In the early eighteenth-century London, the night watchman was indeed an old controversial figure (established for the first time in the 1285 Statute of Winchester), deeply-rooted in the belief that the individual citizen had to perform his social and moral duty for the well-being of the society [REF].
Regardless, Moreton is sceptical about the honesty of watchmen, and he doubts about their suspicious close relation with the criminal underworld in different contemporary pamphlets [REF].