There were two other officials besides the Overseer and Church-warden, the dignity of whose office entitles them to a place of honour in these sketches—viz., the old Parish Constable, and the Parish Beadle.
To understand what the old Parish Constable was in relation to the public peace we have to consider him as embodying most of the functions of the present county policeman, and a variety of other matters, some of which now fall upon the Relieving Officer, the Recruiting Sergeant, and Overseer. All this helped to place him in a position of some dignity and importance, which he conceived entitled him to advise even magistrates and parsons on their duty! Over the Parish Constable was a Chief Constable for each hundred, through whom he was in touch with the Quarter Sessions. Unlike the Parish Constable, however, the Chief Constableship of the hundred was a life appointment. When the police force came into existence the gentlemen holding the office of Chief Constable of the hundreds were pensioned off, and, in support of the popular notion of the longevity of pensioners, it may be of interest to add that some of these old superannuated Chief Constables' pensions were still running in Cambridgeshire until recent years; indeed, I am not sure that the payments have all ended even yet. In this county, too, the old Parish Constables are still appointed annually; but their glory has long since departed.
The Parish Constable was essentially an emergency man, and the manner in which he "rose to the occasion," forms a curious and interesting chapter of parochial history. If occasionally, like his prototype in "Much ado about Nothing," he, on the clerical side of his office, made a slip, and committed an offender to "everlasting redemption," and put down "flat burglary" for perjury, still he did manage to acquit himself of his task in a practical sort of way, though always with a tender regard for his own comfort when on duty.
The office of the old Parish Constable was not quite adapted to the modern idea of police work. Until a crime was committed the old constable had no reason to bestir himself, and when a crime was committed he was hampered in many ways. With a drunkard and a brawler he had the stocks ready to hand, but when a great crime was committed such as sheep-stealing—fearfully common, notwithstanding the dread penalty of the law, in the last and also the present century—the constable had no convenient telegraph office from which to warn his brother officers round the whole country side. He had therefore to resort to the homely process of carrying the intelligence himself, and such items as
L s. d.
for carrying a hue and cry to Anstey . . . . 0 0 4
represented the highest point of Dogberry's intelligence department. From one Parish Constable to another the news was carried, like the fiery cross over the Border, until the whole country round was aware of what had occurred, and, as one might expect, the criminal himself had often got fairly away.
Those parishes lying near the coach roads sometimes had a good share of this carrying the hue and cry, and searching for criminals. Thus in Therfield parish in 1757, we find the constable making this charge:—
for Sarchin the Parish upon Account of the mail L s. d.
being robedd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 1 0
This was the Caxton mail bag, and the "sarchin the parish" appears to have created a profound impression upon the inhabitants, possibly from the awful penalty for such an offence which young Gatward of the Red Lion, at Royston, had suffered only a few years before. The story of the searching of the houses of Therfield for the missing mail bag has been handed down even within the memory of persons still living.
The search appears to have been fruitless, but the truth could wait even a hundred years; for, about thirty years ago some workmen, who were digging at a spot at the entrance to the village by the Royston road, actually dug up the brass label of the "Caxton letter-bag," and thus confirmed the suspicions of those who had fixed upon the village on the hill as the neighbourhood towards which the stolen mail-bag had been carried by the robbers of that far-off time.