tasks so much more difficult. The simpler world in which the City had largely
shut down at 10 p.m. had long been eroding, but it was overwhelmed completely
by the commercialized entertainment that accompanied the changing urban
culture in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The increasing de-
mands being placed on those whose duty it was to police the streets at night re-
sulted in the fundamental alterations to the night watch and the street lighting
that we have followed. But those changes also increased the responsibilities of
the constables in charge of the night-time forces and almost certainly made the
post less attractive. They did so even in the small and less turbulent wards at the
centre of the City, in which local shopkeepers and tradesmen had remained
content to take their turns at filling the post into the early years of the eighteenth
century. By the second quarter many of them had ceased to do so—discour-
aged, presumably, by the duty required, especially at night, but also perhaps by
their sense of their own rising status in the changing urban world.
The pressures to improve the policing of the City thus arose from several
sources. The consciousness of danger or at the least the irritation arising from
what appeared to be the problem of crime was a fundamental issue. Concerns
about crime fluctuated over time, but they were expressed particularly fre-
quently in the 1690 s and again in the quarter century following the end of the
War of Spanish Succession, in 1713. At the same time, the problems of policing
were increasing with the expanding social and cultural life of the metropolis and
the growing expectations of the propertied classes with respect to the protection
that the police of the City ought to provide. Those expectations and concerns
found expression in the legislation of the 1730 s that shifted the basis upon which
the night watch and the lighting of the streets had operated and provided a
model for further improvements in the urban environment funded by local
taxation.^12
The demand for more effective policing was one consequence of the chang-
ing character of the City. That same concern for order in the urban environ-
ment helps to explain the part played by the City of London in the other major
change in the administration of the criminal law in this period—the establish-
ment of non-capital punishments that the courts could impose on convicted
felons. With respect to the law governing the penal consequences of crimes
against property, an overriding concern in the years following the Restoration
and into the eighteenth century was the need felt for a non-capital punishment
for relatively petty crimes against property. By 1660 the threat of hanging for a
second conviction for a clergyable felony had lost any deterrent power it may
once have had. The history of punishment over the following sixty years is very
largely concerned with the search for an alternative—for a sanction that could
be imposed by the courts for the myriad relatively minor offences against470 Conclusion(^12) For the broader context of urban improvements in this period, see Peter Borsay, The English Urban
Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660 – 1770 ( 1989 ).
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