Riot Prevention and Control in Early Stuart London

Abstract

The notion that London conforms to an urban crisis model in the seventeenth century has recently been challenged in a bold reassessment of how the City adapted to change and coped with its problems at a grass-roots level. Too much stress, it is argued, has been placed upon disorder in the capital, wrongly depicted as constantly prone to rioting and criminality, to the neglect of its ordered and stable features which enabled London to weather a period of unprecedented political upheaval without a popular uprising. Yet has disorder in seventeenth-century London received too much emphasis, and just how effective were the endeavours of municipal and other authorities to maintain peace on the streets? This paper will attempt to gauge the seriousness of the problem posed by periodic rioting in the capital, and the efficacy of measures of riot prevention and control, in the period from James I's accession to Charles I's departure from London, allegedly driven out by uncontrollable tumult and sedition, in January 1642. No answer to these questions would be complete, however, if the investigation were simply confined to the area under the lord mayor's jurisdiction, for disturbances which began in the suburbs could soon cross over the City's limits or the citizens themselves could participate in disorders outside those limits.