420 Crime and the State
fundamental change that was gradually coming over the preliminary hearing
itself, turning it into more of a judicial procedure by the second quarter of the
eighteenth century.^159
The City aldermen did not make detection part of the ongoing public work
of magistrates. Colonel De Veil and especially the Fieldings did this by associat-
ing thief-takers directly with the magistrate’s court in Bow Street—binding
them in by means of small retainers provided by the government. The small
group of detective constables who formed the backbone of this detective force
moved the shadowy figure of the thief-taker into the public arena from the mar-
gins of the system of criminal justice, and from the half-light (and occasional
glare) in which their enterprises had been conducted. Thomas De Veil, who had
been in the Middlesex commission of the peace for a decade, moved to Bow
Street in 1739 and established an office for magisterial business with the govern-
ment’s support.^160 He was succeeded shortly after his death by Henry Fielding,
who was appointed a justice of the peace for Westminster in December 1748 ,
and who was himself to give way to his half-brother, John, who presided at Bow
Street from 1754 to his death in 1780.
Henry Fielding came to Bow Street just as a post-war increase in criminal ac-
tivity was taking hold in London, particularly violent street offences. His five
years there coincided with a period of extreme anxiety about crime in the cap-
ital that rose to such a level of panic by 1750 and 1751 that the House of Commons
was induced to establish the first committee ever appointed to examine in a gen-
eral way the whole matter of crime and criminal administration, along with va-
grancy and the workings of the Poor Laws.^161 It also induced Henry to write
extensively on crime, in which—among many other matters—he offered a de-
fence of thief-takers and of the engagement of private citizens in the tracking
and arrest of offenders in opposition to what he thought was the foolish popular
disapproval of those who made arrests or reported an offence. The ‘Person of
the Informer’, Fielding said, ‘is in Fact more odious than that of the Felon him-
self; and the Thief-catcher is in Danger of worse Treatment from the Populace
than the Thief’.^162 He traced the root of these dangerous attitudes to
(^159) Langbein, ‘Structuring the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial’, 55 – 84.
(^160) For Sir Thomas De Veil, see R. Leslie-Melville, The Life and Work of Sir John Fielding( 1934 ), 32 – 4 ;
Radzinowicz, History, iii. 29 – 31 ; Babington, A House in Bow Street, chs 1 – 5. See also a contemporary ac-
count ofDe Veil’s career, Memoirs of the Life and Times of Sir Thomas Deveil, knight.. .( 1748 ), and his own brief
reflections on the work of justices in Middlesex: Sir Thomas De Veil, Observations on the Practice of a Justice
of the Peace.. .( 1747 ). The latter is addressed to magistrates on their first taking up the office. Neither of
these contemporary tracts provides much evidence of De Veil’s involvement in prosecutions or of his
possible dealing with thief-takers.
(^161) Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 520 – 5 ; Rogers, ‘Confronting the Crime Wave’, pp. 88 – 91 ; Richard
Connors, ‘ “The Grand Inquest of the Nation”: Parliamentary Committees and Social Policy in Mid-
Eighteenth-Century England’, Parliamentary History, 14 / 3 ( 1995 ), 285 – 313 ; Hugh Amory, ‘Henry Fielding
and the Criminal Legislation of 1751 – 2 ’, Philological Quarterly, 50 (April 1971 ), 175 – 92.
(^162) Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers( 1751 ), ed. by Malvin R. Zirker
(Oxford, 1988 ), 151.