CHAPTER TWOThe City Magistrates and the
Process ofProsecution
Police and policing before the Fieldings
Unlike France, which by the early eighteenth century had a system of police, both
national and local, and a particularly well-organized force in Paris under central
control and with a finely graded hierarchy of authority, policing in England was
entirely local and fragmented.^1 In the City of London, many of the activities we
would summarize as ‘policing’ were carried out by a variety of officials and by pri-
vate citizens. These forms of policing were, however, to be extended and increas-
ingly co-ordinated in the eighteenth century, impelled by a search for more
effective surveillance of the streets, and more effective prevention and prosecution
of criminal offences. Largely as a result of these changing practices, the word
‘police’ came into more common use and took on a variety of shifting meanings
over the century. That very instability of meaning provides a clue to the subject
that is at the core of the following four chapters: the way in which the elements that
were to coalesce in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to form the modern
notion of police as a force of crime-fighters took shape after the Revolution of 1689.
‘Police’ was first used in England in the early eighteenth century as a syn-
onym for what might be called social administration, especially the management
of what seemed to men in power to be troublesome groups in society, and the
development of solutions to social problems that would make for a more orderly
and a safer environment. The issues addressed in this broad context were not
exclusive to urban areas. Indeed, the first use of the word ‘police’ seems to have
been in connection with the government of Scotland after the accession of
George I in 1714 , when a ‘Commission of Police’ was created to oversee its in-
ternal administration, including the management of the poor, the provision of
necessities, and the maintenance of highways.^2 But the problems that pressed
(^1) For France, see Alan Williams, The Police of Paris, 1718 – 1789 (Baton Rouge, 1979 ); Iain A. Cameron,
Crime and its Repression in the Auvergne and the Guyenne, 1720 – 1790 (Cambridge, 1981 ). For a comparison be-
tween English and Continental police more generally, see Clive Emsley, Policing and its Context, 1750 – 1870
( 1983 ), ch. 2 ; Stanley H. Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780 – 1850 (Cambridge, 1988 ),
11 – 18.
(^2) SP 36 / 4 / 150 – 1.