embroiderer, living in the early 1690 s in Bow Street, Bloomsbury, andJames
Jenkins, a clockmaker in Exeter Court, off the Strand—had been joint secre-
taries and ‘fully employed informers’ of the original Society for the Reformation
of Manners in Tower Hamlets.^49
Rewse andJenkins were among the most active agents in the society’s efforts to
eradicate vice and immorality.^50 In the two years 1693 – 5 they brought numerous
prosecutions before the bodies that dealt with such offences, sometimes
separately or with other men, more often together. They appeared at the City
sessions of the peace, before the lord mayor sitting as a magistrate, and before the
Bridewell court. The lord mayors’ waiting books and the Bridewell court books
disclose that, together, separately, or with others, they were responsible for
charging at least twenty-two women as prostitutes or nightwalkers, or as lewd or
lascivious persons, or on suspicion of pocket-picking, and at least fifteen owners
of disorderly houses or bawdy houses. When one considers that these figures are
for the City only, that within the City there were many magistrates besides the
lord mayor before whom such cases could have been brought, and that neither
the lord mayors’ waiting books nor, especially, the Bridewell court books contain
a complete account of their business, it is clear that Rewse and Jenkins were very
active indeed in pursuing the prosecutorial ambitions of the reforming societies
to take vice off the streets and to close down disorderly alehouses and bawdy
houses. Jenkins was sufficiently active—and sufficiently resented—to be at-
tacked several times in the street, and, as he complained in a charge he brought
against two men before the City sessions, to be called an ‘informer’.^51
Rewse and Jenkins also, however, developed other targets—or rather, per-
haps, they had other targets very much in mind when they joined the moral re-
form crusade. Jenkins was a witness in a larceny case tried at the Old Bailey in
1693 , for example; in the following year he joined with Rewse and a constable to
bring a clipping case, helped to prosecute an attempted rape at the sessions, and
in 1695 was bound over to give evidence with three others in another clipping
case.^52 He appeared from time to time in coining cases in succeeding years, for
the most part associated with Rewse.^53
238 Detection and Prosecution
(^49) Radzinowicz calls them ‘the first regular detectives’ (History, ii. 16 , n. 68 .) For the prosecuting ac-
tivities of the societies, see Faramerz Dabhoiwala, ‘Prostitution and Police in London, c. 1660 – c. 1760 ’,
D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1996 ), ch. 5 ; Robert Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment, ch. 9 , and idem, ‘Re-
forming the City: The Reformation of Manners Campaign in London, 1690 – 1738 ’, in Davison, et al.
Stilling the Grumbling Hive, 99 – 120. In Prosecution and Punishment(p. 242 ), Shoemaker quotes a resolution of
the Tower Hamlets society to employ two persons ‘to search out houses of lewdness and bawdry and
persons that haunt them in order to their legal prosecution, conviction, and punishment’.
(^50) Dabhoiwala, ‘Prostitution and Police in London’, pp. 155 – 6 , 169 – 70.
(^51) CLRO: SF 494 , August 1694 , recog. no. 1.
(^52) CLRO: SF 398 , December 1693 , Gaol Delivery ind. (Katherine Moore); SF 405 , October 1694 ,
Gaol Delivery ind. (Elizabeth Harris); SF 402 , May 1694 , Sessions of the Peace, recog. 32 ; SM 66 ,
July 1695 , Gaol Delivery, recog. 13.
(^53) In an information before a magistrate in August 1696 Rewse gave evidence about apprehending a
coiner withJenkins andJohn Dawes, a constable. They stopped and searched him in the street, finding,