Crime and the State 419There is no reason to think that the response in the City, and in particular the
attitudes expressed by the recorder, William Thomson, and the work undertaken
by Billers and Brocas in the 1730 s, was fundamentally different from that in Mid-
dlesex. But in fact the City version of the magistrate’s court was to develop in a
different way from those in other parts of the metropolis by the end of the cen-
tury. Following Brocas’s death, as we have seen, no alderman came forward to
take up the task of being theCity magistrate that he had been fulfilling for some
years—allowing the others to pay little attention to criminal business, as the
emergence of the ward executive headed by the deputy aldermen and one or two
active common councilmen had allowed the aldermen to opt out of the details of
ward administration. Brocas’s death created a crisis that could only be solved by
the creation of a new institution. The aldermen agreed in November 1737 that
they would take turns sitting as magistrates in the Matted Gallery in Guildhall—
a space that was now developed more fully as a court for public business. The
court was to be open daily except Saturday and Sunday, each alderman sitting
alone for a day in turn, roughly once every five weeks, attended, as the lord mayor
had been, by attorneys who kept the record of the court’s business.^158
The City’s ‘rotation’ system was the first institutionalized magistrate’s court,
but it was to take a different form from those that developed elsewhere in the
metropolis. The Guildhall court, at which the sitting alderman attended daily,
and the Mansion House justice room, where the lord mayor conducted magis-
terial business from the 1750 s, did not develop as ‘police’ courts, in which fully
professional magistrates, leading a group of permanent constables, took up the
investigation and prosecution of serious crime. The aldermen of the City were
unwilling to devote such time themselves to that work, but they were also far too
conscious of the Corporation’s ancient privileges and liberties to cede authority
to a body of stipendiary magistrates. The City courts none the less shared some
of the characteristics of the rotation courts that were to develop in Westminster
and Middlesex, staffed by paid magistrates. Like the institutions created in the
rest of the metropolis after 1750 , the Guildhall and the Mansion House provided
courtrooms in which constables and the public had access at established times,
and they helped to put the administration of the law on a new footing by mak-
ing magistrates more regularly available to victims of crime in the capital. They
also made preliminary hearings into criminal allegations much more open to
the public, since they were now to be conducted entirely in a courtroom to
which access could hardly be denied to interested parties. This was very differ-
ent indeed from a form of criminal administration in which in many cases pre-
trial proceedings had been conducted in the privacy of the justice’s parlour.
Among the many consequences of a more public and transparent administra-
tion of the law was the opening of the magistrate’s hearing to other voices be-
sides the defendant and his accusers. That in turn surely encouraged the
(^158) For a fuller account of the rotation court, see above, pp. 108‒13.