28 Before the Bobbieswatching for fires and thieves, and, it was presumed, preventing street
crimes. Constables, in and yet not of the parochial night watch, kept watch
and ward, supervised the beadles and watchmen, and executed the warrants
of the local magistrates.
It was ten years after the Spitalfields act of 1738, however, before another
London parish sought a night watch act. The campaigns for the reformation
of the manners of the poor had diminished.^114 The advent of the War of
Jenkins' Ear in 1739 and the War of Austrian Succession in 1740 saw a
subsequent decline in property crime.^115 Pressure for police reform lessened
and there is little change at the parish or any other level in the early 1740s. It
was not mere happenstance, then, that the next spurt of watch reform started
in 1748, the year peace returned, bringing with it another period of public
alarm about crime and interest in police reform.