422 Crime and the State
men employed at Bow Street were ‘real and useful thieftakers’.^167 They had
been drawn originally from the constables ofWestminster, so that ‘the real thief-
takers must all have been housekeepers, and reputable ones too.. .’.^168 But,
John Fielding argued, his brother had gone well beyond the organization of a
strikeforce of constables to confront an immediate problem. What distinguished
his work was his ability to persuade some of these constables to remain available
for policing work when their year of office was over. They were given a retainer
from the funds provided by the government, on top of which they gathered
rewards—private as well as public—that the conviction of robbers and burglars
would bring.
There was no direct link between the thief-takers whose activities we followed
in the 1690 s and the institutional arrangements under which the Fieldings gave
detection and prosecution a quasi-official standing. In the interim, thief-taking
had taken several forms and had changed over time as opportunities and incen-
tives changed. It had also included corrupt and illegal activity—and perhaps a
great deal of that. But straightforward detecting and prosecuting for profit had
been at least part of the thief-taking business. It had not been unknown even
before the state made it lucrative in the 1690 s. But the prosecution of felons
seems clearly to have expanded in that decade for reasons we have explored,
and to have been carried on by some men thereafter. It was that aspect of thief-
taking that Henry Fielding sought to legitimize and sanitize in the small group
of detective constables he gathered around the Bow Street magistrate’s court.
Detection and prosecution by this quasi-official police force never acquired the
degree of acceptance with the broader public that the Fieldings hoped for. The
thief-taking constables dealt too much in blood-money for that. They none the
less expanded in the second half of the century when two other ‘public offices’
were established in Westminster in the 1760 s, and in particular when stipendiary
magistrates and a permanent force of constables were established at seven such
offices in the metropolis in 1792 under the Middlesex Justices Act.^169
Detection was to have a fractured history thereafter, and was to be repudiated
as a legitimate activity in the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 , which, though
forward-looking in some ways, reached back to an older ideal of policing in its
total dependence on the prevention of crime by surveillance. But the history of
detection and prosecution is part of a full account of the making of the metro-
politan police if only because of its influence in creating a negative view of
policing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As the progressive
version of police history is gradually replaced by an account that seeks to un-
derstand the changing nature of policing over a long period, thief-takers need to
(^167) John Fielding, A Plan for Preventing Robberies within Twenty Miles of London, with an Account of the Rise and
Establishment of the real Thieftakers( 1755 ), preface.
(^168) Ibid., 3.
(^169) On public offices in 1760 s and on the Middlesex Justices Act see Radzinowicz, History, ii. 188 – 94 ;
iii. 29 – 41 , 123 – 37 ; Paley, ‘Middlesex Justices Act’.