mid-February to mid-March he conducted at least some business on twenty-
seven consecutive days. Ashhurst was known to be an active magistrate during
his year as lord mayor.^43 But the recorded work of Sir Thomas Lane, who
followed him, suggests that the regularity of Ashhurst’s attendance was not
unusual in that period. Thus, in the first six months of 1695 Lane was available
as a magistrate in the Guildhall on at least 101 occasions.
In the late seventeenth century at least some lords mayor were thus making
themselves available in the Guildhall for magisterial business for several hours a
day and on several days a week. It is unclear whether the precise times of these
sittings were made known to the public in advance. There is no evidence of that;
certainly there are no hints of it in the records of the Court of Aldermen or in the
Charge Books themselves. Most likely, it was simply widely understood among
those who might occasionally have need of a magistrate’s services, including
constables and watchmen, that the lord mayor was regularly to be found in the
Guildhall, unless he was otherwise engaged. By the 1690 s, if not earlier, he was
sitting for magisterial business in the so-called Matted Gallery.^44
It is less certain what form this procedure took, but it seems to have been the
case that those with business to conduct before the lord mayor simply gathered
in the court and he took up their cases one by one. The setting on a busy day may
not have been unlike that later portrayed by Hogarth in print ten of Industry and
Idleness( 1746 ), in which Tom Idle is being examined by his erstwhile fellow-
apprentice, now a City alderman. As we will see, the preliminary hearing had
changed in significant ways by the 1740 s. But the general scene—the magistrate
behind the bar, and a crowd of constables, prosecutors, witnesses, and accused,
jockeying for room and attention—may not have been very different from the
hearings into criminal and other matters conducted by Ashhurst and Lane in the
middle years of the 1690 s.^45 The important point is that the City had in place by
the late seventeenth century what no other jurisdiction in the metropolis yet had:
the germ of an established magistrates’ court that did not depend entirely on the
whim of a magistrate, but had a permanent life and a public character. The at-
tendance of an attorney and a clerk, and the use of a bar that separated the mayor
and these officials from the jostling crowd, gave it something of the character of
a courtroom.^46 Other City magistrates also dealt with criminal business, some of
them very actively—indeed, often more actively than the sitting lord mayor. But,
94 City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution
(^43) He was an activist in part because he agreed with the moral reform campaign. He issued an order
in his mayoral year, for example, aimed at achieving ‘a thorough Reformation of Manners in all places
under his jurisdiction’ (Rep 98 , pp. 303 – 10 ). See his entry in David Hayton (ed.), History of Parliament
1690 – 1715 (forthcoming).
(^44) In 1697 the aldermen ordered that the end of the Matted Gallery be ‘enclosed and a chimney to be
built for the reception of persons of quality’ (Rep 102 , p. 32 ).
(^45) For the changing character of the Guildhall magistrates’ court and Hogarth’s court scene, see
below pp. 108 – 12.
(^46) For a bar mentioned in Ned Ward’s satire on magistrates, see The London Spy, ed. Paul Hyland (East
Lansing, Mich., 1993 ), 73.