doors on ‘dark nights’ between Michaelmas and Lady Day. That was the estab-
lished obligation. But the time during which the candles were to be lit turned out
to be two hours longer than before ( 6 p.m. to 11 p.m.), the contractors’ interest
in extending the hours of service, and the overtaking of the old notion of curfew
by the broadening social and commercial life of the capital, having combined to
increase the hours of obligatory lighting. Lights continued to be required only
on dark nights, however, and during the six winter months of the year. The act
declared that failure to light houses in the customary way would bring a penalty
of a shilling for every night’s default to be paid to the proprietors of the Convex
Lights^149 —a sum calculated to encourage householders to pay the six shillings
the company was authorized to charge for the installation and maintenance of
the lamps through the lighting season. The assumption clearly was that the con-
tractors would put up their lamps and then approach the householders for pay-
ment, rather than to treat with each in turn to establish their intentions. The act
assumed that way of proceeding by ordering that lamps were to be no more than
thirty yards apart on the principal streets and no more than thirty-five on the
lesser streets.
Large parts of the most travelled areas of the City thus came to be lit by oil
lamps over the last years of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the
eighteenth. Something in the order of a thousand lamps were installed as a re-
sult of this lease. The convex lamp lit up much more of the street than a candle
in a lantern with horn sides had ever managed to do, though the concentrated
beam of light that it produced through its ‘bull’s-eye’ glass was thought to be
something of a problem. In the early years of the eighteenth century, Ned Ward
wrote about the streets being ‘adorned with dazzling lights whose bright reflec-
tions so glittered in my eyes that I could see nothing but themselves’.^150 The con-
vex lamp also cast a large shadow since it had an entirely solid bottom. But even
a patchy success confirmed the usefulness of improved lighting and of a con-
tractor to maintain the lamps—to trim the wicks, keep them filled, repair
damage, and so on.
The new system of lighting had been accepted by the City authorities be-
cause of their desperate need for income, but once installed it helped to raise ex-
pectations about acceptable levels of this civic service. There was no possibility
that once the financial pressure was relieved, as it came to be in the eighteenth
century,^151 the City would be able to revert to the customary system of street
lighting. Rather, improvements created a desire for further improvements,
Policing the Night Streets 215(^149) Who was actually to do the collecting became a contentious point. A group of officers in the lord
mayor’s household called the ‘young men’, who had by custom the right to collect fines for failure to hang
out candles on the appropriate nights, pressed their claim to continue to do the same in the new arrange-
ment. That was confirmed, and the penalty of a shilling a night for every default was to be divided
between the ‘young men’ and the lessees (CLRO, Journal of the City Lands Committee, vol. 14 , fo. 11 ).
(^150) Ned Ward, The London Spy(ed. by Paul Hyland, from the 4 th edn., 1709 ; East Lansing, 1993 ), 29.
(^151) Doolittle, ‘Government of the City’, chs 4 – 5.