This chapter investigates the impact of state formation, through the rise of the quarter sessions and the new responsibilities this gave village constables, on manorial governance structures. A county-wide case study of manors and quarter sessions’ records in Norfolk for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveals that constables were fulfilling important roles for JPs in serving warrants, enforcing labour legislation and policing vagrancy. However, constables continued to be chosen in manorial courts and to be subject to the oversight of, and directed by, officials of courts leet. Examining the identities of constables at the case-study manors further shows that these individuals continued to serve in manorial office into the early modern period. Moreover, manorial courts since the fourteenth century ensured that constables fulfilled the requirements owed by vills to the crown, meaning that new obligations of constables to the state were underpinned by manorial structures. Therefore, the incorporation of constables into new county-wide structures of law and order was made possible through the local authority given to them via the manor court.

This chapter traces the emergence of a new kind of official masculinity which was not rooted in the household. In the mid-seventeenth century, some lawyers attempted unsuccessfully to exclude women from officeholding entirely by arguing that gender trumped householder status as a qualification for office. Also in the mid-seventeenth century, the new system of indirect excise taxation produced a new kind of officer: young, unmarried, and always male. Excisemen were derided for lacking the independence of traditional householder officers and their wives (if they did marry) were prohibited from taking part in official business. This complete separation of office and household began to be mirrored by London constables and watchmen in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Householders chosen to hold these offices increasingly hired deputies to serve for them, and deputies tended to be poorer than their principals. Many were either younger or older than middle-age and often unmarried. In the course of working and socialising together year after year, these deputies developed a culture of fraternal masculinity based on solidarity, drinking, misogyny, and violence.

In the decades prior to the First World War, the relationship between policing, adjudication, and punishment was continually being redefined not only for those who were its targets, but for its wielders as well. Police authority in the courtroom, though strengthened by expertise and training, was hardly uncontested. Magistrates and police constables were under constant public supervision, and the former were keen to avoid the widespread hostility expressed towards the latter in working-class communities. Regardless of the increasing intrusion of policing into everyday life, it lay in a magistrate’s hands to decide if any given defendant deserved leniency or severity and which laws merited rigorous enforcement. Magistrates and journalists challenged the reputation of constables, while defendants opted for summary jurisdiction of indictable offenses or guilty pleas to mediate the consequences of arrest and prosecution. Through these and other practices, local courtrooms proved crucial in reshaping the legal and social consequences of police prosecutions in this period. The concluding portion of this chapter briefly analyses the social composition of the London magistracy and how they grounded their claims to moral authority in the courtroom.