were confronted. To that end, I set out to establish in the first, introductory,
chapter what evidence of the levels and character of property offences was avail-
able to the political leaders and other opinion makers in the City and what they
took the ‘problem’ of such crime to be in this period—what interests it threat-
ened and what it meant to them.
Thereafter I pursue the multiple ways in which the City of London could be
said to have responded to crime by examining three main subjects: the policing
institutions in the City; the forms of prosecution; and penal ideas and practices.
The nature of the City’s policing—carried out very largely by constables and
night watchmen—forms the first part of the book. The subject invites extended
treatment because the institutions involved in policing the City, as indeed in the
metropolis as a whole (with the exception of Elaine Reynolds’s work on the night
watch of Westminster^1 ), have not been much studied before the Fieldings began
their work at Bow Street in the middle of the eighteenth century. More signifi-
cantly, changes in policing ideas and practices help to reveal the complex nature
of responses to crime in this period. There can be no doubt that demands were
being made for more effective policing in the City—that expectations were ris-
ing about what constables and watchmen and other officials with responsibility
for the maintenance of order could be expected to achieve. Some of the changes
in policing institutions were reponses to those demands and were planned and
intended. But others—changes in the nature of the constabulary, for example,
and the ways in which the night watch and the related matter of street lighting
came to be financed—were perhaps as much the consequences of changes in
the society of the City and of shifts in the economy and culture of the metrop-
olis more broadly.
A pattern of conscious efforts to achieve improvements in the institutions of
criminal justice intersecting with larger social and cultural changes that shaped
the options and alternatives available to those who sought to make improve-
ments in the way the City dealt with crime can also be seen in the two other
main issues I deal with: the processes of prosecution; and the punishments avail-
able to the courts in the sentencing of convicted property offenders. It is clear
that changes in both areas were supported, urged, even initiated by City inter-
ests. But the forms of those changes depended fundamentally on developments
in the political environment—in the City itself to some extent, much more in
Westminster, in the central administration, and in parliament. Many of the
most significant changes in the procedures by which felonies were prosecuted
and the introduction of punishments that were to change the way convicted
property offenders were dealt with at the Old Bailey resulted from interventions
by the City authorities. Their success depended on their ability to influence the
central government and to obtain supportive legislation from parliament. Thisviii Preface(^1) Elaine A. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies. The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London,
1720‒1830( 1998 ).
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