the number of watchmen, but engage each for only half the week, and for
half the pay. The established budget would not be exceeded, but they expected
that better, more able-bodied, recruits would be attracted than under the old
arrangement, since, they said, ‘it might be worth while for laborious People
to undertake it, as it would not hinder them from following their own
Occupations’.^100
Salaries were higher in the City at that point, but still low enough that similar
problems were being experienced there, too, by the middle decades of the cen-
tury. Indeed, it was revealed in an investigation undertaken in 1773 – 4 that the
rigidities of the watching system and the low pay offered had forced several
wards in the City to take drastic measures to try to improve their watch without
exceeding the financial caps that the annual Watch Acts continued to impose on
them—and that they perhaps wanted. All the wards had at first conformed to
the guidelines laid down by the Common Council in 1737 , this investigation re-
vealed, and had kept ‘as strictly as possible to the literal order’ of the annual
Watch Acts. But at some point—when, they did not know or disclose, but it
would not be surprising if it had been during the great anxiety about the in-
crease in violent crime in the middle years of the century—several of the wards
introduced drastic modifications in the practice envisaged under the 1737 act. In
particular, wards with difficult policing problems tried to cope with the conse-
quences of their watchmen’s low pay and constant work by reducing the num-
ber of watchmen by half, doubling the wages of those who remained, and
expecting them to serve through the night without relief. Others reduced the
number of watchmen, but at the same time appointed ‘Patroles’ to move
through the whole ward at night. The total number of men required was
decreased under this plan and so they were able to give each watchmen, either
on the beat or on patrol, higher wages than thirteen pounds a year while staying
within the budget laid down in the City Watch Act.^101
The conclusion of that investigation and what flowed from it is beyond my in-
terest here: it would carry us on to the further development of the watching sys-
tem and into the nineteenth century. The situation it exposed in the City does
cast doubt on the possibility that a system requiring full-time duty from the
watchmen would attract the kinds of men the ward authorities would have liked
to hire—at least in sufficiently large numbers. That does not mean that the
watch had not been improved over its pre- 1737 condition. When contempor-
aries declared the watch (or any other institution) to be inadequate, they were
making an explicit comparison not with what had gone before but with their
current expectations. Continuing criticism does not mean that nothing had
changed. It is indeed likely that, whatever improvement there might have been
in the effectiveness of the watch, the problems on the streets and the changing
expectations of the public would still have drawn criticism. And it does seem
Policing the Night Streets 199(^100) JHC, 26 ( 1750 – 4 ), 159. (^101) CLRO, Misc. MSS 12.10.