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HISTORICAL REVIEW Downloaded From THE ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW Downloaded from NO. XL.—OCTOBER 1895 The Office of Constable http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ mHE officer who in later times has been generally known as -L petty constable or parish constable may be viewed in two lights. In the first place he may be regarded as the officer of a manor or a township, locally appointed for a special purpose, as the hay-ward, the ale-taster, or the beadle might be. In this capacity no special importance is attached to him by the investigators of early at University of Strathclyde on March 26, 2015 English village communities. Neither in Mr. Seebohm's ' English Village Commnnity' nor in Professor VinogradofFs ' Villainage in England' is the constable so much as mentioned, and in other writings of the same class few references to the office occur. In the ' Eecords of the Norwich Leets,' published by the Selden Society (p. 18), one Simon de Melton is said to have been amerced in 1287 for having refused to take oath of office as sub-conetaindariut, after having been chosen per omnes jttratores; and at p. 1 of the same volume a constabrdariut is also mentioned, and a certain offender described as having been arrested and imprisoned at his suit. But here and elsewhere the references to the constable in connexion with early village history are quite incidental, and throw but little light on his status as an officer of law. In legal writings, on the other hand, the duties and privileges of the office have been considered worthy of much discussion and a considerable display of learning. In books like those of Serjeant Hawkins or Sir Matthew H^to on the history of the Fleas of the Crown the con- stable as an executive officer takes a very prominent place next to the sheriff and the justices of the peace. Blackstone, again, looks at him from a somewhat different point of view. High constables, he says (L 856), were first appointed by the Statute of Win- chester (18 Ed. I, stat. 2), and at some unknown period in the reign of Edward HI petty constables were appointed to assist them. 40 VoLlO 626 THE OFFICE OF CONSTABLE Oct. In the office of parish constable are united, he continues, the ancient office of head-borough, or tithing man, and the office of constable, created by royal authority. This account is historically inaccurate, as we shall see that the office of constable, as it was known to the law in Blackstone's time, was not created either by the Statute of Winchester or by any other ordinance of parlia- ment ; and there is good reason to think that Blackstone's parish constable did not merely combine in his person two separate offices, bat rather represented an office of remote antiquity, on which had been impressed in comparatively modern times a character Downloaded from that it could only have gained at a period when local custom was being superseded by the law of parliament and the royal courts. In other words, it is a reasonable hypothesis that parliament has merely recognised a pre-existing institution, and employed it for its own purposes. It is probable that a complete history of the parish http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ constable would be a history of the gradual decay of local self- government in the rural districts. For such a history it is unlikely that any sufficient materials exist; at all events it could not be attempted without an intimate acquaintance with the manorial court rolls and other local records, of which a very large number still await examination and publication. At least those that have been published throw, as I have said, but little light on the functions and position of the constable. If, however, we turn to such readily at University of Strathclyde on March 26, 2015 accessible sources of information as the ' Statutes at Large/ we find indications of a very different view of the office from that pre- sented by legal authors or that which would naturally be derived from the writings of those who have made the early organisation of our villages their special study. It must be remembered that the early acts of parliament embody the ideas of crown lawyers and officers of a semi-foreign court, who were not likely to be very fan"'!'*'"- with the workings of our native local institutions, except in so far as they might come in contact with the central authority or form part of a system common in great measure to all Europe. If such a proposition regarding the authors of the English statute book of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is not one that meets with universal assent, I think an examination of the history of the title of constable will furnish some good evidence that it is at any rate founded on strong probability. In the first place it may be noted that the term is one of very wide application. The comes stabuli was originally a high official of the Frankish court. This dignity survived for long in France. There is to this day an hereditary constable of Scotland, though the office has ceased to exist in England except for special occa- sions such as coronations, and there have been constables of other European countries. Then the title was applied to military commanders of a lower rank. A French author of the thirteenth 1895 THE OFFICE OF CONSTABLE 627 century, quoted by Littre, speaks of constables of thousands and constables of hundreds. Instances occur in English from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century of the use of the word to denote any chief officer of an army or of a household, or even a merely subordinate military officer.1 But the most characteristic use of the word in England cannot be paralleled in any foreign country. By us it has been comparatively seldom used, as it was used abroad, in the sense of a military commander, a governor of men, the head of an organised force, such as an army in the field; it has, on the contrary, been almost universally used to denote an Downloaded from officer of a peculiarly local character; it connotes, in fact, a local rather than a personal jurisdiction, and it is associated with what is, perhaps, the oldest area of local self-government in England. The intimate connexion between the parish and the constable is apt now to be overlooked, but in the last century it was of very great http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ importance and formed the basis of numerous judicial decisions. Thus in the case of the village of Chorley (1 Salt 175) it was laid down by Holt C.J. that a village and a constable are correlatives, while a hamlet has no constable; and that, further, if a warrant be directed to a constable by name, he may execute it beyond bis precinct, but cannot be compelled to do so; while if it be directed to all constables generally, no constable can execute the same out of his constablewick. Again, in a case between the parishes of at University of Strathclyde on March 26, 2015 Denham and Dalham in 8 Geo. II it was held by the court of King's Bench that a place cannot be a township unless it consists de pluribus manaionibus and has a petty constable (2 Str. 1004). In fact, the existence of a constable came to be regarded in the many disputes under the poor law, which the court of King's Bench had to decide, as the most characteristic mark of the independent township. See, for example, the case of B. v. Sir Watts Horton (1 D. & E. 876), in which Buller J. stated in very positive terms that there is a township wherever there is a constable—there may be a constable for a larger district than a township, but not for a smaller. B. v. Inhabitants of Leigh (3 D. & E. 746), and B. r. Newell (4 D. 4 E. 270) famish farther authority on this point. Another very striking feature of the constable's office will be found to suggest some interesting conclusions. In an act of 1827 (7 & 8 Geo. IV, cap. 38) it is recited that in some parts of England petty constables have ' from* a very remote period' been required to appear at a petty session of the peace held before every quarter sessions and assizes, and there on oath make presentments of various matters connected with their respective parishes. These were of an extremely miscellaneous character. Such matters as the existence in a parish of ' Popish Recusants, Persons absenting themselves Numerous {*"rt""*fn of the ose of the word as signifying merely » captain or under tie grren in Uadoz, Hij/. Exeh. i. 89, 40. 628 THE OFFICE OF CONSTABLE Oct. from their Parish Church or any other Place of Beligious Worship,' forestallers and regraters, profane swearers and cursers, and servants out of place, may no doabt have been presented in pursuance of direct statutory enactment, and cannot in any cose have been matters of presentment before the institution of a parliament at all. But there were other subjects on which the constables had been accus- tomed to make presentments, such as the condition of the highways in the parish, the commission of felonies and the arrest of the felons, which savour of a much higher antiquity, and at least suggest that the practice of making these presentments was a survival from a Downloaded from very early period. The practice was nearly or altogether abolished by the above-cited act, but a parliamentary return of 1827 (H.
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