Still other changes emerged as a consequence of decisions being made by the
aldermen who served as magistrates and of City householders who served as
constables. The withdrawal of virtually all the aldermen from the conduct of
preliminary hearings into criminal charges led directly to the establishment of
the Guildhall magistrates’ court in 1737 , a court in which the aldermen served
in rotation and which was open to the public at regular hours—the first such in-
stitution in the metropolis. The decisions of a significant number of men to hire
substitutes to take their place as constables did not have as profound an effect on
the City constabulary, largely because most householders continued to take up
the office when they were called. There was as yet no effort to seek parliamen-
tary authority to establish a body of paid constables supported by taxes—as
happened in the case of the watch and street lighting, two other local services
that had also been carried out by the unpaid work of citizens fulfilling their civic
duty. None the less, a sufficiently large proportion of the constabulary consisted
of hired men by the second half of the eighteenth century that it became pos-
sible to enlarge the body of constables from time to time by increasing the re-
sources devoted to policing. Without facing a sensitive political issue, the City
authorities were able to adapt the peace-keeping forces to meet some of the de-
mands made upon them by the problems of a changing metropolis.
Although some of these developments brought significant changes to the way
the law was administered, they had occurred very largely in the absence of pub-
lic discussion of their nature or implications. This was in part because they were
not generalized into principled assaults on the law or on the institutions making
up the system of criminal administration. There was no ambition in this period
to undertake root and branch transformations. Changes were piecemeal, incre-
mental, ad hoc. Their proponents were not aiming to ‘reform’ the system, in the
sense of achieving a full-scale reconstitution of the criminal law or of the police.^1
They did, however, want to make improvements in these institutions of crim-
inal justice. The proponents of rewards for convictions, of improved lighting, of
a better organized watch, or more effective non-capital punishments wanted to
prevent crime or, if that failed, to increase the chances of catching offenders and
ensuring their conviction and punishment. The resulting changes were signifi-
cant enough to affect the character of the institutions of criminal administration
and to shift the bases upon which the system of criminal justice worked. These
developments—and other responses to domestic problems—challenge the
characterization of the first half of the eighteenth century simply as an age of
stability. Such a notion usefully describes developments in the world ofhigh pol-
itics. It reflects the contrast between, on the one hand, the reigns of Charles II
and James II, in which the government was frequently weakened by conflict and464 Conclusion(^1) This adopts Joanna Innes’s argument that the term ‘reform’, as distinguished from the much older
‘reformation’, came into use in 1780 to refer to projects aimed at achieving broad institutional change. I
am grateful to her for permission to read her recent unpublished paper, ‘The Idea of Reform in English
Public Life, to 1830 ’.
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