confronting offenders and making arrests. Several of them helped an exciseman
who was set upon by four men and stabbed with a butcher’s knife as he was re-
turning home near Smithfield market in 1717. The watchmen interrupted the
attack before he had lost anything but his hat and wig, chased the four men
‘round Smithfield’ and caught one.^105 Another City watchman deposed at the
trial of a burglar, who was convicted and sentenced to death, that when ‘going
his silent watch’ he saw two men running out of a house. He pursued one, cry-
ing out ‘stop thief’ as he went, and with the help of‘his Brother watchman’, cor-
nered the man. One of them knocked him down with his staff, and they took
him.^106 Another watchman responded to a woman’s cry for help when she and
her husband were robbed as they went along the notorious Chick Lane at mid-
night: her husband and a watchman trapped the attacker in a yard and arrested
him.^107 At the following session, another woman testified that
she and another young Woman having been in Aldermansbury, about Business... were
returning Home, pretty late at Night, and perceiving the Prisoner and another to follow
them, who appeared to be shabby Fellows, were under some Apprehension of being in-
jured by them; and going thro’ Spittle Square, perceiving a Watchman not far off, said to
her Companion, that now they were out of Danger; but had no sooner spoke the Words,
but immediately the Prisoner came up to her, pull’d the Handkerchief off from her Neck,
and ran away, and she crying out, the Watchman came, and he was apprehended.^108
Coming upon a robbery in progress was the most obvious way the watch got
drawn in. How often they turned the other way will, of course, never be known.
But since there were rewards to be earned for the arrest of a street robber or a
burglar, there was an inducement to come to the aid of a victim or to report an
apparent burglary. A watchman in St Andrew’s, Holborn, told the Old Bailey
jury at the trial of two men for breaking into a bookseller’s in Holborn, that just
before 2 a.m. one morning
I went to the upper End of my Walk, that I might beat down again, when the Clock
struck. When I was got just against this Shop, I heard a Clatter—a falling down of some-
thing. I immediately went up, and knocked at the Shop-door—Who is there, says I?
There was no Answer—so I called out again—Who is there? A Man (who we found
afterwards was Wilson) answer’d—it was his Brother’s Stall, and he came there to lie
that Night. I bid him open the Door; he would not.... a Brother-Watchman coming up
to assist me, we forced the Door open, and laid hold of him.^109
Policing the Night Streets 201(^105) The Weekly Journal, or Saturday’s Post, 25 May 1717.
(^106) OBSP, September 1719 , p. 4 ( Jones). Several watchmen claimed to have taken offenders after
knocking them down with their staffs. One who came upon a robbery in progress in which the victim was
being threatened with a bayonet, having called ‘his Partner’, struck at the offender with his staff. ‘[H]e
was a Stout Fellow’, he told the court, ‘and I gave him several Knocks before I could fetch him down’.
The evidence of the two watchmen convicted the accused and he was sentenced to death (OBSP, De-
cember 1726 , p. 2 (Miller) ). For other cases of watchmen felling fleeing offenders with their staffs, see
OBSP, December 1737 , p. 6 (Pardesty); and OBSP, April 1740 , p. 131 (Cane).
(^107) OBSP, April 1724 , p. 3 (Winderam). (^108) OBSP, May 1724 , p. 5 (Mobbs).
(^109) OBSP, September 1740 , p. 228 (No. 392 , No. 393 : Wilson and Murray).