The word "constable" was imported by the Normans, but its etymology is not quite certain; formerly it was said to be derived from "Conning," a king,[56] and "Stapel," a stay or prop, and to signify "the king's right-hand man," but this is an unlikely solution, because the invaders despised the Anglo-Saxon language, and would not use a word which was partly derived from that tongue. Latterly the derivation "Comes-stabuli," meaning an Equerry or Master of the Horse, has been generally accepted as correct. In England the title has been applied to a variety of functionaries, some high and some low, who had little in common beyond the fact that they all owed their authority to the Crown.

The first mention of petty constables occurs in 1252, in a writ of Henry III. for enforcing watch and ward. This writ provides for the employment of these officers in parish and township, but it is more than likely that the office was not then a new one, because the word "constable" is there used without any explanation being added, and it may therefore be assumed that its meaning was a matter of common knowledge.

The Statute of Winchester, it will be remembered, ordained that there should be two constables in each hundred, to carry out the inspection of arms; these officers were probably connected with the Militia, and were closely allied to, if not identical with, the High Constables of later date; in any case they must not be confused with the petty constables, who, according to Blackstone, were so called when they added the duties of assistants to the High Constable, to their ancient business of keeping the peace, and who, as Lambard explains, were modified tythingmen; "when there be many tythingmen in one parish, there only one of them is a constable for the king, and the rest do serve but as the ancient tythingmen did."

The transition from the Anglo-Saxon tythingman to the petty constable, that is to say, from the chief frankpledge to the Justice's assistant was very gradual, and it is impossible to determine a rigid boundary line between the two. All we can say is that the term "constable" was introduced as early as the year 1252, and that the term "tything man" continued to be occasionally made use of down to the beginning of the nineteenth century: that first and last the offices were in effect the same does not admit of doubt, both were primarily ex officio guardians of the peace, and when the tything man came to be commonly called "constable," it does not follow that the change marked the creation of a new office.

The Normans naturally substituted French or Latin names for Anglo-Saxon ones; headborough became præpositus, and shire-reeve or sheriff became vicecomes. Of these foreign titles, the former is now never used, and the latter[57] has acquired a new meaning totally distinct from its original sense. "Constable," on the other hand, survived, although at first it was used only by the Normans, and in official documents, the people continuing to employ the native words according to the custom of the different parts of the country; thus in Middlesex there were Headboroughs, in Kent Borsholders, and in the West of England tythingmen.

It is not necessary to pursue the matter further except to say, that when the Justices of the Peace, owing to the increased amount of work thrown upon them, were in want of subordinate officers, advantage was taken of the staff of tythingmen already existing, some of whom were given new functions, e.g. the execution of the Justices' warrants and the service of summonses, but without prejudice to their duties in connection with peace-maintenance; in short, the titles of tythingman, petty-constable, parish-constable, and finally police-constable, are the various names applied to the same office from the time of Alfred the Great to that of King Edward the Seventh.

We do not know enough about the social distinctions of the period to say what the precise status of the early constable was. His position was without doubt an honourable one, superior in every way to that of the parish constable of later years, who only served because he could not help it, or because he was poor enough to bear another man's burden for a paltry pecuniary consideration.

The local competence of the officer has always been insisted upon, and his incapacity to exercise any powers outside a particular area was one of the causes that contributed to make him the useless nonentity that he at one time became. So close was the connection between constable and parish that the Court of King's Bench decided, in 1734, that a place that did not employ one constable at least must be considered merely as a hamlet, and was not entitled to the privileges that belonged to an independent township; and whenever similar questions arose, the decision invariably turned on the existence or the non-existence of a parish constable.

The qualifications that a constable ought to possess are thus tabulated by Coke:—