32 Before the Bobbies
and worked as watchmen. George Hopkins, a Wilkite killed in a brawl at
the Middlesex by-election in December 1768, was a headborough.^20 H.T.
Dickinson thus argues that rioters never intended to replace the authority of
national or local rulers, 'but to compel [them] to act as the rioters desired.
They did not rebel against authority per se, but rather protested because
those in authority had failed to act responsibly.m
What was changing was the definition of responsible action. In the twen-
tieth century, authority, in theory, is expected to act impartially in enforcing
the law, as if the law was without bias. When the Commissioner of the
Metropolitan Police was sued in 1968 for allegedly having a policy of not
enforcing gambling laws, the judge, Lord Denning, stated:
I hold it to be the duty ... of every Chief Constable to enforce the law of
the land ... he is not the servant of anyone save of the law itself. The
responsibility of law enforcement lies on him. He is answerable to the law
and to the law alone.^22This belief was only beginning to emerge in the eighteenth century. Norma
Landau argues that by the 1760s, justices of the peace were moving away
from the patriarchal ideal, which included the notion that magistrates were
representatives and spokesmen of their communities, toward a patrician
model, the justice as distant, disinterested judge and administrator.^23 Histor-
ians have assumed that these mediating roles played by magistrates and
parish officers were abandoned in the face of the more impersonal and
transitory nature of urban life in London than in rural areas. The burdens
of city law enforcement and the decline of party politics meant movement
towards a more legalistic and bureaucratic relationship between rulers and
ruled.2^4
However, some local officials in London apparently still believed their role
was to speak and act for their communities, including allowing and even
encouraging crowds.^25 The participation of local officials, especially from the
City of London, in the Wilkite demonstrations is well documented.^26 Thus,
crowds in the streets were not necessarily seen by contemporaries as a failure
of parochial law enforcement.^27 Crowds certainly could help generate a
sense among some propertied elites that 'irreligion, idleness, almost total
want of morals, and dissoluteness of manners' were key characteristics of the
common people.^28 But the actions of mobs did not lead all to conclude that
the solution for such disorder lay in more central government involvement in
street policing.
If riots were not a direct concern for local government agencies, lighting
and watching the streets were. A variety of nuisances moved vestries and
others to seek improved policing in its broader sense, a meaning still current
at mid-century. Improvement of increasingly filthy, dark, rough streets as
well as the need to protect those whose lives and property were at risk on