CHAPTER III
JUSTICE AND CONSTABLE
The accession of Edward III. marked the beginning of a new police era, that of the petty constable acting under the direction of the Justice of the Peace. The Statute of Winchester continued to be the guide in matters of police, but the executive which carried out its provisions underwent a change.
Any attempt to follow in detail the history of the Justices of the Peace, and the powers resident in them, is beyond the scope of the present work; this task has already been often and ably performed.[39] It is impossible, however, to divorce the functions of the Justice from those of the Constable; the story of the evolution of the latter is so dovetailed into the history of the former, the two are so closely allied in their mutual relationship of master and servant, that some reference must here and elsewhere be made to the office of the Justice, a functionary who claims a considerable share of attention in any enquiry that deals with police in the full interpretation of the word, because the executive power vested in a Justice as Peace Officer is antecedent to, and on the whole more important than, the judicial authority attaching to him as Magistrate: in other words, he must be considered as a policeman first, and as a judge afterwards.
The origin of the Justice's office is by no means obscure. Towards the close of the twelfth century (1195), by a proclamation of Richard I.,[40] Knights were appointed to see that all males over the age of fifteen years were "sworn to the King" by taking a solemn oath to maintain the peace: after fifty years or so had elapsed (1253) these Knights had become Peace Wardens or Conservators, who again, continually undergoing a process of development as the importance of the Sheriffs dwindled, were eventually invested with judicial powers, and were then known as Justices of the Peace.
When the office of Justice was first created, it was not intended that the Sheriff should be altogether superseded, but rather that the new officer should become an auxiliary agent for the preservation of the peace, to co-operate, as the Conservator had formerly done, with the Sheriff, who still retained the primary responsibility for the policing of his shire. It would appear that the supremacy of the royal officer in matters of police was generally recognised throughout the thirteenth century; for when, in 1285, Edward I. had occasion to rebuke the men of Kent for the prevalence of crime in their county, he made no mention of the Conservator, but ordered the inhabitants to afford in future every assistance in their power to the Sheriff, whose especial province it was (so the King declared) to keep the peace, not only by his own power, but also by means of the "posse comitatus," or power of the county.[41] On the other hand, even at this time, the Sheriff was not always given a free hand. In Warwickshire, for example, all arrangements for the preservation of the peace had first to be submitted to the Conservator for his approval;[42] it cannot, however, be supposed that the supervision exercised by the Conservators over the police administration was more than nominal, because, as a rule, they were great noblemen, holding a plurality of offices, and because the districts within their wardenship were usually too large to be effectively controlled by any one man. We learn, for instance, that in 1281 the Earl of Cornwall was Peace Warden for the counties of Middlesex, Essex, Herts, Cambs, Hunts, Norfolk, Suffolk, Kent, Surrey, Oxon, Beds, Bucks, Berks, Northants, Lincoln, and Rutland.
When both population and trade increased, and when offenders and offences grew more varied and numerous, it became necessary to augment to a proportionate degree the staff of officers answerable to the King for the internal peace of the kingdom: it was no good making more Sheriffs, who had seldom proved a success in the past (whose misconduct, in fact, had led to the restricting of their power to do harm on more than one occasion), and so it came about that the Justice gradually superseded the Conservator, and in the end not only deprived the Sheriff of his judicial powers, but to a large extent took his place as director of the police also.
The Sheriff did not submit to this curtailment of his authority without a struggle. After he was no longer allowed to act in his old capacity, he sometimes managed to get made a Justice, and to hold both offices in the same county at one time, to the great oppression of the people, who bitterly complained of the heavy fines that were inflicted, and of the outrageous bail that was exacted by these pluralists, until in 1378, at the request of Parliament, Richard II. put an end to such practices. Nevertheless, the Sheriff still remained the responsible person for the levying of Hue and Cry, for the pursuit and apprehension of felons, for the due execution of the sentences pronounced by the law-courts, and was answerable for the persons of prisoners handed over to him for punishment. He also had to perform various duties connected with elections, and until the reign of Edward VI. retained certain military functions.