that watchmen were more active and engaged in the second quarter of the cen-
tury, though it is of course possible that apparent changes of that kind are more
a reflection of the sources than watchmen’s practice.
There are fleeting glances in the lord mayor’s Charge Book and the court
book of the Bridewell hospital of the watchmen at work—references to watch-
men bringing prostitutes or men and women on more serious charges to be exam-
ined by the lord mayor, or to be committed to Bridewell.^102 Their work is almost
certain to be masked in these records because most of the commitments of
offenders would have been recorded as being made by the constable in charge
of the watch even if a watchman had actually brought the suspect into the
watch-house. Not that watchmen were ever likely to have brought in large num-
bers of street people, including prostitutes. Tony Henderson has shown that in
the first half of the century street prostitution in the City of London tended to
be concentrated in Farringdon Without, along the western edge of the City bor-
dering the dangerous areas around Covent Garden and St Giles, and women
from this area were occasionally charged by the City watch and constables with
nightwalking. But Henderson has also confirmed what one might expect: that
watchmen patrolling the same patch night after night got to know streetwalkers
well, and their relationships tended to develop as one of negotiation, collusion,
and corruption.^103
Collusion was also likely with respect to more serious offences, but there is
also evidence, especially in the second quarter of the century, of watchmen vig-
orously engaged in catching offenders. It is true that the principal source of such
evidence, the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, is significantly richer after 1730 than
for the first quarter of the century: one would not want to draw too firm a con-
clusion from the fact that reports of watchmen making arrests become more
common in the years following the Watch Act. But such reports that show active
watchmen at work are at the least some counterweight to the picture that has
been so easily accepted of the watchman doing nothing but ‘fuddling in the
watchhouse or sleeping on their stands’, as a newspaper complained in 1738.^104
It is not difficult to find examples in the Old Bailey trial reports and occa-
sionally in the press of watchmen being diligent, even brave—discovering and
200 Policing the Night Streets
(^102) For the lord mayor’s waiting book and the Bridewell court book, see above, pp. 27 – 9.
(^103) Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London, 106 – 19. One man, writing against the im-
position of rates in the watch bill, made the disingenuous point that rather than taxing the rich to pay for
a waged system it would be better to force the poor to take their turns watching because each man would
have to serve only occasionally and thus no cosy relationship between the watchmen and those they were
supposed to police would develop. ‘It hath been observable’, he wrote, ‘that a Standing Watch some-
times have been in fee with Thieves, they being certain always to be known; which if there were new
Watchmen every Night, it would effectually prevent that Evil’ (Observations on a Bill entitled A bill for
Appointing a better Nightly Watch and Regulating the Beadles in England; and for the better Enlightening the Streets and
Publick Passages within the Weekly Bills of Mortality(n.d.; possibly 1729 ) ). Defoe also complained about the
corruption of watchmen and the way they had street prostitutes ‘under contribution’ (Parochial Tyranny;
Or, The Householder’s Complaint( 1727 ), 20 ).
(^104) The London Evening Post, 7 – 9 November 1738.