68 Before the Bobbiesconstables as inevitably corrupt, inefficient, and unsupervised across the
board.
As watch authorities increasingly demanded higher standards of conduct
from their employees, they also extended greater protection and rewards.
Watch authorities were more likely to prosecute anyone who attacked the
watch on duty and defend their officers from civil suits for actions taken in
the line of duty. When three men employed by the St Marylebone watch
were charged with false imprisonment in 1791, the watch committee resolved
that: 'this Board will support the above named Persons in the legal Execution
of their Office' and ordered the parish solicitor to bail them out of jail and
defend them in court.^65 In the West End, the social status of an attacker did
not deter the vestries of StJames, Piccadilly, or St Marylebone from going to
court to protect and support their servants. In 1792-93 both parishes prose-
cuted Viscount Galway for repeated attacks on watchmen and constables.^66
Another indication of the increased professionalization of the watch was
the institution in wealthier parishes of sick funds and pensions. In 1778, the
St Marylebone watch committee established a relief fund for any watch
personnel who were 'ill and incapable of attending to their duty and that
have no other mode of relief'. The money came from fines levied as punish-
ments, deductions from the men's pay, and the fines paid by violators of local
acts. A watchman had to have served the parish for five years before he was
eligible to draw on the sick fund.^67 A 1795 local Act for St Marylebone
stipulated that the Vestry could also, at its discretion, grant an annuity to any
watchman or beadle who had served the parish for at least ten years and who
'may be disabled, wounded, or hurt, in the Execution of their Duty, or ... ,
after a Service of Ten Years, be incapable of discharging such duty by bodily
Infirmities ... '.^68 The sick and pension funds in St Marylebone were unu-
sually well organized. In most parishes, support for sick, injured, or old
watchmen was granted on an individual basis. All this - increased super-
vision, increased distance between the watch and the watched, stricter hiring
standards, and benefits -is indicative of more bureaucratic, impartial forms
of policing, created under the influence of rising fears about crime and the
movement for economical reform.
Thrning from economical reform to criminal justice reform, almost everyone
in the eighteenth century agreed that a key goal of the criminal justice system
was crime prevention. One of the traditional rationales for the proliferation
of capital offences in the eighteenth-century statute book was that the mere
threat of hanging would produce the fear needed to deter and thus prevent
crime. This was set out by Archdeacon William Paley in his famous Principles
of Moral and Political Philosophy, published in 1785. He argued that the long