found plenty of other concerns. ⁵ What their daily activities amounted
to was the reconstruction of public order in its widest sense. Charles
Rowan and Richard Mayne, the founding Commissioners of the London
Metropolitan Police, became unusually direct 'primary definers' -- to use
the term applied, sometimes rather indefinitely, by Stuart Hall -- of order. ⁶

This unplanned agenda had unanticipated results. The old tolerances
within which the people had periodically stepped into the public arena of
politics were tightened up. Public space became more constricted. F. M. L.
Thompson has reached the glum conclusion that the steady growth of the
police presence in the later nineteenth century turned the streets 'more and
more into sterile territory on which the public had the right of passage but
nothing else', confirming William Morris's more highly coloured remark
on 'the impatience of the more luxurious part of society to clear the streets
of costermongers, organs, processions, and lecturers of all kinds, and make
them a sort of decent prison corridors, with people just trudging to and
from their work'. ⁷ The redefinition of public order, moreover, paradoxically
made order-maintenance steadily more difficult, if not indeed impossible.
As Allan Silver has suggested, the transformation of the police into what
he calls a public bureaucracy 'may raise expectations about the level of
public peace it is possible to attain'. ⁸ It plainly did so. ⁹ Equipoise would
soon tilt back towards anxiety.

The twentieth-century idea of public order is an immensely demanding
one. Still, it appears to remain plausible, and not merely to conservatives.
This plausibility reflects the special place of order in English public culture,
and its deep historical roots. There is copious evidence of a public belief
that order once existed, even if it is breaking down at present. ¹⁰ The
temptation to find out whether it really did is hard to resist. Yet such a line
of enquiry does not get very far before it runs into the problem of
definition. Public order is an odd, and in a sense un-English, concept. Sir
Thomas Elyot's great tract on English gentry character-building of 1531,
The Boke named the Governour, pointed out that 'the wordes publike and
commune... be borrowed of the latin tonge for the insufficiencie of our
owne language'. ¹¹ While the word 'common' has been fitted to specially
English notions -- common law, common land, common wealth, common
people, and common sense -- the other has remained more obviously
ambiguous. The accretion of ambiguities was in process while Elyot was
writing. The overlapping equivalents, 'common', 'national', and 'popular',
were generated by Middle English, according to the Oxford Dictionary;
'community' was added in 1560.

Just what sense of unity did the word rest on? The profusion of

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