further precautions were to be taken. The Royal Exchange was given special at-
tention before the main watch was assembled, for one of the watchmen was to
come on duty there at 9 p.m. and walk round the Exchange for an hour and then
stand guard at the corner of Threadneedle Street from 10 p.m. until 11 p.m. And
finally, in the winter months the constable was to remain on duty after the main
watch was dismissed and to walk round the ward with four of the watchmen
until 6 a.m., for which these watchmen were to be given extra pay.^36
This was, of course, a paper plan which might or might not have worked this
way, or, even if it had, might or might not have provided an effective deterrent
against night-time crime and disorders of the kind the leaders of the ward were
anxious to prevent. But it was an innovative scheme that combined private and
public forces and disposed them around the ward in what seems to have been a
more carefully worked out pattern than had obtained earlier—certainly in a
more elaborately described way in the wardmote inquest book. Both the agree-
ment with the Mercers’ Company and the novelty of the watching system may
explain why this Cornhill night watching plan was endorsed by the lord mayor
of the day: he was present at the wardmote in December 1696 and, quite un-
usually, signed the page of the inquest book on which the new watch plan was set
out.^37 The system of two watchmen working each of the eight beats was still
being followed six months after it was established, when the City marshal made
his inspection, and it may have encouraged what seems to have been a general
adoption of watch-boxes and beats in other wards in the early years of the
eighteenth century. Certainly, watch-boxes were common enough by Anne’s
reign to provide attractive targets for the gentlemanly hooligans known as the
Mohocks, who took particular pleasure in rolling watchmen around in them
(their novelty perhaps providing much of the fun).^38
Cornhill revealed what could be done when public and private money was
mobilized and there was a will to act. But across the City as a whole in the last
decades of the seventeenth century the difficulties of raising money were such
that the number of effective watchmen was shrinking rather than expanding.
Frequent complaints repeated the charge that watchmen were too thin on the
ground to do any good, and that in any case too many of them were ‘Ancient and
Infirme... and not fitt for soe lively and Active a duty’—though the man who
said this, in 1679 , had an interest in damning the watch as much as possible since
he was trying to get himself appointed as a mounted ‘scout or patrowle’ to ride
around the City every night and ensure that the constables and watchmen were
doing their duty.^39 There is more direct and reliable evidence of the incapacities
of watchmen, however, for ward officers themselves can occasionally be found
180 Policing the Night Streets
(^36) GLMD, MS 4069 / 2 , pp. 401 – 4. (^37) GLMD, MS 4069 / 2 , p. 85.
(^38) Daniel Statt, ‘The Case of the Mohocks: Rake Violence in Augustan London’, Social History,
20 ( 1995 ), 179 – 99 ; Neil Guthrie, ‘ “No Truth or very little in the whole Story”? A Reassessment of the
Mohock Scare of 1712 ’, Eighteenth Century Life, n.s. 20 ( 1996 ), 33 – 56.
(^39) CLRO, Misc. MSS 10.13(petition of Robert Wilkins to the lord mayor and aldermen).