numbers of young men and women could easily find themselves in serious diffi-
culty if work dried up and they were adrift in parishes in which they could make
no claim on local resources, without friends and supporting kin.^24
The City’s social and economic landscape helped to shape the offences pros-
ecuted at the Old Bailey, and we will have reason to explore it more fully when
we examine the work of that court. We will also have reason to return to the pol-
itical and cultural makeup of the City when we consider the responses of its
more prosperous citizens to what they considered the great threat of crime and
disorder. Social structure and political organization also shaped the working of
the judicial system in the City.
The administration of the criminal law was divided among several jurisdic-
tions in the larger metropolis of London and was unique in the country in terms
of the work of the courts involved, the relationships among them, and the pat-
tern of their meetings.^25 It was certainly very different indeed from the system of
quarter sessions and assizes familiar elsewhere. In the City the institutions of
policing and prosecution were governed by the royal charter which established
the wards, each of which was led by an alderman elected for life and one of
whom served an annual term as mayor. The City’s magistrates were chosen
from among the twenty-six aldermen. At the Restoration their numbers were
governed by the 1638 charter which named the serving lord mayor, the recorder
of the City (the principal legal officer and adviser to the aldermen), the alder-
men who had ‘passed the chair’—that is, who had already served as mayor—
and the next three most senior aldermen as magistrates. The increasing
reluctance of aldermen to act in the office, along with the press of business over
the late seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth, resulted in add-
itional aldermen being named as magistrates until, in 1741 , all were included as
soon as they were elected.^26
The City magistrates held sessions of the peace eight times a year at Guild-
hall. The rest of the metropolis north of the river Thames came under the juris-
diction of the magistrates of Middlesex, who also held their sessions of the peace
eight times a year, at Hicks’ Hall in Clerkenwell, at the same time as the City ses-
sions met.^27 In both jurisdictions, the sessions calendars included the kinds of
Introduction: The Crime Problem 11(^24) George, London Life, chs 3 – 4 ; A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay, ‘Introduction: The Significance of the
Metropolis’, in Beier and Finlay (eds.), London, 1500 – 1700 , 17 – 20.
(^25) For the relationship in criminal matters among the courts in the metropolis in the seventeenth cen-
tury, see John Cordy Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, 4 vols. ( 1886 – 92 ), i. xvii–lx; Hugh Bowler
(ed.), London Sessions Records, 1605 – 1685 , Catholic Record Society, 34 ( 1934 ), vii–lx; J. S. Cockburn, A His-
tory of English Assizes,1558‒1714(Cambridge, 1972 ), 29 – 31.
(^26) [ Jones], The Corporation of London, 59 – 60.
(^27) The City of Westminster had its own commission of the peace and also held its own sessions. The
Borough of Southwark, on the south of the river and connected to the City by the only bridge in the me-
tropolis in the late seventeenth century, was in some respects part of the City, and the mayor and alder-
men held sessions of the peace there once a year. But this court dealt with few cases; criminal matters
arising in Southwark, and in its neighbouring populous parishes, came within the jurisdiction of the
county of Surrey. See Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 16 – 17.