Constables
(Student Project)
Constables were a form of law enforcement devised to replace an earlier
system of two "shire-reeves," or sheriffs in each shire, for it had become
largely corrupt. The word "constable" comes into English from French, where
it derived from the late Latin comes stabuli meaning "count or officer of
the stable" (OED).
Constables were ideally supposed to come from the yeoman class, but because
these men were tradesmen and small landowners, they usually refused to
serve. The end result was that constables were generally chosen from the
fourth and lowest class of people. Poor and usually uneducated, they
constitute a real historical basis for the comic bumbling of Shakespeare’s
three famous constables: Dull in
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Dogberry in Much Ado About
Nothing, and Elbow in
Measure for Measure.
In London, constables were chosen to serve the wards and parishes they lived
in, since there was no citywide police system. In Thomas Harman’s A Caveat or
Warning for Common Cursetors Vulgarly Called Vagabonds, the
author asks a constable about the process used to select them, to which he
replied: "‘Mary, syr,’ sayd he, ‘I am Constable for fault of a better, and
was commaunded by the Iusticer to watch’" (qtd. in Evans 428). Many men chosen for the job refused it,
however, as suggested in Measure for Measure:
Escalus Come hither to me, Master Elbow; come hither, Master Constable. How long have you been in this place of constable?Elbow Seven year and a half, sir.Escalus I thought, by the readiness in the office, you had continued in it some time. You say, seven years together?Elbow And a half, sir.Escalus Alas, it hath been great pains to you. They do you wrong to put you so oft upon’t. Are there not men in your ward sufficient to serve it?Elbow Faith, sir, few of any wit in such matters. As they are chosen, they are glad to choose me for them. I do it for some piece of money and go through with all.(2.1.255–69)
Escalus’ surprise at the length of
Elbow’s employment as a constable
shows that a person was appointed as constable for only a short amount of
time before someone else would be selected.
Since no one wanted the job, those who accepted it were often inadequate for
the watch. In Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1605), a constable and the rest of the watch are on the lookout for
a notorious criminal, Black Will. He
makes a point of showing to Henry
VIII the ineptitude of the watch by passing through the gates into
the city, while declaring that his name is Black Will. A moment later, when he passes out through the gates
again, the watch have already forgotten him, and he tells them again that he
is Black Will.
Another example of the real-life inadequacy of Elizabethan law enforcement is
a letter dated 10 August 1586, from Lord
Burghley to Sir Francis
Walsingham. Burghley was
travelling through the countryside from London, just two months prior to the
trial of Mary Queen of Scots, a time
when national security was tightened to protect Queen Elizabeth from Catholic attempts on her life.
Burghley described seeing
"plumps" (qtd. in Evans) of ten to
twelve men huddled together in towns he passed through, but he assumed they
were doing so because it was raining. When he came to a town and saw another
of these groups when it wasn’t raining, he recognized that they must be
members of the watch and asked them what they were doing. The men replied
that they were looking for three young men. When Burghley inquired how they would know these men, they
answered that one of the men had a hooked nose. Burghley was surprised to hear that they had no other
means of identifying the wanted men. He asked to see the head constable, a
man named Bankes, and told him the constables were not performing their
duty. No criminal would approach them if they were standing about in groups,
nor would they be likely to recognize the criminal from the vague
description they had been given (Evans
429).
After the Restoration of Charles II, the parish
constables were replaced by "Charlies" -- an organized force of 1,000
watchmen who were on duty through the night (Critchley 30).
References
- Critchley, T.A. A History of Police in England and Wales 900–1966. London: Constable, 1967. Print.
-
Evans, Hugh C.
Comic Constables—Fictional and Historical.
Shakespeare Quarterly 20 (1969): 427–33. Print. - Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Web. Subscr. OED.
- Rowley, Samuel. When You See Me, You Know Me. London, 1605. STC 21417. Rpt. Edinburgh; London: Tudor Facsimile Texts, 1912. Rpt. New York: AMS Press 1970. Print.
This project is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
