for drunken revelry, and too little sombre reflection on the wages of sin.^121
Whether the crowds were becoming more difficult to control or the attitudes of
the authorities towards crowd behaviour at executions was changing, it was
clearly thought necessary to add a contingent of City constables to join the
escort from Newgate and to act as reinforcements to Middlesex constables
around the hanging place.
Constables were hired in even larger numbers to police executions when the
hanging place was moved from Tyburn to a gallows outside Newgate, in 1782.^122
The forces that came to be thought necessary to control the large numbers of
people who all too often pushed into the streets around the gaol and the Old
Bailey courthouse simply could not have been assembled routinely under the
old system, in which men of middling station served for a year in their own per-
son and in the understanding that their duty would be largely confined to their
own wards. Indeed, there were increasing numbers of occasions by the last
decades of the century on which such large numbers of constables were thought
to be required to control crowds in the City that the marshal was authorized to
hire men who became known as ‘extras’, that is, constables who were not on the
ward establishments, but who were taken on from time to time for particular
purposes. The City marshal had been eclipsed as a policing figure in the second
quarter of the century when authority flowed strongly towards the wards and
into the hands of the deputy aldermen and common councillors. He re-
emerged as a useful organizer of crowd policing in the second half of the cen-
tury, most especially after the Gordon Riots in 1780 and in the midst of the
threats posed by radical political crowds in the 1790 s and the early decades of the
nineteenth century. He was given this work presumably because he had City-
wide authority and had some responsibility to keep the streets clear. The mar-
shal was in charge of hiring ‘extra’constables for the purposes of street
policing—an entirely ad hocdevelopment which allowed the constabulary to be
increased by two and three times its official numbers when it was thought neces-
sary and which had come to seem possible presumably because many, perhaps
most, of the ward constables were now also routinely paid for additional
work.^123
156 Constables and Other Officers
(^121) Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings,
ed. Malvin R. Zirker (Oxford, 1988 ), 163 – 72 ; Radzinowicz, History, i. 410 – 13 ; Beattie, Crime
and the Courts, 526 ; Nicholas Rogers, ‘Confronting the Crime Wave: The Debate Over Social
Reform and Regulation, 1749 – 1753 ’, in L. Davison, T. Hitchcock, T. Keirn, and R. B.
Shoemaker (eds.), Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in
England, 1689 – 1750 (Stroud, 1992 ), 81 – 8.
(^122) Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, 601 – 4 ; Wilf, ‘ImaginingJustice’, 64 – 76.
(^123) For the hiring of ‘extra’ constables, see Andrew T. Harris, ‘Policing the City,
1785 – 1838 : Local Knowledge and Central Authority in the City of London’, Ph.D. thesis
(Stanford, 1997 ), 63 – 7.