ward and parish authorities complained frequently about house-
holders who refused ‘to watch or to pay the rate in lieu thereof’. Among others,
the constables of St Andrew’s Holborn, and the beadles and deputy aldermen
of the wards of Castle Baynard, Farringdon Within, and Tower complained
about their difficulties—further evidence of the way that under-payment hit the
largest and poorest parts of the City the hardest.^77 When the bill for ‘Appointing
a better Night Watch and regulating the Bedles in England and for the better
Enlightening the Streets and publick passages within the Weekly Bills of Mor-
tality’ was introduced into parliament in 1728 , the City was thus ready to ask for
statutory authority for the collection of their own watch rate. The Court of Al-
dermen asked the common serjeant and recorder to prepare a clause to be in-
serted in the new legislation that would extend to the City powers ‘for the better
recovery of such sums of Money as for the future shall be assessed on the several
Inhabitants’ in support of the watch, by authorizing the deputy and common
councilmen of each ward to seize and sell the goods of those who refused to pay
the watch rate simply by virtue of a warrant signed by a magistrate. The clause
made it clear that the payment of these rates was in lieu of the personal duty of
watching and warding.^78
In the end the complex politics ofWestminster doomed this bill, too. But the
issues it addressed and the crime problems it responded to were so insistent that
within a few years the issue was raised again, and the City then successfully
sought its own bill. After one final effort to make the old system work,^79 a no-
ticeable shift occurred in the mid- 1730 s in the urgency with which the issue of
night policing was dealt. The impetus clearly came from the wards; from the
men who had to raise the watch with inadequate tools. The deputy aldermen
and the common councillors seem essentially to have taken matters into their
own hands. As we will see, the related question of how to provide adequate
Policing the Night Streets 191(^77) Rep 129 , pp. 72 – 3 ; Rep 132 , p. 466 ; Rep 133 , pp. 189 – 90, 272, 282, 283.
(^78) Rep 133 , pp. 280, 307.
(^79) Noting in 1733 ‘the frequent Robberies Committed in the night time in the Publick Streets of the
City’, the aldermen ordered the ward deputies and common councilmen to cause the beadles to give
notice to every inhabitant when their turn came to watch as the act of 1705 required—not to get them ac-
tually to turn out, but ‘to pay what shall be charged on them’, and if they refused, to prosecute them
(Rep 137 , pp. 199 – 200 ).