Paul Griffths's study of growth, vagrancy, poverty, and crime in early modern London is a tour de force that has become one of the most talked about books in its subfield. Indeed, it was the subject of an entire session at the North American Conference on British Studies in the year of its publication. Griffiths is interested not only in how these social issues were dealt with by London authorities but also in how growth, vagrancy, and crime were perceived and constructed as problems by the city's social elite. Rhetoric about social control is as important in his analysis as the actual methods of control. The problems Griffiths studies will be familiar to students of many rapidly growing cities, both in the West and elsewhere, some of whose legions of newcomers have found remedies for their marginality in crime, drink and drugs, or sex. London stood out in the early modern European world, however, for the rapidity of its growth after 1550, for its eventual size, and for its governors’ multiple efforts to deal with problems they thought were leading to a breakdown of the city's order and reputation.

Central both to social control in early modern London and to Griffiths's study is the hospital-cum-prison-cum-workhouse known as Bridewell. Once a principal residence of Henry VIII, Bridewell became so intimately associated with the control of vagrancy and crime as to lend its name to other similar institutions. Nobody has ever spent more time with its surviving records than Griffith. Griffiths's conclusions rest upon samples of 40,000 committals and 40,000 crimes; he has also drawn upon the records of London's other hospitals, which focused upon the care of orphans, the sick, and the mentally disturbed. The extent of Griffiths's research and his command of historical contexts and literature are all impressive. Important findings are scattered over 440 pages of text and thirty pages of statistical appendices.

What are Griffiths's most important findings? Concerns about rising illegitimacy and the abandonment of children in the first decades of the seventeenth century correlate with a surge in the influx of vagrants, an increasing proportion of them women. So does a decline in the prosecution of sexual misbehavior, even as authorities became more focused upon crimes committed by women. Vagrancy and the crimes of theft, night-walking, idleness, and begging—crimes that the social elite associated with vagrancy—were increasingly seen as overwhelming the good order of the city. The most unruly areas included the westernmost wards of Farringdon Without and Farringdon Within, with their teeming alleys of jerry-built tenements, red-light districts, out-of-doors markets and fairs, and convenient (for thieves and beggars) proximity to fashionable neighborhoods further to the west. The authority of the Bridewell court to punish vagrancy and crime, which rested upon a royal grant rather than upon statute, survived the destruction of prerogative courts in the 1640s because its board was so carefully drawn from the city's governing elite and because of the critical functions it fulfilled. Surveillance of the city was provided by some 800 officials and citizens (marshals, deputy aldermen, constables, beadles, warders, and bellmen), most of them chosen by their fellow householders to serve a turn. Such amateur surveillance was relatively effective, despite varieties of misconduct also known to modern professional policing. As the city's growth accelerated in the early seventeenth century, authorities sought to reorder these policing forces in new and more responsive patterns.

As Griffiths works toward these and other findings, he also addresses numerous historiographic conversations. He critiques, for instance, the employment of the stability/instability dichotomy to examine urban social structures in the midst of change, thereby challenging the important arguments and approaches of Ian Archer (The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London [Cambridge, 1991]); Steve Rappaport (Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London [Cambridge, 1989]), and others. With careful qualifications, he accepts the reliability of the rogue literature of the era and employs it to supplement his quantitative and anecdotal evidence. He examines the relative importance of public and private initiatives in the prosecution of early modern crime, thereby challenging arguments and assumptions of John Beattie (Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 [Princeton, NJ, 1986], and Policy and Punishment in London 1660–1750 [Oxford, 2001]). Griffiths also contributes to understanding the role of record keeping in the early modern state.

Unfortunately, these conclusions and historiographic discussions must be extracted by the reader from a text that is badly overwritten and poorly organized. A book of this importance deserves a wide audience, but few outside the professional subfield of early modern English social history will have the patience to wade through it. As a method of analysis, thick description in Griffiths's hands becomes as unruly as the city he examines. Anecdotes and examples swarm from paragraph to paragraph, giving voice to the voiceless, to be sure, but also leading the reader in pursuit of argument down many a meandering lane and byway. Clever chapter titles and section headings sometimes fail to reveal the course of the discussion: a chapter section about “dangerous growth” (47–66), for instance, wanders from the helter-skelter growth of the city toward “big bellied” women (suffering dangerous growth?), illegitimacy, and child abandonment. Lively verbs impart their action to the narrative but also smack of journalistic overstatement: urban thoroughfares “stream” together in the heart of London (89), letters “race” between the city and the crown in troubled times (104), and tributes “ooze” to long-serving parish officers ( 297). Authority figures are repeatedly turned into “big-wigs” and “top brass.” Such colorful writing can easily lead to exaggeration. Do we really know, for instance, that “panic” broke out in Common Council (a body with a potential attendance of over 250 persons) on the news, in 1603, that certain “outrages” had been committed by unknown persons (179)? Did the same body of people become “nervy” about inadequacies in the watch in 1609 (354)? Did the aldermen, in fact, “scamper” to their wards in 1637 to search for hidden Catholics (403)? Sadly, the important history that Griffiths offers is too frequently marred by such unnecessary “imaginative” characterizations and constructions.