passing on their businesses to their descendants. The attractions and the re-
wards of business were no doubt principally at work here; but the developing
complexity of the London social world must have encouraged such choices—
the elaboration of the culture of politeness and sociability in the metropolis and
the status and honour it was capable of conferring.^11
A consciousness of such status may help to explain why the aldermen of Lon-
don increasingly left the administration of their wards to their deputies and in
particular why they withdrew from the conduct of preliminary hearings into
criminal charges and the other business that single magistrates traditionally
conducted in their parlours. As we have seen, the City aldermen were less in-
clined to take on these duties by the early decades of the eighteenth century, with
the result that it became necessary in 1737 to construct a new institution to fill the
gap: the first magistrates’ court in the metropolis, a court presided over by all the
aldermen in turn, and open every day at hours known to the public. For the al-
dermen, it meant giving a few hours roughly once a month to work to which
some of their predecessors had devoted many hours every week. The Guildhall
magistrates’ court was not a precise model for the court at Bow Street that was
initiated by Thomas De Veil and developed by the Fieldings, or for the ‘rotation’
or ‘police’ courts that followed in Westminster and Middlesex in the second half
of the century, because the City aldermen-magistrates were not willing to with-
draw entirely from criminal administration and hand it over to professional jus-
tices. Nor did they set out to create a staff of detective constables that would be
available to search for and apprehend dangerous offenders. None the less, the
Guildhall justice room surely demonstrated the usefulness of a court that was
available to the public at known hours, that monopolized all aspects of the early
stages of criminal prosecution, and that was presided over in rotation by a body
of magistrates.
The same concerns about their status and the appropriateness in new cir-
cumstances of roles their ancestors had played for generations—as well, again,
of the demands of their work and careers—may help also to explain why the
better-off men in the inner wards of the City became unwilling in the same early
decades of the eighteenth century to take up the office of constable. In the late
seventeenth century even substantial shopkeepers, tradesmen, and profession-
als had still been willing to take their turn; by the second quarter of the eight-
eenth century there was a strong tendency in the richer, more fashionable,
wards for such men to pay for substitutes to do the work for them. As in the case
of the aldermen, the withdrawal of the comfortably-off from the office of con-
stable must have had several causes. The demands of the post were changing in
ways that provide explanation enough, for the developing culture of the City in-
evitably altered the shape of the urban day, and, by extending the hours of
leisure and entertainmnt well past the time of the old curfew, made policingConclusion 469(^11) See the literature cited in Ch. 2 , nn. 65‒6.
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