The English Police

A Political and Social History

Clive Emsley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317890232
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

A comprehensive history of policing from the eighteenth century onwards, which draws on largely unused police archives. Clive Emsley addresses all the major issues of debate; he explores the impact of legislation and policy at both national and local levels, and considers the claim that the English police were non-political and free from political control. In the final section, he looks at the changing experience of police life. Established as a standard introduction to the subject on its first appearance, the Second Edition has been substantially revised and is now published under the Longman imprint for the first time.

CHAPTER ONE

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Policing Before the Police

Early institutions of law enforcement

Traditional histories of the police in England and Wales have argued along lines similar to the police reformers of the nineteenth century, namely that the system before 1800 had been in steady decline for perhaps as much as half a millenium. T.A. Critchley, one of the more astute of the historians of the English police, for example, begins his account with Saxon tythingmen and the first appearance of the word ‘constable’ under the Normans, but he then maintains that the emergence of the office of justice of the peace degraded the constable’s office to the extent that over a period of 500 years it ‘was gradually going downhill’.¹ David Ascoli, the historian of the Metropolitan Police, argues similarly and adds: ‘the decline of the constable in Elizabethan times from a man of authority to a figure of fun is perfecdy illustrated by Shakespeare’.² Indeed, Shakespeare is commonly quoted as revealing the comic and ignorant nature of the law enforcement agents before the new police; I will return to his reliability as an analyst of Elizabethan administration, but first it will help to look, very briefly, at the origins of the agents who have received so much criticism: constables, watchmen and, to a lesser extent, justices of the peace.

‘Constable’ was a Norman term.³ By the middle of the thirteenth century the name covered a variety of functionaries of whom the most significant, at least for the future, were the high constables of the hundreds and the petty constables of the manors, tythings or vills. The petty, later commonly known as the parish, constable had acquired two distinct characteristics. The first of these went back to the Saxon tradition of collective responsibility when families were grouped in tens, or tythings, and made responsible for the good behaviour of each other. The medieval constable, a man appointed from within his community and charged with carrying out the duties of the office for probably no more than one year, increasingly became the executive agent of the manor or parish for which he was appointed and it was his task to make regular reports, or ‘presentments’, to the local court leet about felons, miscreants and nuisances. But the medieval constable also acquired royal authority and was responsible for maintaining the King’s peace in his district. Watchmen were local agents of law enforcement who had long been recruited by, and from among, urban dwellers. A succession of royal writs during the thirteenth century made the appointment of watches obligatory and these were cemented by legislation of 1285: the Statute of Winchester ordered boroughs to provide watches of a dozen men, while the smaller towns had to find between four and six watchmen depending upon their population; a separate act, Statuta civitatis, divided the City of London into 24 wards each of which was required to have a watch of six men supervised by an alderman, while a ‘marching watch’ was to patrol the whole city. Justices of the peace were royal officials from the outset; they originated from the knights commissioned by Richard I in 1195 to keep the peace and received full legislative recognition during the fourteenth century, principally by an Act of 1361 (34 Edw. III cap. 1). The justices were the social superiors of the constables; they were often lords of the manor and therefore they, or their stewards, presided at the courts leet to which the petty constables brought their presentments. The constable thus could appear to be the justice’s man; and this is one reason why Critchley sees the constable’s authority degraded by that of the justice.

Perhaps the constable’s authority was undermined by the emergence of the justice of the peace, but it will not do to quote passages from Shakespeare as illustrations of this. Both Dogberry, the headborough in Much Ado About Nothing, and Elbow, the simple constable from Measure for Measure, talk in malapropisms, but this is a comic fault allegedly found also in twentieth-century English policemen,⁴ and none of the critics of Shakespeare’s constables think of condemning twentieth-century policemen as comic and degraded characters for this reason. Literary evidence is something which needs to be handled with infinitely more care than the historians of the police have generally applied in their references to Tudor constables. Furthermore, a brief, broad survey of constables as portrayed by a variety of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists has shown that whereas there were other comic characters of the Dogberry variety, there were also some who were not comic and who demonstrated courage and efficiency in organising the hue and cry and in making arrests.⁵ Oliver Cromwell, in explaining to a parliamentary committee how he understood his office of Lord Protector, declared:

so far as I can, I am ready to serve you not as a King, but as a Constable … for truly I have, as before God, often thought that I could not tell what my business was, nor what I was in the place I stood in, save comparing myself to a good Constable set to keep the peace of the parish.

As J.A. Sharpe has pointed out, it is unlikely that Cromwell was suggesting himself as either Dogberry or Elbow.⁶

Shakespeare’s characters are best left for what they are, literary creations, rather than being taken for any serious representation of Tudor constables. However, the Tudor and Stuart constables were not without their contemporary critics. Prominent among the latter was the Kent justice and legal scholar William Lambarde, who complained of their ignorance and lack of diligence and who published a prototype handbook for them, The Duties of Constables, Borsholders, Tythingmen, and such other low and lay ministers of the peace. Quarter sessions and assize courts often heard charges against constables for negligence in letting offenders escape or for not using their powers to apprehend vagrants. At the summer assizes for Sussex held in 1613 the Grand Jury lamented: ‘Our constables in most parts are honest men but of meane estate, and fewe of them knowe what belongeth to there office.’⁷ The courts were also prepared to use their powers to ensure that only fit and proper men were appointed constable. In Kent, in 1598, some two dozen men from the Hundred of Cranbrook were indicted at the assizes for contempt because they had elected William Sheafe to serve as constable, ‘although they knew him to be an infirm man incapable of discharging the office’.⁸ The problems highlighted by the courts show that there were corrupt, idle, ignorant and poor constables during the Tudor and Stuart periods, so some of the criticisms are justified. But this is only a part of the picture.⁹ The parish constables were chosen in a variety of ways depending on local custom. Most served for one year, but some for two, with the appointments overlapping so as to give some continuity. Constables often had experience in other local government or community roles: they may well have served as overseers of the poor, surveyors of the highways, or churchwardens. They were not poor men but were most commonly drawn from the higher strata of village and small town society. They may well have been illiterate, but this was more the result of the general literacy rate of society than the particular ignorance of the men serving as constables. They may well have been in trouble with the law themselves, but probably as a result of a general affray or the infringement of economic regulations; the application of modern standards of decorum and behaviour is anachronistic in the study of early modern society.

Some constables were less than diligent in the apprehension of offenders; while others, when called upon, went to considerable lengths and arrested both members of their own community as well as outsiders. The constables were local men and they were fully aware that, after their brief term of office, they would have to continue living in the community which they had policed, consequently they might try a variety of expedients to solve a dispute or settle an offence before recourse to the courts. In 1636, for example, John King, an Essex villager, stole eight hens. He was quickly apprehended by Thomas Burrowes, the local constable. King begged not to be prosecuted, stressing that it was his first offence; after a long talk with the victim of the theft, Burrowes resolved to release King as the lesser of two evils.¹⁰ Similarly, constables could be involved in community action directed at individuals who had offended against locally accepted forms of behaviour; they might be the organisers of a charivari against, for example, a couple living together out of wedlock. Such cases highlight the alternative views of order in early modern society. On the one hand there was the view of the community which stressed the avoidance of conflict and conformity with local custom; this was much more flexible than statute law. On the other hand there was the jurist’s view of order which sought uniformity based on statute law. This was the view which probably underlay the criticisms of local constables by men like William Lambarde when they demanded greater diligence on the part of the peace officers. Lambarde himself was a Puritan with a high sense of morality and he was inclined to measure a constable’s diligence by his number of presentments and prosecutions.

The major socio-economic and political changes of the Tudor and Stuart periods also had an impact on parish constables. It appears that, as greater divisions developed between tenant farmers and landless labourers, many of the former were attracted to the office of constable as a way of controlling and better supervising the latter. This was especially the case where the wealthier farmers and villagers were inspired by Puritan concerns about the control and the reform of the ungodly. At the same time the growth of the central government and its attempts to exert its authority in the provinces generated a growth in county administration and an increase in the administrative and judicial duties of the constable; in addition to maintaining the king’s peace the constable was expected to enforce legislation on church attendance, keeping the Sabbath, drunkenness, swearing, and vagrancy, as well as on taxation and military recruitment. Given the increasing burdens it is no small wonder that some men may have become reluctant to serve, especially when, in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, central government largely withdrew from the supervision of local government. In 1714 Daniel Defoe could describe the office of constable as one of ‘insupportable hardship; it takes up so much of a man’s time that his own affairs are frequently totally neglected, too often to his ruin’.¹¹ It may be that the office of constable went into gradual decline from the late seventeenth century: the question awaits an historian. However, work on law enforcement in the metropolis in particular has suggested that matters were improving substantially towards the end of the eighteenth century. By 1800, constables of the metropolitan parishes may often have been substitutes, but they were more numerous, better supervised, better informed, and increasingly used to making criminal charges and acting as prosecutors.¹²

In his guide for the early Stuart justice of the peace Michael Dalton urged his readers to ensure that night watches were kept in the towns from sunset to sunrise. The watchmen were authorised to arrest ‘persons suspect… night-walkers, be they strangers, or others that bee of evill fame and behaviour’. Constables were to make presentments to the justices about any laxity on the part of the watch.¹³ Like the constables, the pre-police watchmen have been derided by historians. Those historians fond of citing Shakespeare conveniently ignore the fact that it is Dogberry and Verges’s comic watchmen who arrest Don John’s evil henchmen, and that Friar Lawrence warns Romeo:

Either be gone before the watch be set,

Or by the break of day disguis’d from hence.

By the early seventeenth century, in London at least, the householder’s obligation to serve watch and ward had largely been replaced by the payment of an assessment which enabled the hiring of substitutes. Yet in times of emergency it appears that principals did turn out and act with courage and some effectiveness.¹⁴

The suppression of serious rioting created major problems for the local authorities of Tudor and Stuart England; watchmen, constables, and men sworn in as special constables for the emergency might cope, but, often of necessity, magistrates also relied on ‘good words’ to pacify crowds. If ‘good words’ and the local forces of order failed, then the magistrate could call on military support. The Trained Bands were county militias run by the local gentry; they were scarcely trained and sometimes unreliable, but little else existed in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. During the Interregnum, for the first time, there were well-disciplined, professionally led soldiers who could be, and were, called upon to suppress rioting. The use of troops in this way was disliked and resented; it became linked in the popular recollection with Cromwell’s shortlived experiment to keep order and to get local government working efficiently by deploying major-generals as administrators across the country. The memory of the ‘tyranny’ of the major-generals ensured that the idea of a standing army remained unpopular in late Stuart and Hanoverian England. Nevertheless, with the Restoration came the beginnings of a small regular army which could be, and regularly was, made available to magistrates during riots, or when riots threatened. Policing duties appear to have been unpopular with the soldiers, both o...