recruitment of better men and solved the problem the deputy alderman of
Candlewick presented to the committee on the watch in 1737 , when he told
them that shortage of money had ‘oblig’d us to be satisfy’d with the Service of
such Men, as the smallness of our Pay would enable us to employ, though per-
haps less Capable of their Duty, than we could wish and desire’.^95 Candlewick
was then paying its watchmen ten pounds a year. The new rate was well below
the twenty pounds that Defoe thought a poor man required in London to live
decently, if frugally.^96 And, at five shillings a week, it was almost certainly to-
wards the low end of the range of income of London labourers.^97 On the other
hand, a watchman’s thirteen pounds provided a guaranteed income throughout
the year, not subject to seasonal variation or interruption, as was so much work.
It was also a base salary that would have been increased by tips and rewards and
fees, not to speak of more corrupt possibilities—and perhaps sufficiently in-
creased to encourage rather better recruits to take up watching at night than in
the past.^98
Watchmen’s pay emerged as an issue, however, in the evidence taken by a
House of Commons committee set up in 1751 (at the height of another post-war
panic about crime in the metropolis) to look into the law enforcement appara-
tus in Westminster and a number of other urban parishes in Middlesex, and to
‘consider the Laws in being which relate to Felonies, and other Offences against
the Peace’.^99 Among its many resolutions on the watch, the committee com-
mented on the deleterious effects of low wages on the quality of the watchmen
serving in Westminster and other metropolitan parishes. In their view, ‘the
Salaries paid to Watchmen are too small to induce able-bodied Men to under-
take that Service; and the Watching all and every Night makes it impossible for
industrious Handicraftsmen or Manufacturers, to accept of being employed as
Watchmen’. Not even unskilled men could afford to take it on, they thought, if
they had to work every night. Their recommendation was not, however, that the
wages be increased: that was not apparently a possibility they could imagine,
given, one must presume, what they knew about the attitudes of the parish
authorities and the ratepayers ofWestminster. Their suggestion was to double
198 Policing the Night Streets
(^95) CLRO, Misc. MSS 245.2. (^96) Defoe, Augusta Triumphans, 52.
(^97) See L. D. Schwarz, ‘The Standard of Living in the Long Run: London, 1700 – 1860 ’, Economic His-
tory Review, 2 nd ser., 38 ( 1985 ), 36 , for London bricklayers, carpenters, and bricklayers’ labourers’ wages.
The latter earned no more than 2 s. 0 d. a day in the first half of the eighteenth century. Peter Earle esti-
mates the annual income of a London labourer at between £ 10 and just over £ 16 a year (The Making of
the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660 – 1730 ( 1989 ), 14 ).
(^98) Ruth Paley has found evidence that at least in the early decades of the nineteenth century watch-
men in some Middlesex parishes were younger and more vigorous than the stereotype suggests (‘ “An
Imperfect, Inadequate and Wretched System”? Policing London before Peel’, Criminal Justice History, 10
( 1989 ), 104, 114).
(^99) Radzinowicz, History, 1. ch. 12 ; Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 520 – 30 ; Nicholas Rogers, ‘Confronting
the Crime Wave: The Debate Over Social Reform and Regulation, 1749 – 1753 ’, in L. Davison, T. Hitch-
cock, T. Keirn, and R. B. Shoemaker (eds.), Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic
Problems in England, 1689 – 1750 (Stroud, 1992 ), 77 – 98.