Whether these watchmen shared in a reward for the eventual conviction of this
burglar in unknown. It seems likely they did, and that was surely an inducement
to them—as the statutory rewards were intended to be—not to pass by and
ignore suspicious circumstances, or to leave victims of robberies to fend for them-
selves. Certainly, there are cases at the Old Bailey in which watchmen appear as
interested parties, having pressed the victim to undertake the prosecution, on
occasion against their will. In a weak case in which a boy was acquitted of the
charge of stealing the hat and wig of the young child of a wealthy family living in
the neighbourhood, the parents were induced to prosecute by the watchman
who found the offending child wearing the hat and with the wig stuffed into his
pocket. The boy claimed to have found them in the street. It seemed so clear
that the watchman had pressed for prosecution that the judge remarked to him
as he gave his evidence: ‘I suppose you heard of a Reward for taking Street-
Robbers?’ John Allen, the watchman, acknowledged that he had indeed heard
that, ‘but what I did, was not for the Sake of the Reward I’ll assure you’.^110
A man who made five shillings a week was certain to know how he might
profit from arrests and convictions, and it would be surprising if watchmen did
not try to take advantage not only of the statutory rewards and the huge extra
payments for the conviction of street-robbers in London offered by royal proclam-
ation, but also of private gratuities and more local rewards.^111 But one also gets
a sense from the trials in which watchmen gave evidence that some of them at
least saw themselves as servants of the neighbourhood, with a particular re-
sponsibility for ensuring its peace and tranquillity. The language they so fre-
quently used about their beats as they gave evidence in court, and the way in
which they talked about their relationship to and knowledge of the inhabitants,
carries a sense of their being embedded in the community, albeit as its servant.
Some of their language in court was clearly self-serving—and, it is likely, was re-
ported in the Sessions Papers because it struck the editor as pompous and amus-
ing. But the sense conveyed of watchmen regarding themselves as community
policemen seems real enough. John Sylvester, a watchman called to give evi-
dence in a case in which a man claimed to have had his pocket picked by a pros-
titute—Mary Blewit, alias Dickenson, alias Bawler, who lodged in the house in
which Jonathan Wild had lived until his execution the previous year—made this
speech to the court:
The Prosecutor you must know is one of my Masters, he’s a Barber by Trade.... Now
it’s always my way to take care of my Masters, and see them safe home, whenever I meet
any of them as I go my Rounds; and so it fell out between 12 and 1 a Saturday Morning,
that I sees my Master Hartrey come out of a Coach very much fuddled, and who should
202 Policing the Night Streets
(^110) OBSP, January 1733 , p. 48 (No. 50 , Fretwell).
(^111) The parish of St Anne’s, Westminster, for example, paid its constables and watchmen twenty
shillings upon the conviction of every burglar they prosecuted (OBSP, May 1739 , p. 76 (No. 264 ,
Masters) ).