ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with an episode that promises to offer us some perspective on the quality of English policing in the decades before Peel undertook his reform of the Metropolitan police. Between 1797 and 1821, the Bank of England faced a serious and extensive criminal challenge. The story of the Bank's efforts to contain an extensive outbreak of forgery in the early nineteenth century has a good deal to tell us about how policing worked in this period, and, perhaps, something about its effectiveness. The forgers and dealers put together sophisticated schemes that might have been expected to tax the ability of the Bank to cope with them. The conflict produced severe financial stress in the nation almost from the first. By 1796, the Bank found its reserves of specie falling to dangerous levels. The Bank soon began to find a small but slowly increasing stream of forged notes being turned in to its cashiers.