The steward of a seventeenth-century estate was a man perpetually on guard. He occupied the role of ‘constable’, not in the sense of a village constable but in the mediaeval sense of a man set in authority to hold a castle, a fiefdom or a baronial estate on behalf of his lord against all enemies. The era of the later Stuarts was mercifully more peaceful than the age of Simon de Montfort but there was still a constabulary role for the steward to play. The bulk of crime in the English provinces in the seventeenth century consisted of crimes against property, and as the largest and most conspicuous possessors of property the landlords were obvious, and indeed vulnerable, targets.