were particularly numerous in the older, more stable parts of the City. The
parishes outside the walls, larger in area and increasingly in the seventeenth
century in population, were both more crowded and poorer than those at the
centre. Their social problems, including crime, were more difficult to manage,
in part because they did not command the resources of their wealthier neigh-
bours. Several such parishes, including St Botolph in Bishopsgate Without,
St Giles in Cripplegate Without, St Andrew, Holborn, and St Sepulchre and
several other parishes, or part parishes, in Farringdon Without, regularly peti-
tioned and received help with their Poor Law obligations from their richer
neighbours, a process co-ordinated by the court of aldermen.^22 But none of the
twenty-six wards into which the City was divided was without a central group of
established residents who brought some stability to its governing institutions.
The urban world was no doubt more anonymous than the small towns and vil-
lages in which the vast majority of the population of England lived. Indeed,
some measure of the freedom that anonymity brings may have been one of its
strongest attractions to the young who were coming to London in such numbers
by the end of the seventeenth century. But the City ofLondon was not a mass
society in any modern sense of the term. The local community still mattered a
great deal—in social and political and cultural ways—and even the largest and
most crowded of the City’s wards were not without a core of men prepared to
take their turns in local offices that engaged them in the government of their
small world. Throughout the City there were still many men like Nathaniel
Redhead of the parish of St Andrews Holborn, a baker, described by his neigh-
bours in 1750 as ‘an Honest and Substantial man and of good Credit and Char-
acter’, who had lived twenty-five years in the parish ‘and hath served all the
offices therein’.^23 Men like Redhead, who helped to govern at the level of
the parish and the precinct, and who served in ward offices, on juries, and on the
common council, gave a particular character to the administration of the City,
including its judicial administration.
The City included a large working population, many of whom lived in the
greatest insecurity because they depended on work that was by its nature un-
certain and irregular. Even in the wealthiest districts there were pockets of
poverty. But in the suburban wards on the outskirts of the City a larger propor-
tion of their less-rooted and less-skilful populations were more vulnerable to
changes in the availability of work. Along with other parts of the metropolis, the
City attracted large numbers of young immigrants, women and men, looking
for work in service and in the textile, building, and other trades, who tended
to congregate in the suburban parishes. Their fortunes depended entirely on
the shifting availability of work and the costs of basic foodstuffs, and very large
10 Introduction: The Crime Problem
(^22) See, for example, CLRO: London Sess. Papers, May 1694.
(^23) He was petitioning the king on behalf of his son, who had been condemned to death for horse-theft.
Twenty-three men supported his petition (SP 36 / 113 / 20 ).