¹ For two surveys of the records in existence, see Jones, D. J. V. and Bainbridge, A., Crime in Nineteenth-Century Wales (Social Science Research Council Report, Swansea, 1975)Google Scholarand Brett, D. T., The Police of England and Wales: a Bibliography, 1829–1979 (3rd edn., Bramshill, 1979)Google Scholar. I should like to thank Mr Brett for his assistance in obtaining some of the publications used in this lecture.

² See, for instance, the complaints of Forster, Sobell and Henley. Hansard, cxl, 1856, cols. 2145–2152 and 2165–2172.

³ For comments of criminologists and sociologists on the difficulties of such records, see, for instance, Ditton, J., Contrology: Beyond the New Criminology (1979)Google Scholar, and Walker, N., Crime, Courts and Figures: An Introduction to Criminal Statistics (Harmondsworth, 1971)Google Scholar.

⁴ The reports are in the Manchester Central Library, Local History Section, 352.2.M.1, 1843–92.

⁵ Probably the best historical work to date in this area is Miller, W. R., Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London 1830–1870 (Chicago, 1973)Google Scholar. Sociologists have been more interested in the subject. See, for example, Banton, M., The Policeman in the Community (Tavistock, 1964)Google Scholar.

⁶ There are of course many books by Reith, , but the classic interpretation can be found in British Police and the Democratic Ideal (Oxford, 1943)Google Scholar. His ideas have influenced many subsequent writers. Compare Ascoli, D., The Queen's Peace (1979)Google Scholar.

⁷ The two important articles by Storch, R. D. are, ‘The Plague of Blue Locusts. Police Reform and Popular Resistance in Northern England, 1840–57’, International Review of Social History, xx (1975)Google Scholar, and ‘The Policeman as Domestic Missionary: Urban Discipline and Popular Culture in Northern England, 1850–80’, Journal of Social History, ix (1976)Google Scholar.

⁸ Some of the vast amount of primary material in this area has been collected in Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Bailey, V. (1981)Google Scholar, McConville, S., A History of English Prison Administration 1750–1877, i (1981)Google Scholar, and Jones, D. J. V., Crime, Protest, Community and Police in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1982)Google Scholar.

⁹ Jerrard, B. C., ‘The Gloucestershire Police in the Nineteenth Century’, M. Litt. thesis, Bristol University, 1977Google Scholar, chaps. 1 and 2.

¹⁰ The standard work on these early developments is Critchley, T. A., A History of Police in England and Wales, 900–1966 (1967)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Parliamentary Papers (henceforth PP.), 1852, xxx, i. Number of Police, England and Wales, 1835–52, and Hart, J. M., The British Police (1951), 34Google Scholar.

¹² As exemplified by Mr Henley, M.P. See Hansard, cxl, 1856, col. 2171.

¹³ Pilling, C., ‘The Police in the English Local Community, 1856–80’, M.Litt. thesis, Cambridge University, 1973Google Scholar, and Parris, H., ‘The Home Office and the Provincial Police in England and Wales, 1856–1870Google Scholar, Public Law, autumn 1961, chap. 3.

¹⁴ Jones, J. O., ‘The History of the Caernarvonshire Police Force, 1856–1900’, M.A. thesis, University of Wales, 1956Google Scholar, chap. 5.

¹⁵ Mayhew, H., The Criminal Prisons of London (1861), 341Google Scholar, cited in Ignatieff, M., A Just Measure of Pain. The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (1978), 186Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Engels, F., The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844, ed. Henderson, W. O. and Chalenor, W. H. (Oxford, 1958), 149Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Taylor, W. C., ‘The Moral Economy of Large Towns’, Bentley's Miscellany, vi (1839), 481Google Scholar. Compare P.P 1818, VIII, Third Report on the State of the Police of the Metropolis, 32, and P.P., 1828, VI, Report on the Police of the Metropolis, 9.

¹⁸ On this, see for instance, Hansard, xlix, 1839, cols. 731–2, L, 1839, cols. 116–17, P.P., 1852–3, XXXVI, Second Report on the Police, 81–8, and Radzinowicz, L., A History of English Criminal Law, iv (1968) 67–78Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Fletcher, J., Summary of the Moral Statistics of England and Wales (n.p., 1847–1849), 84–5Google Scholar. In their efforts to reduce society's tolerance of crime and riot, Fletcher, Chadwick and others could be bitterly over-critical of older methods of policing.

²⁰ The best source for Chadwick's views of capitalism under threat is P.P., 1839, XIX, Report of the Royal Commission on the Constabulary Force.

²¹ For a regional study, see Philips, D., Crime and Authority in Victorian England (1977), 287Google Scholar.

²² Bradford, Shropshire and Merioneth were examples of this. The threat of vagrancy and ‘vagrancy crime’ has been neglected in the story of the police. But see Burn, W. L., The Age of Equipoise (1964), 168–9Google Scholar, and D. J. V.Jones, Crime, Protest, chap. 7.

²³ For interesting studies of Bradford and Oldham policing, see Smith, G., Bradford's Police (Bradford, n.d.)Google Scholar, and Taylor, D., 999 and all that (Oldham, 1968)Google Scholar.

²⁴ See for instance, P.P., 1839, XIX, Report of the Royal Commission on the Constabulary Force, 54–5, 82 and 169–170.

²⁵ A new study of the County Act is Foster, D., The Rural Constabulary Act 1839 (1982)Google Scholar.

²⁶ P. Muskett, ‘Agrarian Protest in East Anglia in 1822’, Agricultural History Review, forthcoming; Dunbabin, J. P. D., Rural Discontent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1974) 51–7Google Scholar; Jones, D. J. V., ‘Thomas Campbell Foster and the Rural Labourer’, Social History, I, i (1976), 18–19Google Scholar; and P.P., 1852–3, XXXVI, First Report on the Police, 107, and Second Report, 14–15. The prevalence of this rural crime did not always lead to such police reforms, and some leaders of country society came out against them. Ibid., 26–7, and 58–9.

²⁷ A new and useful addition to the secondary sources on government policy is Spiers, E. M., The Army and Society 1815–1914 (1980)Google Scholar, chap. 3. The classic work on government and the police is still Radzinowicz, History.

²⁸ Hart, J. M., ‘Reform of the Borough Police, 1835–56’, Eng. Hist. Rev., lxx (1955), 427Google Scholar; Mather, F. C., Public Order in the Age of the Chartists (Manchester, 1959)Google Scholar, chap. 4; and Dutton, H. I. and King, J. E., Ten Per Cent and No Surrender; the Preston Strike 1853–4 (Cambridge, 1981), 161Google Scholar.

²⁹ Goodway, D., London Chartism, 1838–48 (Cambridge, 1982), 12Google Scholar.

³⁰ Some of this story is told in Richter, D. C., Riotous Victorians (1981)Google Scholar.

³¹ Ibid., 167.

³² See the graphs of police arrests in Jones, D. J. V., Crime, Protest, 129, 163, 167Google Scholar.

³³ The police were, of coure, only one of a number of influences here. See Malcolmson, R. W., Popular Recreations in English Society 1700–1850 (Cambridge, 1973)Google Scholar, Cunningham, H., Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, 1780–1880 (1980)Google Scholarand Howkins, A., Whitsun in Nineteenth-Century Oxfordshire, History Workshop Pamphlet, No. 8, 1972Google Scholar.

³⁴ Jones, D. J. V. and Bainbridge, A., Crime in Wales, section V. ‘At best the police can only make clean the outside of the platter’, admitted the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1870: P.P., 1870, xxxvi, 468Google Scholar.

³⁵ The debate is set out in Gatrell, V. A. C., ‘The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England’ in Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500, ed. Gatrell, V. A. C., Lenman, B. and Parker, G. (1980)Google Scholar.

³⁶ This is confirmed by a reading of the police records and analysis of the criminal statistics. See ibid., Jones, D. J. V., Crime, Protest, and Fletcher, , op. cit., 82Google Scholar.

³⁷ See, for example, Manchester Central Library, Local History Section, 352.2. M1, reports of 1846–8, and 1863. For the rural story in which the 1860s seem to have been a turning-point, see Jones, D. J. V., ‘Rural Crime and Protest’, in The Victorian Country-side, ed. Mingay, G. E. (1981)Google Scholar.

³⁸ Junius Junior (Johnson, ), Life in the Lower Parts of Manchester (Heywood, n.d.) 8Google Scholar.

³⁹ For this, and for much of the background to these paragraphs, see Gatrell, op. cit., and D. J. V.Jones, Crime, Protest.

⁴⁰ P.P., 1874, XXVIII, Report of the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, Appendix 3.

⁴¹ Storch, R. D., in Jnl. Soc. Hist., ix (1976), 494Google Scholar.

⁴² Cited in D. Foster, op. cit., 21. Some districts, including those in Lancashire and Gloucestershire, did seek to abolish or reduce the forces set up under the Act of 1839.

⁴³ Sopenoff, R. O., ‘The Police of London: the Early History of the Metropolitan Police, 1829–56’, Ph.D. thesis, Temple University, 1978Google Scholar, chaps. 4, 5, and the comments of Sobell, Roebuck and Walmsley in Hansard, cxl, 1856, col. 2152, and cxlii, 1856, cols. 305 and 611. Sobell and Muntz accepted the ‘inevitable’, but wanted central government to pay half the cost of police pay and clothing. Ibid., cols. 305 and 306.

⁴⁴ The lack of direction of consistent interest in police policy on the part of Home Secretaries for a generation after the Police Act of 1856 is perhaps exaggerated some-what in Parris, op. cit., 235. Pellow, J., The Home Office 1848–1914 (1982), 39Google Scholar and 136, claims that decisions were taken at the level of inspectors and heads of department.

⁴⁵ From the start reformers believed that these people were a vital element in the success or failure of police reforms. P.P., 1839, XIX, 40–1, 104 and 154–5, P.P., 1852–3, XXXVI, first report, 25–7 and 64–7, and Hansard, cxl, 1856, cols. 2176–9.

⁴⁶ On the thefts from houses with the poorest rentals, see, for example, the Manchester Central Library, Local History Section, 352.2 MI, report of 1849.

⁴⁷ Sopenoff, op. cit., chap. 5, and The Early Chartists, ed. Thompson, D. (1971), 73–81Google Scholar. See the interesting and varied response of the Chartists to professional policing in Northern Star, 23 Mar. 1839.

⁴⁸ Claims in D. Philips, op. cit., 124, and V. Bailey, op. cit., 71–2. Compare this, however, with Weinberger, B., ‘Crime and Police in the late nineteenth century’, M.A. thesis, Warwick University, 1976, 55–8Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ See, for example, Nottingham Journal, July-Oct. 1862; P.P., 1872, X, report on the Game Laws, evidence of Arch; and P.P., 1873, XIII, report on the Game Laws, evidence of Walpole and Haward.

⁵⁰ Miller is illuminating here. See, for instance, op. cit., 62–3, and 123.

⁵¹ Foster, J., Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (1974), 56–61Google Scholar, and V. Bailey, op. cit., 105 and 113–14.

⁵² These riots were often more complex than they first appear. There were not many of them. For evidence on some, perhaps grudging, acceptance of the police by groups of people in the poorer districts, see D. Taylor, op. cit., 122–3, D. Goodway, op. cit., 102, and Miller, op. cit., 108–9.

⁵³ The most recent studies of attacks on the police are by Storch, R. D., in Inter. Rev. Soc. Hist, xx (1975)Google Scholar, and in V. Bailey, op. cit., 66–76. At least 12–13,000 policemen were attacked every year, though the regional patterns do show interesting variations. The story of the battles between the police and the Irish has yet to be told.

⁵⁴ There were 15,860 provincial police in 1871 and 10,350 in London. By 1901 the comparative figures were 27,360 and 16,900. Hart, J. M., The British Police (1951), 34Google Scholar. Gatrell, op. cit., 275, gives somewhat different figures.

⁵⁵ Useful studies on the developing ethos and values of the police are Pilling, op. cit., chaps. 4, 5, and Birch, K., ‘The Merioneth Police 1856–1950’, M.A. thesis, University of Wales, 1980Google Scholar, chaps. 3 and 4.