Law & Order - Duties of the Constable in 17th Century England

by Deborah Swift

A Conventicle preacher brought before the Justices

The Role of the Constable
In the 17th century the responsibility for law and order fell on the community through its constables; though actually only a proportion of the community were eligible for this post – that is the householders. Tenants were not allowed to be constables. The office was usually held yearly amongst the wealthiest householders who were obliged to serve, or provide a deputy in their stead. I have read of one occasion in 1644 where in Upton, the householder turned out to be a widow. Given the often violent nature of the job, Jane Kitchin was obliged to hire a deputy. Though I have to say, I rather like the idea of a woman fulfilling this role.

Unlike later police, the position was strictly amateur, with the constable receiving no remuneration for his services, which could be both dangerous and cumbersome. However, what it did do was to promote a shared citizenship, and in the early 17th century, gave prominent householders an understanding of how the systems of ancient Manorial land ownership worked. Once a year, the constables from neighbouring parishes were sworn in at the local Justice’s office or residence by the High Constable of the County.

Their duties were primarily in disputes over land and territory, particularly with regard to tenancies, but also after the Excise Act of 1642 they were also charged with collecting tax and duty on goods. A duty was put on provisions coming into the cities from the country – on beer and cider and soap, and the next year on salt, hats, starch, and copper goods. This law was extremely unpopular, as these were not imported items from abroad, as before, but everyday necessities, and the enforcing of this law, and the collection of these monthly excise duties must have been a great burden on the elected constables.

Like doctors or vets today, the constables were constantly ‘on call’, meaning they often had to leave their dinner or their sleep to deal with the drunk and disorderly, street fights, or criminal activities.

Hue and Cry
If a murder or robbery had been committed, or a criminal had escaped, the Constable was responsible for recruiting a search party. The pay for chasing a criminal was anything from one penny to one shilling, depending on the perceived danger. The constable could call upon the villagers or townspeople for help, and anyone who refused to give chase or lend his horse to the party, was fined. The chases were known as Hue and Cry

‘given to Richard Taylor for going to Aram with a Huincri in ye night 2d’

Upton Constable's Account Book 

Hue and Cry of 'Canonbury Besse'

When the miscreant was caught, that was not the end of the constable's responsibility. If no gaol or lock-up was available, the constable had to find suitable premises and a watchman to keep the wrong-doer under lock and key.

Minor offences could be punished by a stay in the stocks, but more serious misdeameanours had to wait for the Justice at the Quarterly Assizes, known as the Quarter Sessions. Justice was a hit and miss affair, though, as the constable was often responsible for choosing the jurymen, to his own advantage in disputes.

Inside the Judge's Lodgings Museum Lancaster

Moral Guardians
Along with the churchwarden, the constable was supposed to keep an eye on the moral compass of the neighbourhood. During the Interregnum, with Cromwell in charge, staunch attacks on vice were demanded. Alehouses were restricted, various sports were banned, and the constable’s duties were to enforce all these new rules – an unenviable task, particularly since he was subject to the orders of the army Generals who were put in charge of each county district. In the period after the Civil Wars when there were many disputes over sequestrated land, (aristocrats' land seized by Parliament) the job must have required much diplomacy.

In addition there were all the new religious rules, such as fining those who did not keep Lent. Once the King was restored, a whole new raft of rules appeared, including persecution of religious dissenters such as the Quakers. A constable could call upon the trained band of soldiers to help quell a disturbance, and was resposible for enforcing that men of the parish trained in pike duty or other defensive arts as stipulated by law.

Allowed our trayne soldiers their charges when thery apprehended some Quakers in our town and conveyed them to prison 13/-

From the Upton Constable’s Account Book 1661

Taxes
The Long Parliament brought about a reform in taxation, moving away from the feudal system, and introduced a Poll Tax – no doubt extremely unpopular, and yet another difficulty for the constables to administer. The taxes were means tested, which meant constables must go door to door to assess the rate of tax – a task that was hardly going to enamour you with your neighbours. The taxes were resented because Parliament had promised that the poor would not be taxed. (sound familiar?)

Hearth Tax returns from Chaddersley Corbett, Worcestershire

Added to this already unpopular Poll Tax, the constable had to administer the Hearth Tax, introduced in 1662, where the number of chimneys had to be assessed.

There is not one old dame in ten, and search the nation through,but if you talk of chimney men will spare a curse or two

 Macauley 1662

Charity
Not only all this, but the constables were in charge of keeping the roads passable, and the bridges mended, and preventing vagrants from entering their boundaries. Vagrants were obliged to return to their place of origin, which resulted in many a poor beggar being turned away from one parish, and sent onwards to the next, spending their time sleeping in barns and calling on charity. More often than not the charity was supplied by the parish constable. No travelling was allowed on a Sunday, and canny travellers would arrive at a village on a Saturday night, knowing they would have to be accommodated there until the Monday.

'Given to a man that had been a footman to the Kinge, and who was in great want whose wiffe was with him 4d'

'Given to a souldier the 12th of May that was maimed at woster and had been under the surgon's hand 2d'

Upton Constable's record

Depending on where the sympathies of the constable lay, supporters or soldiers of the King after the end of the Civil War could be treated with kindness and respect, or they could be moved on, like common beggars.

Unpaid Civil Servant

The duties of the constable combined the duties of our police force with the duties of a charitable institution, and the constable was at the heart of the community. His house was taken over for a year as a gaol, a minor court, a meeting house, and a poor man's soup kitchen. The constable had to be a record-holder and thus was required to be literate and numerate, and thank goodness, for it is from constables' records that we know so much about the workings of the law in this period.

Sources:

Rude Forefathers: F.H West

The Gaol : Kelly Grovier

Every One A Witness - The Stuart Age: A.F.Scott


This is an Editor’s Choice from the #EHFA archives, originally published May 24, 2017.

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Deborah Swift is the author of nine historical novels as well as the Highway Trilogy for teens (and anyone young at heart!). So far, her books have been set in the 17th Century or in WW2, but she is fascinated by all periods of the past and her new novel will be set in the Renaissance. Deborah lives on the edge of the beautiful and literary English Lake District – a place made famous by the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge.

For more information of Deborah's published work, visit her Author Page. Find her historical fiction blog at her website www.deborahswift.com or follow her on twitter @swiftstory.

A Dreadful Punishment – 'Petty Treason' and the Medieval Beliefs Surrounding It

by Lindsay Townsend

Lindsay has recently completed two medieval historical mysteries based on The Wife of Bath, and alerted me to her research on petty treason - a fascinating subject I thought she might like to share as my guest on the blog this week.

Deborah Swift

There were a series of crimes in the Middle Ages that were thought so dreadful they were considered to be a form of treason. High treason is the offence of attempting to injure or kill the king or queen, and little or petty treason involves any “underling” killing his or her superior. Under the law of petty treason, codified in 1351, wives accused of murdering their husbands, or clergy killing their prelates, or a servant killing his or her master or mistress could be tried under this charge.

Why were such crimes considered treason? In the Middle Ages, hierarchy was seen as natural, as part of good order, created and ordained by God. God was always seen as male and at the apex of creation. Earth mirrored heaven, it was believed, and so man was held above woman. To a medieval man, a wife should obey her husband and be inferior to him, and the same was believed to be true for servants and their masters and mistresses.

Attitudes held at the time and the the demands of the church reinforced such ideas. One of the most popular lay stories of the fourteenth century was that of Patient Griselda, who submits to her odious husband while he takes her children from her, tells her he has killed them and finally tells Griselda he has divorced her. As an ideal, patient wife, Griselda then forgives him when her bullying husband reveals that all these ordeals have been fake and a test of her obedience. The church may have raised the Virgin Mary as a perfect woman, but all other females and wives were said to be tainted by the sin of Eve, tempted by Satan in the guise of a serpent into stealing an apple from the tree of knowledge and then tempting her husband Adam into sharing it with her. For that sin, the church believed women should be subservient to their husbands.

The message was clear: wives must obey. To murder one’s husband (whom a medieval wife had promised to obey in the marriage ceremony) was seen as the ultimate betrayal, a deadly, intimate act. Servants, too, were encouraged to be servile, especially since they lived with the family, inside the family.

Writing as I do about relationships and romance, I am particularly appalled by the crime of petty treason. For a wife convicted of it, the punishment was dreadful – she was burnt at the stake. It was a crime where the same act – murder of a spouse – was treated in different ways. A man could kill his wife and be tried for murder, but a wife killing her husband was committing treason.

A man was allowed to beat his wife because, it was believed by philosophers like Thomas Aquinas that women were less capable of reason than men. This meant, strangely enough, that women could be acquitted of the crime of Petty Treason if it was discovered that she had no “accomplices”. Women were not considered able to murder their husbands alone! So in 49 cases of husband killing brought before the justices in medieval Yorkshire and Essex, 32 were released. For those desperate women who were convicted however, a terrible fate awaited. In one of my novels, A Taste of Evil, I have my heroine Alyson accused of the crime of petty treason, with that barbaric threat hanging over her.

This horrific punishment was the same as for relapsed heretics and for the same reason. For a wife to kill her husband was seen as a form of heresy, a move against God’s order. Some “mercy” could be offered by the executioner’s choking the woman by cords before the flames touched her, but that often went wrong as the cords could also be burnt by the fire. The law was finally repealed in 1790.

[Renaissance image of Patient Griselda from Wikimedia Commons]

About Lindsay 

follow Lindsay on Twitter @lindsayromantic

The Bloody Assizes: Justice and Cruelty in 1685

by Tim Vicary

The first person brought before the court was a woman. She was seventy years old, partially deaf, and possibly senile. The charge was high treason, for which the penalty was death. Her name was Alice Lyle.

The judge was the Lord Chief Justice of England, the newly ennobled George, First Baron Jeffreys of Wem. In 1685 Jeffreys was 40 years old and had been England’s top judge for 2 years. He was a highly intelligent, ambitious man, renowned for his energy, hatred of criminals, and ferocious skill in cross-examination. He was also a sick man, suffering from a kidney stone. He frequently sipped what was thought to be brandy during trials, leading to accusations that he was drunk. This may have been true, but if so the brandy was probably medicinal, to dull the extreme pain he was suffering. And like most people in chronic pain, he was often in a filthy temper, searching for a scapegoat to vent his fury on.

If that was so, he had been given the perfect opportunity.  Earlier that year, James II succeeded to the throne, and his nephew James Scott, duke of Monmouth, rose in rebellion against him. Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis, in Dorset, and gathered an army of Protestant rebels to depose King James, his Catholic uncle. But the rebels were defeated at Sedgemoor (the last battle on English soil) Monmouth was captured and beheaded, and King James sent Judge Jeffreys to the West Country to teach the rebels a lesson they would never forget.

The charge against Alice Lyle was that she had hidden a rebel fugitive named Hicks in a priest’s hole at her home.  Her defence (she was a wealthy widow, able to hire a lawyer) rested on two points:

a)      Hicks hadn’t even been tried yet, let alone convicted, so there was no proof that he actually was a rebel;

b)      She was too old and doddery to know anything about Monmouth’s rebellion; she thought he was a priest

Jeffreys was having none of it. Point a) – which would certainly have stopped the trial in its tracks today – he brushed aside as irrelevant; of course Hicks was a rebel, everyone knew he had been with Monmouth’s army, he said. For point b) the prosecution produced two witnesses, a man called Barter and a man called Dunne. Barter said he’d seen Dame Alice with Dunne about ‘the business’ by which he meant the rebellion. When Dunne refused to confirm this Jeffreys launched into a terrifying cross-examination.  Part of it went like this:

Jeffreys:  Come now and tell us, what business was that?

Dunne:  (After a long silence) Does your lordship ask what that business was?

Jeffreys: Yes. It is a plain question. What was the business that the lady asked thee, whether the other men knew?

Another long silence.

Jeffreys: He is studying and musing how he shall prevaricate ... But thou hadst better tell the truth, friend ... Now I would know what that business was.

Dunne: I cannot mind it, my lord.

Jeffreys: Oh, how hard the truth is, to come out of a lying Presbyterian rogue!

Dunne: I cannot give you an account of it, my lord.

Jeffreys: Oh blessed God! Was there ever such a villain upon the face of the Earth?

And so on, over half an hour. Very effective cross-examination, you might think, from a prosecution barrister.  But Jeffreys wasn’t the prosecution, he was the judge, whom we think of today as impartial. But that wasn’t how Judge Jeffreys saw his role, not at all. He was there to get convictions, as quickly and efficiently as possible, and that was what he did.

Alice Lyle was convicted and sentenced to be burnt alive. There was no appeal on legal grounds, as there would be today. The only appeal was to the King, for mercy. And King James was merciful, sort of.  Alice wasn’t burnt alive; she was beheaded.

Hers was just the first case in the Bloody Assizes; Jeffreys had well over a thousand more to deal with.  In Dorchester he found 300 prisoners crammed into a small jail, mostly men charged with fighting in Monmouth’s army. Clearly it would take months to try them all individually, but Jeffreys had a better idea. Dispensing with a Grand Jury, he sent his clerk into the jail to offer them mercy if they would confess (and inform on their friends) He repeated this in court:

‘If you will plead guilty, the King, who is almost all mercy, will be as ready to forgive you as you were to rebel against him, yea as ready to pardon you as you are to ask it of him.’

Does that sound familiar? It should: it is the basis of the ‘plea bargain’ which is, unfortunately, practised daily by district attorneys across the United States, and, slightly more discreetly, by the Crown Prosecution Service in England. In 1685 the main differences were:

a) it was the judge who was making a direct offer to the accused, rather than a deal being struck between prosecution and defence lawyers (but then few, if any, of the rebels had defence lawyers) and

b) the punishments the rebels were facing were much more extreme.

The choice was between being transported as indentured slaves to the West Indies, or being hanged.   A cruel punishment indeed, but Jeffreys was able to joke about it.  When Christopher Battiscombe was convicted, his mistress bravely pleaded with the judge to hand over his body, unmutilated, for her to bury after death. ‘Certainly, madam,’ Jeffreys laughed. ‘You shall have part of the body. I know what part you love best and will direct the Sherriff accordingly.’

In fact, of course, the men were not just hanged, but drawn and quartered too.  They were half hanged, then cut down and disembowelled while still alive, and chopped into four pieces. Captain John Kidd was the last of twelve men to be executed like this on the beach at Lyme Regis; he suffered the unimaginable horror of watching this happen to eleven of his friends before him. The courage of such men, many of whom met their deaths while singing a psalm, is as humbling as the cruelty of the executioners is appalling.
Jeffreys ordered all this, but he was not the only monster of cruelty around. At least he acted within the law. James Kirke, the colonel of ‘Kirke’s Lambs’ a royal regiment who wore white coats, was said to have hanged over a hundred rebels without any trial at all. When a pretty young woman begged him in floods of tears to save her father’s life, Kirke agreed on one condition: that she would spent the night in his bed, which she did. When she got up next morning and walked to the window, she saw her father, hanging from the signpost outside the inn.

Such stories, and the fact that the rebels’ arms, legs and heads of rebels were boiled, tarred, and publically displayed in towns and villages all around the West Country, had a terrifying effect. Judge Jeffreys’ Bloody Assizes didn’t make anyone love the King, but they surely made people fear him.

For the next three years, at least.  

Then, in 1688, King William of Orange sailed to England with a much larger army, and chased King James away. James fled abroad, but Jeffreys – now Lord Chancellor - was captured, thrown into prison, and died of kidney disease in the Tower of London.  In the West Country, his death was greeted with understandable delight.

********

Tim Vicary’s novel about 1685, The Monmouth Summer, which touches only briefly on the cruelties described here, was listed as one of the 10 top history books of 2012 by Samantha J. Morris ‘Lady Hertford’ in her blog ‘Loyaltybindsme’. It is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.