man who ‘reflected upon the Lord Mayor’, questioned the constable’s author-
ity, and, according to one of the watchmen, gave Wade ‘very abusive language,
saying he was a pimpe’. On this second visit to the tavern they also came upon
the person of quality, in fact a peer of the realm (not identified) who had been in
an upstairs room and who now told Wade that the two men he had arrested
were his servants and that ‘he would lay [ him] by the heels’ if he did not go im-
mediately and release them. He was sorry he had done it, Wade answered, but
his ‘power did extend only to committ, but not discharge’. And with that he left.
The watchmen gave similar evidence.^122
We can learn a good deal about this incident because on the Monday morn-
ing Sir John Fleet, the lord mayor, took depositions from Wade and the six
watchmen who were eventually involved. He showed an unusually active inter-
est in what was after all a relatively minor affair, no doubt because there was a
peer involved. It was unusual in other ways, too. Presumably, constables did not
take four watchmen from their posts every time they heard that there was illegal
drinking going on in a tavern. Apart from the possibility that Wade was active
in the reformation of manners movement, and these watchmen were of a like
mind, Wade had had confrontations with Mr Shepheard before (the tavern was
presumably named after its owner). Unusual it may have been, but the inciden-
tal details do tell us something about watchmen. They werewatchmen; they
were on their stands when Wade sent for them; and they at least do not seem to
have been feeble, however old they were. None of them said anything in his de-
position about the physical aspects of the confrontations that occurred, but it
seems unlikely that men as arrogantly contemptuous of authority as two of those
arrested (their attitudes no doubt owing to their being servants of a nobleman),
and who had been drinking, and were armed to boot, were unlikely to have
gone along quietly to the compter, especially if the watchmen had been incap-
able of manhandling them. Of course, we have only their own accounts to go
on, but these watchmen emerge from this encounter as a reasonably formidable
force. When Wade ordered them to arrest men, they were able to do so. When
he ordered them to follow him upstairs, in the face of the man with a drawn
sword, they apparently did that too.
One can draw no conclusions about the state of the night watch in London in
the late seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth from this ac-
count or from the fragments of evidence drawn from the published accounts of
trials at the Old Bailey in which watchmen appear to give evidence. But it does
suggest that the policing of the City at night may not have been as hopelessly in-
effective as the comments of contemporaries worried about the state of crime
would lead one to believe. What should be emphasized is that there was almost
certainly no uniform picture across the City. As in so many other aspects oflife
206 Policing the Night Streets
(^122) Informations given by Nicholas Wade and six watchmen, 8 March 1693 (CLRO, London Sess.
Papers, March 1693 ).