1 Introduction
The first question any historian of policing must face is: what do we mean by
'police'? The word police came into English from the French in the late
seventeenth century, where police meant governance-'control of all activity,
all dimensions of experience, deemed properly subject to public author-
ity ... .' By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, French lex-
icographers defined police more specifically as the regulation of a city, not an
entire state, and the word took on an urban connotation.^1 It is in the sense of
this broad definition that we see the first usages in English, as in the
Commission of Police for Scotland, or when Dr Johnson defined police in
1755 as 'the regulation and government of a city or country, so far as regards
the inhabitants'.^2 By 1860, however, the meaning of the word police in Great
Britain no longer applied to the whole of internal government; it defined a
specific part of government. Lord Brougham, in his British Constitution,
defined police as 'the care of preventing infractions of the law, detecting
offenders, bringing them to justice, and executing the sentences of the
courts'.^3 Also, by mid-Victorian times, one could speak of the police in
reference to a specific body of officials within the criminal justice system,
charged with the functions listed by Lord Brougham.
This semantic change during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
mirrors the reality of administrative change. A key event in the development
of both concept and reality of modern policing in Great Britain was the
creation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829. This was London's first central-
ized, uniformed, wholly professional, centrally-controlled police force. Thus,
for many historians the 'real' history of policing in London and England
began in 1829. The history of policing in London prior to 1829 thus initially
was the search for the origins of Scotland Yard as an institution -of the
professional, centralized policing practised by the 'bobbies' - the men sent
out on the streets of London by Scotland Yard's founder, Sir Robert Peel.^4
More recently, historians of crime and local government, with the riches of
Quarter Session and other local records, have shown we must not view
policing only from Westminster and Whitehall. J.M. Beattie, John Styles,
Ruth Paley, and Clive Emsley have shown us that a real appreciation of
eighteenth-century law enforcement, and police reform must include the
contributions of local officials and agencies. The work of Stanley Palmer
on policing in Ireland also marks an important departure.^5 These studies and
others, such as Norma Landau's on magistrates, call into question the idea
that local administration was hopelessly ineffective or that local leaders were
reluctant to adopt effective measures of policing.^6 Emsley notes there is
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