what was by the late seventeenth century a well-established pattern. For the
most part they were drawn from the upper ranks of the London rate-paying
population. Eighty per cent of grand jurors in the 1690 s were men in the pros-
perous wholesale or retail trades—including linen drapers, mercers, haber-
dashers, and merchants of all kinds. They were also widely experienced in other
aspects of the government of the City: some as common councilmen; others in
ward or parish offices as churchwardens or overseers of the poor; some as mem-
bers of civil juries in the City. Many of them served with some regularity on the
grand jury itself. Their primary task as jurors was to listen to a statement of the
prosecution evidence in each case and to decide whether the accused should go
forward to trial before the petty jury. But when that work was completed, they
also had the task of ‘presenting’ problems to the court that had been brought to
their attention or that in their own view required redress. It seems likely that
men who were as active as many of the grand jurors were in the affairs of their
wards and parishes and of the City itself, regarded this aspect of their grand jury
service as an important part of their wider participation in the governance of the
City.^146
Grand jury presentments were clearly shaped by the jurors’ local experience,
and by the opinions of the men they associated with in the management of their
communities. They varied considerably from one jury to the next. Some were
printed, presumably because they were thought important enough to be ad-
dressed to a wider audience than had been present in court; some were per-
functory; others were devoted entirely to naming individuals whose misdeeds
required corrective action; some were narrowly partisan, aimed against politi-
cal enemies; from time to time presentments took the form of an address to the
Crown or parliament on a matter of national importance. Most often, however,
the City grand jurors felt moved to comment on the state of the community,
drawing the attention of the City magistrates to problems that needed solution.
Prominent among these were the problems of crime, and the circumstances and
conditions that made it possible. Not many presentments of the City grand jury
have survived, but the thirty or so examples among the Sessions Papers between
1689 and 1706 provide us with a reasonable sample of the way these influential
men in the City of London regarded some aspects of the crime problem and
what they thought might be done about it.^147
Grand jury presentments ranged over a variety of subjects relating to crime.
Several made specific recommendations about how crime might be contained.
On at least three occasions early in William’s reign they repeated an obvious point
made by several of their predecessors that alehouses that served beer in silver52 Introduction: The Crime Problem(^146) J. M. Beattie, ‘London Juries in the 1690 s’, in Cockburn and Green (eds.), Twelve Good Men and True,
237 – 44.
(^147) About fifty grand jury presentments survive from the half century after 1680 , mainly in the reign
of William III and the early years of Queen Anne. They are among the Sessions Papers in CLRO, filed
by the month and year of the appropriate session.
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