character by his being attended at his sittings in the Guildhall by a clerk, and by
four attorneys who took turns to serve for a week and kept a record of his work
in a ‘Waiting Book’, later known as a ‘Charge Book’.^40 This does not provide a
complete record of the lord mayor’s magisterial work. Unlike a number of other
magistrate’s notebooks in this period, the lord mayor’s Charge Books—which is
what I will call both series—do not, for example, normally note warrants issued
to constables to arrest suspects or to carry out a search; nor do they include
copies of depositions taken from victims of alleged offences or copies of exam-
inations of suspects.^41 In the 1690 s the Charge Books may also under-record
cases that the lord mayor dismissed or settled by way of arbitration. Volumes are
missing; and there are gaps in some of those that have survived when an attorney
failed for some reason to record the business. But the Charge Books do enable us
to reconstruct much of the work of the lord mayor as a single magistrate—and by
implication the work of the aldermen who also sat as magistrates.
We have seen previously that in the late seventeenth century the lords mayor
were committing significant numbers of accused thieves to the Bridewell, the
City’s house of correction, without trial. This was only one aspect of their work,
as an examination of the Charge Books in the 1690 s makes clear.^42 In 1694 ,
when Sir William Ashhurst served as lord mayor, and in the following year, in Sir
Thomas Lane’s term, both men sat regularly as magistrates in the Guildhall. In
the first six months of 1694 Ashhurst conducted magisterial business on at least
105 days. He was thus present in the Guildhall for several hours on about four
days a week on average. During those six months he would also have attended
four sittings of the City sessions of the peace and at least some days of the four
gaol delivery sessions at the Old Bailey, so that for an additional twenty days
or more the lord mayor was likely to have been engaged in other aspects of
criminal administration. Nor was this work confined to weekdays. Ashhurst
appeared frequently in the Guildhall on Saturdays and Sundays; and from
City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution 93(^40) Two incomplete series of bound volumes in the CLRO record the lord mayors’ work as a magis-
trate between 1664 and 1733. The first, labelled ‘Lord Mayor’s Waiting Books’, covers the years 1664 – 86
in nine volumes; the second, labelled ‘Mansion House Justice Room Charge Books—anachronistically,
since the Mansion House was not built until the middle of the eighteenth century—consists of a broken
series of volumes that survive only for the years 1686 – 9 , 1692 – 5 , 1695 – 9 , 1699 – 1705 , and 1728 – 33. For the
sake of simplicity and clarity, I have called them all the ‘Lord Mayor’s Charge Books’. Two other vol-
umes that appear to continue the first series (covering the years 1690 – 7 and 1700 – 6 ) are mainly notes of
fees due to the four attorneys who kept the record (see below, n. 73 ).
(^41) See, for example, the notebooks kept by William Brockman of Kent (British Library, Add. MSS
42598 – 42600 ); and for examples of magistrates’ records in fine modern editions, see Elizabeth Crittall
(ed.), The Justicing Notebook of William Hunt, 1744 – 1749 (Wiltshire Record Society, 1982 ); Ruth Paley (ed.),
Justice in Eighteenth-Century Hackney: The Justicing Notebook of Henry Norris and the Hackney Petty Sessions Book
(London Record Society, 1991 ); and Elizabeth Silverthorne (ed.), Deposition Book of Richard Wyatt, JP,
1767 – 1776 (Surrey Record Society, 1978 ). For other manuscript magistrates’ notebooks, see Norma Lan-
dau, The Justices of the Peace, 1679 – 1760 (Berkeley, Calif., 1984 ), 175 – 6 , 191 – 3.
(^42) I have examined two periods of six months each for this purpose in 1694 and 1695 , taking samples
from two years to eliminate some of the personal preferences and quirks that the two lords mayor may
have brought to the work: CLRO: Lord Mayor’s Charge Book, 1692 – 5.