We will begin our examination of the City’s policing forces in this chapter
with the magistrates, the officials who were in charge of the machinery of pub-
lic order and who were the indispensable agents of criminal prosecution. In the
following two chapters we will go on to examine the institutions and the various
bodies of men with responsibility for the surveillance of the City streets and for
supporting the prosecution of accused offenders—the constables, night watch,
beadles, and the marshals.
To make sense of the policing arrangements of the City, it will be necessary
for us to examine the numbers of constables and others attached to the official
forces—who they were, how they were appointed and for how long, what their
duties were supposed to be, and, to the extent that this is possible, how well or
indifferently they carried them out. Very little is known about these matters with
respect to the police ofLondon, particularly with respect to the men who served
as constables and watchmen. That has not, however, prevented confident pro-
nouncements being made about them, and at the very least it seems worth prob-
ing the judgement of contemporary critics (and of the historians who have
echoed them) that the constables and watchmen of the eighteenth century were
invariably old, infirm, timid, and frequently absent from their posts.^18
Such an enquiry into the duties of the constables and night watchmen and an
examination of the men who served in these and other posts in the City reveals
the efforts made by the aldermen and other officials in the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries to establish some control over the officers who were
supposed to police the streets. Those efforts were a response, at least in part, to
the changing demands and enlarging expectations of the propertied population
in a city in which commercial and cultural activities expanded greatly, and in
which policing problems were changing in consequence. The urban day grew
longer as shops proliferated and shopping became possible well into the
evening, and as theatres, the opera, and other entertainments ensured that in-
creasing numbers of people would be on the City streets well past the time when
the City might once have closed down in response to a curfew that was now too
difficult to enforce. Policing problems expanded with the growing commercial
and cultural life of the metropolis. The response to this changing world can be
City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution 83(^18) For such criticism, see below, Chs 3 and 4. For the City policing forces see Donald Rumbelow,
I Spy Blue: The Police and Crime in the City of London from Elizabeth I to Victoria( 1971 ) and Andrew Harris’s
dissertation, noted above. To my knowledge, no detailed work has been done on the institutions that
were charged with maintaining order in the City—indeed, with respect to constables, anywhere in the
metropolis—in the century after the Restoration. Rural constables in the early modern period have been
better served: see Joan Kent, The English Village Constable, 1580 – 1642 : A Social and Administrative Study
(Oxford, 1986 ); J. A. Sharpe, ‘Crime and Delinquency in an Essex Parish, 1600 – 1640 ’, in J. S. Cockburn
(ed.), Crime in England, 1500 – 1700 ( 1977 ), 94 – 6 ; idem, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550 – 1750 , 2 nd edn.
( 1999 ), 49 – 50 ; Keith Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables, and Jurymen in
Seventeenth-century England’, in John Brewer and John Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People: The English
and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries( 1980 ), 28 – 33. For a later period, see David Philips and
Robert Storch, Policing Provincial England, 1829 – 1855 : The Politics of Reform( 1999 ); and Peter King, Crime,
Justice, and Discretion, 1740 – 1820 (Oxford, 2000 ), 65 – 75.