Crime and the State 417tipped off Unwin that Read was in his house. He addressed the defendant and
then the court, as though in explanation:
Jack, you know I never went after Mr Unwin [ he said]. I know this poor Creature thinks
I went to this Man, and I swear I never was near him; if I would have had him taken, I
could have done it several Times before now.^153
However compromised it might have been, detection as an activity none the
less became part of policing practices over the late seventeenth and first half of
the eighteenth centuries. In both positive and negative ways it shaped attitudes
towards police that were to be of decisive importance in the future. As Ruth
Paley has said, thief-takers ‘straddled the margins of the conventional and crim-
inal worlds and formed, in effect, a sort of entrepreneurial police force.. .’.^154
They also straddled the private and the public worlds, in that, at least in some
periods, close ties developed between thief-takers and constables and encour-
aged a fusion of private energy and self-interest on the one side, and public au-
thority on the other. Such an alliance was the fundamental idea behind the work
of Henry and Sir John Fielding, who made significant innovations in policing
practices by creating an institutional setting that merged active detection with a
more focused, more bureaucratic, system of magisterial work. This is not a sub-
ject we can deal with in detail, but it is a useful way to conclude our investigation
into the changing forms of prosecution in the first half of the eighteenth century
by examining the extent to which developments in the City had influenced
developments in the rest of the metropolis.
Policing and prosecution at mid-century
As we saw in Chapter 2 , there was a gradual concentration of magisterial
criminal work in the City ofLondon in the hands of a shrinking group of alder-
men over the early decades of the eighteenth century. It is true that men named
to the commissions of the peace all over the country were also becoming in-
creasingly reluctant to act as magistrates.^155 But the situation that was to occur
in the City was unprecedented, sudden, and drastic, for what had been a group
of about half a dozen or more active magistrates as recently as Anne’s reign had
been reduced by 1733 to two: by then, much of the burden of the magistracy in
criminal matters was being carried by Sir William Billers and Sir Richard
Brocas.
Although Billers and Brocas were active magistrates, they do not appear to
have done much to extend the work that justices had traditionally performed in
the City. There is little evidence of their instigating investigations into crime or
organizing prosecutions; nor do they seem to have had close ties to constables or
(^153) OBSP, February 1743 , pp. 130 – 1 (No. 195 , Read).
(^154) Paley, ‘Thief-takers in London’, 302. (^155) Landau, Justices of the Peace, 318 – 28.