streets." In the reign of Henry the Eighth,
crime was so rife, that seventy-two thousand
great thieves, petty thieves, and rogues, were
hanged. This, of course, was for all England.
"What may have been the proportion for London,
does not appear; for there were no tabulated
police returns in the sixteenth century. But it
must have been large. The annalist who records
the fact, says that the king " seemed for a while
greatly to have terrified the rest [i. e. of the
rogues]; but since his death the number of
them is so increased, that, except some better
order be taken, or the law already made be
executed, such as dwell in uplandish towns
and little villages shall live but in small safety
and rest." The Marching Watch, with its costly
annual pageantry on the vigil of St. John the
Baptist, apparently did but little service; and,
on its abolition in 1569, in the reign of Elizabeth,
" a substantial standing watch" was set
on foot. We all know from Shakespeare's
immortal photograph of constabulary life, in
the persons of Dogberry, Verges, and Co.,
how utterly ineffective the London police was
in his time; for, though he has placed those
worthies in the streets of a Sicilian city, it
is evident that the portraits were drawn
from the night-guardians of our own metropolis.
The same great pen has shown with
equal vividness the class of ruffians swarming in
the thoroughfares of London, and in the lonely
outlying country roads. Ancient Pistol, Nym,
Bardolph, and the rest of that marauding crew,
are types, a little poeticised, of the bullies and
swash-bucklers of three hundred years ago. The
town at that time possessed certain privileged
spots, which, having been conventual sanctuaries
in the Roman Catholic days, were still held
sacred from the intrusion of the law, as far as
debtors were concerned, and which, as a matter
of course, became places of retreat and security
for the most abandoned of both sexes. Such
was Alsatia, occupying the ground adjacent to
the present Bouverie-street, Fleet-street  —  a nest
of chartered rascality and crime, which was not
broken up until the reign of William the Third,
and of which, as it existed under James the First,
Sir Walter Scott has given a minute and dramatic
description in the Fortunes of Nigel.
From these centres of infamy, the ruffler, the
cut-purse, and the cut-throat, would sally forth
on their errands of mischief; and, if hard pressed
in any encounter with such officers of justice as
were then to be found, would retire, whenever
it was possible, to the sanctuary, where the law
was practically incapable of following them. It
was in the precinct of Whitefriars, or Alsatia,
that in the year 1612 two paid assassins of a
Scotch nobleman, Lord Sanquhar, murdered at
his own door a teacher of fencing, who, five years
previously, had accidentally put out the patrician's
eye at a bout with foils. Sanquhar and
his agents escaped for a while, but were ultimately
taken and hanged. Lord Bacon called
this ignominious execution of the peer "the
noblest piece of justice that ever came forth in
any king's time; " and Coke says that he
reported the case in all its details " because this
example hath not its parallel." The revenging of
private quarrels in the open streets, however,
was a common occurrence. In a letter from Mr.
Gilbert Talbot to the Earl of Shrewsbury, dated
February 13,1578, and quoted in Lodge's
Illustrations, an account is given of " one Wyndam,
who shot at my Lord Rytche" while riding out;
and of Lodowyke Grevell's attack on Sir John
Conway, first with a cudgel, with which he
stunned him, and then with a sword, as he lay
senseless. The frequency of these outrages is
shown by the fact that they were regarded with
no more concern than the pistolling or bowie-
knifeing of an obnoxious gentleman at the
present day in a South Carolina hotel. The Earl of
Shrewsbury's correspondent speaks of the two
circumstances to which he alludes as " trifling
matters." To Latimer, however, who in one of
his sermons relates the murder by a London
merchant of a man who had " displeased" him,
such excesses appeared in their true light; and
he relates with horror that the worst crimes
were " winked at." The peace of the town,
indeed, was threatened in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries not only by the professedly
criminal classes, but by dissolute noblemen,
(who would quarrel over their wine, and fight
in the taverns and ordinaries, or in the public
ways), and by the young 'prentices, whose
clubs were often a terror to more peaceable
citizens. There were fifty dangers to be guarded
against then, to every one which menaces us
now; and bribery frequently interposed, to shield
the offender from the punishment which was his
due.

Matters were probably better under the strict,
stern rule of Cromwell; but the accession of
Charles the Second brought back a flood of vice
and criminality, and rendered the streets of
London even more perilous than they had
been before. Rochester, Sedley, and the other
profligate wits of the time, filled the town
with the terror of their lawless exploits, and
any man who had offended the great lords
and courtiers might reckon on the certainty
of maltreatment in passing by night from one
part of the metropolis to another. It was
thus that Rochester punished Dryden, as he
walked home from Will's Coffee-house to his
residence in Gerrard-street, Soho. Mr. Charles
Knight, in his entertaining work on London,
says that " this was a solitary case;" but he is
mistaken. A still more disgraceful outrage,
committed in the same reign, towards the close
of 1670, with the connivance of the king himself,
is mentioned in the histories, and more
particularly recorded by Andrew Marvell in letters
to his friends. Sir John Coventry, a member of
parliament, made a jest in the House of
Commons at the expense of Charles's morality. A
few nights afterwards (it was a little before
Christmas, and the night was long and probably
dark), twenty-five of the Duke of Monmouth's
troop and a few foot soldiers lay in
wait for the imprudently bold orator, from ten
P.M. to two in the morning, in Suffolk-street,