London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800

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This search box allows you to locate tagged data relating to locations (building names, street names, parishes, and other geographical locations) where these have been associated with an individual name. It searches on the text within tags, and as a result you will need to account for variations in spelling. You can use Wild Card (*) functionality with this facility (the asterisk stands for zero or more letters and can only be used at the end of a word). Related To ID: Subject Person ID of the individual to whom the person in this entry was related. Searching for this number within this dataset will allow you to find the person who was baptised, married or buried, to whom the person in this entry is related.

In 1792, the Middlesex Justices Act created offices on the model of Bow Street across the metropolis. In response to the apparently ever growing threat of crime, the principle of using salaried officers both to prevent crime and to detect criminals had become firmly established in London, decades before the creation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829. One of the externally created datasets included provides evidence of the professional careers and incomes of those following one middle class occupation, clerks. The database of salaries paid to East India Clerks between 1760 and 1820 includes evidence not only of their salaries, but also the length of time clerks had worked for the company, their specific occupation, the department they worked for, and the gratuities they received. Marriage Authorisation: Indicates whether a marriage was authorised by the calling of banns, or by licence, or both, where this information is given in a register.St Botolph Aldgate, Pauper Examination Book, 1777-79, London Metropolitan Archives, Ms. 2676/12, LL ref: GLBAEP10318, Tagging Level: A St Clement Danes, Examinations Book, 1795-1798, Westminster Archives Centre, Ms. B1192, LL ref: WCCDEP35826, Tagging Level: B Watch rate, St Anne King Square ward (1780), City of Westminster Archives Centre, A/1549; Watch rate, St Anne Leicester Fields ward (1780), City of Westminster Archives Centre, A/1550; Poor, highway and scavenger rate, St Margaret Grand ward (1780), City of Westminster Archives Centre, E/492; Poor, highway and scavenger rate, St Margaret Absey ward (1780), City of Westminster Archives Centre, E/493; Poor, highway and scavenger rate, St John (1780), City of Westminster Archives Centre, E/494.

This project extracted data about examinants and their families from the Settlement, bastardy and vagrancy examinations of two London parishes in London Lives (the term “pauper examinations” is used for general reference)St Clement Danes, Examinations Book, 1766-1769, Westminster Archives Centre, Ms. B1181, LL ref: WCCDEP35821, Tagging Level: B The second strand on “Voices” is developing from research for the Digital Panopticon research theme, Voices of Authority. I’m exploring the changing significance of defendants’ own words in court following the ‘coming of the lawyers’, from about 1750-1900. Work in Progress Corfield, P. J., Harvey, C. and Green, E. M. Westminster Man: Charles James Fox and his Electorate, 1780-1806. Parliamentary History, 20 (2001), pp. 157-85. St Clement Danes, Examinations Book, 1776-1779, Westminster Archives Centre, Ms. B1184, LL ref: WCCDEP35808, Tagging Level: A The index to the Prerogative Court of Canterbury Wills from 1680-1819. Each entry also includes place of residence.

Related Person ID: Unique identifier if the individual in this entry is identified as being related to a person who was recorded as born, married or died. to the workhouse of St Botolph Aldgate because she was unable to support herself, and was given the task of supervising boys who were winding silk. Unfortunately, she beat one so severely that he died, and she was convicted of murder. With several different types of police patrolling the streets or seeking out deviants, eighteenth-century London was hardly the weakly policed city some contemporaries complained of. But levels of policing varied significantly across the metropolis. With its Marshal and his officers, ward beadles, and Patrole, the City of London was subject to much greater levels of surveillance than the surrounding suburbs, though the affluent Westminster parishes which taxed themselves to provide a more regular watch were also relatively intensively policed. Even within the City, the ratio of constables to houses varied enormously from ward to ward, from only 28 houses per constable in the central ward of Bread Street, compared to 267 houses per constable at the other extreme in the extra-mural parish of Farrington Without. 11 Malvin Zirker, Fielding's Social Pamphlets (Berkeley, California, 1966). For the rebuilding of London's prisons, see Christopher Chalklin, The Reconstruction of London's Prisons, 1770-1799: An Aspect of the Growth of Georgian London, London Journal, 9 (1983), pp. 21-34. ⇑

Date

O’Gorman, Frank. Voters, Patrons and Parties: the Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England, 1734-1832. Oxford, 1989. Nicholas Rogers, Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century London: The Vagrancy Laws and Their Administration, Histoire Sociale / Social History, 24 (1991), pp. 127-47. ⇑ The poll book data represent a complete transcription of extant Westminster Poll Books for the years between 1749 and 1820, omitting date of polling and swearing of oaths, indications 'senior' and 'junior', and house numbers. Bastardy Examinations formed an important variant on the settlement examination. These were taken before two Justices and enquired into the circumstances under which a woman about to give birth to a bastard child had fallen pregnant. Legally a woman who knew herself to be likely to bear a bastard child was obliged to present herself for examination, but in practice this only occasionally happened, and many examinations occurred after the birth.