418 Crime and the State
thief-takers.^156 But the concentration of magisterial authority in few hands at a
time when anxieties about crime in the metropolis were encouraging radical
ideas about other aspects of policing—including the night watch and street
lighting—may have suggested the usefulness and importance of an established
and regular magisterial presence in the City. It is significant that Billers’s and
Brocas’s monopoly of criminal work found echoes in other parts of the metrop-
olis, particularly in the activity of Sir Thomas De Veil in Westminster, who cre-
ated a form of magistrate’s court in Bow Street in the 1730 s and 1740 s, and with
it the notion of a more fully engaged justice of the peace with ties to the central
government. This was to be the foundation of the system of police and prosecu-
tion more fully elaborated by Henry and John Fielding after 1748. De Veil and
the Fieldings created a new kind of urban magistracy. They were more fully en-
gaged in investigating crime and organizing prosecutions than had ever been
imagined as being within the purview of a justice of the peace. They developed
a magistrate’s court that was a centre of policing activities and provided the
model for the professionally staffed police courts that monopolized the early
stages of criminal administration in the metropolis (outside the City) by the end
of the century.^157
The fact that concentrated magisterial activity arose in the two major centres
of the metropolis in the second quarter of the century suggests that something be-
yond mere personal circumstances underlay the withdrawal of some magistrates
from criminal work and the willingness of a few others to take up the burden.
That is also underlined by the anxiety of some magistrates after 1750 to take ad-
vantage of the changes in the policing and prosecution environment—in the
availability of rewards, the pardon process, the activities of thief-takers and more
active constables, as well as a central government that was more able and more
willing to put resources into the criminal justice system—to construct new mech-
anisms and new means of combatting violent criminals. Such innovations
depended on the engagement of active men who saw in the challenge of crime an
opportunity for personal fulfilment, professional advancement, or more simply a
way to earn a living and perhaps of attracting the patronage of the powerful.
(^156) They did take advantage of the discretionary powers at their disposal to carry out a policing strat-
egy, using the offer of a royal pardon as a way of inducing accused felons to confess and give the evidence
that would convict their accomplices. Virtually without exception, the statements taken from the ac-
cused in this period were confessions, not simply examinations, and confessions in which accused men
typically owned up to multiple offences committed with a variety of accomplices and also named their
receivers (CLRO: London Sess. Papers, 1733 – 7 ). One must presume the magistrates continued to take
depositions from victims of offences and continued to examine individual suspects who denied any in-
volvement in the offence in question. But such depositions and examinations were not retained. This
seems unlikely to have been an accident of record survival, but rather a sign of the magistrates’ determin-
ation to gather and keep information that would help to break up gangs of offenders (and to convict
receivers), and of their determination to mount successful prosecutions.
(^157) Anthony Babington, A House in Bow Street: Crime and the Magistracy in London, 1740 – 1881 ( 1969 ),
chs 1 – 13 ; Radzinowicz, History, iii. chs 1 – 2 ; Ruth Paley, ‘The Middlesex Justices Act of 1792 : Its Origins
and Effects’, Ph.D. thesis (Reading University, 1983 ).