A History of Police in England

by W. L. Melville Lee

The confusion of the illiterate constable, called upon to act when confronted with a medley of contradictory charters, passports and privileges, can well be imagined, and, needless to say, personation and forged certificates were largely resorted to both by the habitual criminal and by the professional beggar.

A very necessary reform introduced in this reign was that which, in cases of homicide, made the trial of the accused follow immediately upon the discovery of the offence. By long-established usage, originating from the time when the blood-feud was the recognised agency for avenging murder, the custom had arisen of postponing royal interference until the relatives or friends of the deceased had been allowed ample time in which to bring the criminal to justice, and, by ancient consent, those parties who were interested acted the rôle that our police detectives are now charged with, and, so to speak, had to "get up" the case against the alleged offender. An "Appeal," as it was called, was then made before the Coroner and by him publicly declared at five consecutive county-courts. It had been laid down in 1277,[86] that homicides should not be proceeded against at the King's suit until a year and a day had elapsed since the commission of the murder, and in 1482,[87] twelve months was declared to be the privileged period in which appellors alone might formulate an accusation. The natural result (to quote the Statute,[88] which did away with these out-of-date restrictions) was, that "the party is oftentimes slow, and also agreed with, and by the end of the year all is forgotten, which is another occasion of murder."

The anxiety to make money that pervaded all classes, but which was especially observable in the middle class, besides influencing the status of the constable and making the guild such a prominent feature of the time, was to a large extent responsible for the increasing rigour of the criminal law. The claims of property were urged to the uttermost, and people who had anything to lose pressed for the infliction of exemplary punishment in all cases where the rights of ownership were threatened. The result of this attitude was, that the war of extermination against those who had no visible means of subsistence was waged more relentlessly than ever before. The dissolution of the religious houses, following upon the civil commotions of the previous century, had multiplied the number of vagrants until the country was full of homeless and starving wanderers, many of whom, needless to say, maintained themselves by robbery. Bad government first created this dangerous class, and then attempted to exterminate it by wholesale hanging: it is said that more than 70,000 persons were put to death during the thirty-eight years of Henry the Eighth's reign; from this number a considerable reduction may be made for exaggeration, and of the remainder a large proportion suffered on religious and political grounds. But the general government was rigorous in the extreme, and, the value of human life being but little accounted of, a penal system grew up which exacted the death penalty for offences of a comparatively trivial nature, thus laying the foundations of the barbarous code which continued to disgrace our Statute book for centuries, vainly endeavouring to supply the place of preventive police by repressive measures that were expected to deter by virtue of their extreme severity. Sir Thomas More saw the uselessness of such a policy, and pointed out in his "Utopia," that as robbers often killed their victims on the principle that dead men tell no tales, it would be desirable, therefore, to reduce the punishment for theft in order to check the frequency with which murders were committed.

Wales and the Welsh borderland had long been the refuge of the outlaw, and the fastness of the robber; for whilst the natural features of the country favoured the escape of the fugitive from justice, the division of the principality into independent lordships, from which the king's writ was excluded, still further increased the difficulty of arrest. At one time there were 141 of these lordships, under as many petty chieftains known as Lords-Marchers, who indiscriminately sold charters, and harboured any lawbreaker who would pay for his footing. This kind of home-rule in Wales was incompatible with the maintenance of order in the West of England, and the counties near the border suffered severely for their proximity to this Alsatia. Accordingly in 1536 it was decided to extinguish the separate jurisdiction of the Lords-Marchers, and the whole of Wales was incorporated into England by an Act passed in the 27th year of Henry the Eighth, which provided Justices-of-the-Peace, Justices-of-the-Quorum, and Justices-of-Gaol-delivery for the Welsh counties, armed with the same power and authority that the corresponding Justices in England were possessed of; shortly afterwards (1543)[89] these newly-appointed Justices of the Peace were authorised to select two "substantiall gentlemen, or yeomen, to be chiefe constables of the hundred wherein they inhabite, which two constables in every hundred shall haue a speciall regard to the conseruation of the King's Peace."

A somewhat similar state of unrest existed in the neighbourhood of the Scottish border. Here the simple expedient of incorporation by Act of Parliament was of course impossible, so in the following year Henry instituted a Court, called the President and the Council of the North, and empowered it to preserve the peace, in that part of the realm, in the king's name; so that "his true subjects ... have undelayed justice daily administered."

Nearer home, Thomas Cromwell, acting for the king, overhauled the administration of police, and amongst other improvements established parochial registers of births, marriages and deaths,[90] but he was too fond of thrusting petty and vexatious regulations down the throats of a people, who, recently freed from their old bondage, were now for the first time beginning to think for themselves; his whole system moreover was vitiated by the frequency with which he employed spies and informers, a method of police control always peculiarly abhorrent to the English.

The law against vagrancy, which, as we have seen, was extremely severe during the preceding reigns, reached its most barbarous stage soon after the accession of Edward the Sixth. It is the irony of circumstance which associates the name of so mild a prince with one of the most atrocious measures ever imposed upon Englishmen, for Edward was but a child when the Statute in question was passed, and can have had no hand either in the inception or application of its provisions.[91] The responsibility belongs to the Protector, Somerset, yet it will always remain a mystery how he could sanction such a measure, for he is well known to have felt much sympathy for the masses of his countrymen, and was ever anxious to please. After remarking in the preamble that "idle and vagabond persons are worthy of death, whipping, imprisonment, and other corporal pain," the Statute proceeds to enact that "the offender there described to be an idle person shall be taken before a Justice of the Peace, who shall cause him to be marked with a hot iron in the breast, the mark "V," and adjudge him to be a slave to the person presenting him for two years, to be fed with bread and water, and be put to work (how vile soever it be) by beating, chaining, etc.: and if he runs away, the Justice, on conviction, shall cause such slave to be marked on the forehead or ball of the cheek with the sign of an "S," and shall further adjudge him to be his master's slave for ever:[92] and if he again run away, he shall suffer death as a felon."[93] No record tells how many unfortunates suffered the pains above recited, but the number is not likely to have been considerable, because vagabondage was by no means stamped out: the conclusion is forced upon one, however, that whilst law-making of such a type was in vogue, the infirmity of the police, whose business it was to enforce its enactments, cannot be considered as an unmitigated evil.

The grandmotherly domestic policy of the time, which told people what they were to eat, how they were to dress, and the number of hours they must labour, resulted, as all such attempts to interfere with the natural laws of supply and demand must result, in serious conflict between the authorities and the people, who sooner or later are sure to resent coercion, and have recourse to violent resistance to obtain economic freedom for themselves and their descendants. Dissatisfaction had long been dormant, but matters came to a head early in the reign of Edward VI.; popular risings took place simultaneously all over the country, the most serious outbreaks occurring in counties as far remote from each other as Cornwall in the West, and Norfolk in the East. There was no machinery in existence for the suppression of riots, no standing army, and no civil power in any way adequate to meet force with force: the executive was well-nigh powerless. Under these circumstances a penal statute[94] against unlawful assemblies was passed, much of which survives in our present Riot Act now in force. It became high treason for twelve or more persons, being assembled together, to attempt to alter any laws, etc., or to continue together for the space of an hour after being commanded by a Justice of the Peace to depart. It was made felony for twelve or more persons to "practice to destroy a park, conduit, or dovehouse," to pull down houses, barns, or mills, to burn any stack of corn, or to abate the price of victuals; or being assembled, to continue together an hour, after being ordered in like manner to depart.

To make this statute effectual, it was necessary to devise some new executive to enforce its provisions; accordingly in each county a high official called the Lord-Lieutenant was appointed, who was authorized to levy men and lead them against the enemies of the king, to which category rioters, as being guilty of High Treason, were now specifically declared to belong. With the appointment of Lords-Lieutenant, the last of the military functions exercised by the Sheriff passed out of his hands into those of the new official, who to this day retains a remnant of authority over the regiments of Yeomanry and Militia of his county.[95]