From Vigilance to Vigliante: The Rise and Fall of the Action Against the Hundred and the Reshaping of the Community's Role in Policing

Abstract

This paper discusses the changing role of the community in policing in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by looking at the rise and fall of the action against the hundred. The action was a means of encouraging communities to pursue offenders by making them liable to compensate victims if no arrest were made. Originating in the thirteenth century, a growth of parliamentary interest in crime during the eighteenth century led to the revival of interest in the action as a means of encouraging communal pursuit. But the cost and complexity involved meant victims were more likely to do nothing or to offer a reward for the return of stolen property. Moreover, the action was based on assumptions about the stable nature of communities that no longer held true in a period of rapid social and economic changes. As a result, other approaches to crime were developed which tended to displace the community from its role at the centre of active policing.