manner of lighting the courts and alleys’ in their wards.^154 The same complaint
was to be made later the same year, in the following spring, and indeed from
time to time thereafter. Twenty years later, when the first lease was coming to an
end, negotiations had still not been completed in eleven wards.^155 These diffi-
culties—and presumably the shortfall in their profit—was one of the reasons the
proprietors were always in arrears in paying their six hundred pounds annual
rent, a running problem that was never satisfactorily solved from the City’s
point of view. When it came time to renegotiate the renewal of the lease in 1715
there was a good deal of thought as to how those who had never been under the
customary obligation to contribute to the lighting of the City might be obliged
to pay the proprietors of the new lamps.
While members of the City Lands Committee might have had an interest in
increasing security on the streets, the driving force behind the effort to enlarge
the range and scope of the new lighting was clearly the interest of the proprietors
in charging as many people as possible. Pressed by the proprietors as the new
lease was being discussed to extend these obligations, the City Lands Commit-
tee turned for guidance to the City’s legal advisers, Duncan Dee, the common
serjeant, and William Thomson, the recorder.^156 A series of questions was put to
them, the import of which was to enquire how the scope of the established obliga-
tions could be extended. Their answers revealed fundamental disagreements
about the springs of governance in the City and the obligations of its citizens.
The recorder’s responses to the committee’s questions are particularly interest-
ing. William Thomson, who had just come into office, revealed in his replies (as
he was to do in his work as recorder generally) a tough-minded attitude towards
dealing with crime in the City that was to be influential in a number of areas
over the next quarter century. While Dee voiced serious doubts about the ex-
tension of obligations that the proprietors wanted the Common Council to
build into the new agreement, Thomson sided with the proprietors. On the
question of whether the City had the power to oblige masters of halls and
schools and of all other public buildings and the churchwardens of parish
churches to hang lanterns outside their buildings, Dee’s response was essentially
negative: lighting the streets was governed by custom, and the Common Coun-
cil could not, in his view, charge anyone but inhabitants. They could not light
the streets that ran alongside public buildings, or charge the owners, because the
buildings were not inhabited. For his part, Thomson saw no impediment in law
to extending obligations. ‘I conceive the Common Council have a power to
made such an order according to reason’, he wrote, ‘both as to the Distance of
Lanthorns and the penalty for non performance.’^157
On the question of whether the Common Council had the power to oblige
occupants of houses in courts or places which were not thoroughfares to hang
Policing the Night Streets 217(^154) Rep 100 , fo. 159. (^155) Rep 100 , fo. 189 ; Rep 101 , p. 110 ; Jor 56 , fo. 35.
(^156) CLRO,Journal of the Committee on City Lands, vol. 13 , fos. 289 – 90. (^157) Ibid., fo. 289.