Formal police forces did not exist before the Norman Conquest in 1066, although the conversion of this country to Christianity in 597 AD encouraged the Christian/Roman practice of writing laws down. Under Alfred (871-99 AD) an attempt was made to unite England into a single nation under a single set of laws.

There was a requirement that a local community should pursue offenders and deliver them to the royal courts of justice and according to the laws of Athelstan (925-39) "A thief who ran off shall be pursued to his death by all men who are willing to carry out the King's wishes and whoever shall meet him shall kill him. And he who spares or harbours him shall forfeit his life and all that he has as if he were a thief himself, unless he can prove that he was not aware of any theft or crime for which the thief's life was forfeit."

The Statute of Winchester 1285 required all felonies to be publicized and felons actively pursued. The Watch system was more formalised than anything that had gone before and it employed watchmen to protect property against fire and robbery, the watchmen themselves being supervised by constables.

Henry V th's accession to the throne in 1413 was accompanied by general disorder throughout the kingdom and the Leicester Parliament of 1414 introduced various measures to improve the situation, including an expansion of the role of the Justice of the Peace. The King tended to leave measures against crime to the gentry and it was they who acted as Justices, whilst the yeomanry served as constables and jurors.

The ancient "Hue and Cry" survived, being used a great deal as late as the seventeenth century, which allowed the constable to effect an arrest without waiting for an indictment and to pursue offenders across jurisdictional boundaries and it also placed on officials a duty to assist the constable, in those areas into which the Hue was carried.

By the eighteenth century, this system of watchmen was firmly established, again built around the concept that householders had an obligation to protect their own community, but the reluctance of the middle classes to undertake this task was still present. In1735, the wealthy parishes of St. James, Piccadilly and St. George, concerned about the number of street robberies, passed legislation to establish a professional night watch, paid for by a compulsory rate on householders.

Constables were neither a preventative nor a detective force and they had other duties including the collection of county taxes. They were also employed to move offenders from place to place, taking an accused prisoner to court during which process, they sometimes had to house the offender temporarily in their own homes.

There was a great deal of hostility to constables in the execution of their duty and it did not always stop at verbal threats and abuse. Many constables were corrupt, although more often than not, they were merely ineffective.

Constables had an obligation to pursue any felony that was reported to them although only very occasionally did they engage in primitive detective work. Detection of the crime was assumed to lie largely with the victim himself and if he was unwilling or unable to take on this task, the crime mainly went unpursued and the only remaining action open to the victim was to engage a thief-taker.

These were private individuals, much like bounty hunters, who lived off rewards from courts and victims for bringing offenders to justice. Like the constables, thief-takers did not always prove to be reliable and the notorious Jonathan Wild was hanged at Newgate Prison, for being in league with the very criminals he was supposed to be catching.

The first effective police force in England was organised by Henry Fielding (1707-54), the novelist and self-styled "Principal Westminster Magistrate", together with his brother, Sir John Fielding, known as the "Blind Beak". They spurned the bribes that had given others a bad name and went to great lengths to reform the young offenders and prostitutes who came before them.

They encouraged victims to come forward with descriptions of criminals and their deeds and they developed a primitive system of record keeping, which they shared with other magistrates.

Their methodical efforts effectively banded eight Westminster constables together into a pioneering police force, which became known as the Bow Street Runners. This was the first police organisation actually to patrol the streets.

The Runners gradually gained the trust of the public and became widely respected. Reports of crimes and descriptions of offenders flooded in from all over the country. The London office became a central clearing house for data regarding serious crimes and this information was collected and circulated throughout England in the form of a newspaper called "The Hue and Cry".

The world's first organised police force is recognised as the Metropolitan Police, set up by Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850) born in Bury, Lancashire, the son of a prosperous family of mill owners, educated at Eton and Oxford, and becoming in 1809, the M.P. for Cashel. His political career flourished and by 1828, he was Home Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons.

During a former position as Chief Secretary for Ireland, Peel had formed the Irish Peace Preservation Force to maintain order in rural districts. These forerunners of the Royal Irish Constabulary, (Now renamed the Police Service for Northern Ireland) were called "Peelers" fifteen years before the word came into common use in London.

In 1822, Peel set up a Select Committee to consider the state of the existing police offices, watchmen, constables and Bow Street Runners. He foresaw some kind of centralisation and by 1826, he was outlining a plan for six police districts to cover a 10 mile (16 km) radius from St. Paul's, excluding the City of London.

He resigned the following year over the attempted removal of the political disabilities of Catholics, but was back a year later and began to draft his Metropolitan Police Bill 1829. Peel stressed that the principal duty of his policemen was to be crime prevention, rather than detection.

Despite considerable public animosity to his proposals, the Bill had a surprisingly easy passage through the House and the initial force was comprised of over one thousand officers, rapidly nicknamed "Bobbies". It was the first force to be under a military command structure and the first force to have special uniforms.

Peel envisaged a force in which there was to be no caste system and typically, ranks up to Superintendent were drawn from ex-warrant officers and non-commissioned officers. Senior uniformed ranks were brought in "from below" and not from the higher social classes and Peel decided that the ranks would have low pay, as "he did not want any policeman to feel superior to his job or to his colleagues".

Policemen would be between 23 and 40 years of age, would earn 17s per week as a constable (85p) and would work shifts of eight, ten or twelve hours, seven days a week. No rest days were allowed initially, and only one weeks holiday, unpaid. The uniform was to be worn at all times, with a duty band on the sleeve to indicate whether or not the constable was on duty. No meal breaks were allowed on shift, although the uniform top hat could be used to hold a snack. The new constable was told that he must expect a hostile reception from all sections of the public and be prepared to be assaulted, stoned or stabbed in the course of his duties.

This presumably explained why, of 2800 ordinary constables who had been employed since May 1830, 2238 had left the force within four years, 40% being dismissed and 60% who left to better their situation. It was only after the introduction of a relatively generous pension scheme that the position improved.

The Municipal Corporations Act 1835 created the borough police and required each new chartered borough council to form a watch committee and within three weeks of their first election, to employ sufficient constables to preserve the peace within the Borough. Many watch committees applied to the Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police for assistance in setting up their force.

The County Police Acts of 1839 and 1840 provided for the voluntary installation of county police and saw both separate police-office forces and the Bow Street Runners abolished.

The County Police and District Constabulary Act 1839 stated that executive control over the police would rest with a chief constable, who would be responsible for appointing, promoting, dismissing and disciplining the constables in his force. The rates of pay were set by the Home Secretary and were largely based on Metropolitan Police rates.

Detectives in the Metropolitan Police were not created until 1842, although Birmingham had a detective branch as early as 1839. In 1859,Middlesbrough had one detective out of a total strength of fifteen and at that time, there were three detectives in Leeds and Bradford and five in Sheffield.

From the middle of the 19th century onwards, the police became part of British culture. They became effectively an all-response emergency service on which the townsfolk relied, including fire and ambulance and also the inspection of a range of commercial services such as weights & measures, gasometers and bridges.

The Police Act 1890 gave police officers the right to a pension after twenty five years service or after fifteen years with discharge on medical grounds. Another function of the Act was to introduce a facility for providing mutual aid in cases of emergency. If a police force was found to be understaffed during an emergency situation, a chief officer could call upon the chief officer of another force to provide reinforcement.

Until 1920, being a police officer was a seven day a week occupation, and although most constables were given a day off every one or two weeks, this leave was only granted at the discretion, some would say whim, of the chief constable.

A major bone of contention was the requirement in most forces for constables to apply to their chief officer for permission to marry. In 1899, the chief constable of Surrey further insisted that applications should be accompanied by a " recommendation or testimonial from a clergyman or responsible person, who can guarantee the respectability of the woman the constable intends to make his wife". Amazingly, this requirement was still in force until the 1970's in some forces.

The House Select Committee on the Police Weekly Rest Day (1910) heard that two major issues were the cause of discontent in the lower ranks. Firstly, no formal mechanism existed to enable police officers to express their grievances, which at the time and apart from the issue of rest days, also included the low rates of pay, increasing levels of work and hours of duty. Later, these also came to include the pressure put on Metropolitan constables to make arrests because the sub-divisional inspectors received an allowance based on the number of charges brought, the difficulties of promotion, which more or less ceased during the Great War and the tendency to promote from outside forces on grounds unconnected with policing ability.

Secondly, central government was making little effort to ascertain the views of police officers themselves.

By the end of the First World War, grievances over leadership and representation were brought to a head by the extra demands placed on the police by the war. Problems with air-raid duties, lighting restrictions, the increasing activities of the Suffragette movement, and an increase in laws which required police intervention all contributed to the unrest. A continuing series of industrial strikes, of which the miners' strike in 1910 remained in the public consciousness and the rising popularity of the automobile also created logistical problems for the foot-patrol based system.

The police crisis was brought to a head by two police strikes in 1918/1919. On Wednesday, 28th August 1918, some 6000 police officers, mostly Metropolitan, were on strike and some months later, a further strike involved 2364 men from seven forces

This latter event had been precipitated by the progress of the Police Bill 1919 through parliament, after the deliberations of a committee chaired by Lord Desborough. The Bill would legislate to prevent police officers from joining a trade union and would set up an alternative form of representation that would not take the form of a union. The Police Federation was proposed to represent the interests of inspectors and below, a Police Council was to act as a consultative body for the Home Secretary on police matters and the Home Secretary was to be given power to regulate police pay and conditions of service of all police officers.

There was little support for this second strike outside of the Metropolitan force and Liverpool, where more than half the police officers were involved. Many strikers were dismissed without any hope of reinstatement, including 951 members of the Liverpool force out of a total of 1874.

The Desborough Report, published in July 1919 recommended that pay and conditions should be improved, centralised and centrally determined by the Home Secretary and it also recommended a substantial rise in pay. Its second Report, in January 1920, made recommendations on police recruitment, (sorely needed after the strikers had been dismissed) discipline, control over policing, the merging of small borough forces and the appointment of chief constables.

Police representative machinery evolved further during the 1920's, the Police Council, replaced in 1964 by the Police Advisory Board, acted as a central advisory body to the Home Office and comprised representatives of police authorities and all ranks of police. In Council, the ranks of inspector and below were represented by the Police Federation, superintendents by the Superintendents' Association and the chief constables, assistants and deputies by the Association of Chief Officers (ACPO).

In 1944, Home Secretary Herbert Morrison set up a committee to discuss the post-war reconstruction of the police service and prepare it to deal with problems of policing a post-war society. Four reports were produced, which formed the basis for the Police Act 1946, which considered higher training and the establishment of a new police college to improve the quality of demand, the organisation of the police, buildings and welfare, the responsibilities of the higher ranks and the organisation of the special constabulary.

All the existing 47 non-county borough forces, with the exception of Peterborough, were forced to amalgamate with their county force, thus reducing the overall number of provincial forces from 181 in 1939 to 124 by 1960 and eventually to 44 in 1969.

The shortage of police officers had been an ongoing problem, not least since the strike dismissals of 1919/1920 and manpower problems caused by the Great War. The wives of police officers had played a largely unsung and unrecognised (by authority) part for many years, including searching of women prisoners and chaperoning women and children in custody.

The First World War provided the impetus for the recruitment of women police, initially into two separate forces. Voluntary Women Patrols (VWP) which were formed by the National Union of Women Workers (Later the National Council of Women) and the Women Police Volunteers (WPV) (Later the Women Police Service) formed by Margaret Damer-Dawson, who recruited mainly from suffragettes who had dropped their campaign at the outbreak of war.

Apart from looking after the moral and physical health of women, women police were also used to train munitions workers, anti-espionage work and trying to control drug-trafficking to soldiers.

After the war, the Metropolitan Police established a small force drawn from the VWP but deliberately avoided recruiting the ladies of the WPV, who, when they continued to patrol, were sometimes prosecuted for "impersonating police officers!"

Whilst some forces kept a small number of women on, most had none in the inter-war years and in 1936, there were just 175 women police officers in England and Wales. The Second World War altered the position and police forces had to open their doors to both regular police women and the Women's Auxiliary Police Service. By 1942, there were 2800 full time policewomen (regular and auxiliary) and 844 part time.

The Special Constables Act 1831 had given any two magistrates the power to appoint any number of Special Constables they deemed necessary to control a crowd and prevent a riot. In London, the first use of Specials was during the Chartist Demonstration of 1848, when the "Chartists" demanded universal suffrage (for men) and the opportunity for working men to be represented in Parliament without fear of victimisation.

The Government were alarmed at this thought and at least 150,000 Special Constables were enrolled, which successfully made the Chartists call off their proposed open air meeting and instead, present a petition to Parliament. In the event, the Government took no notice and it was to be many more years before the Chartists and their sympathisers got what they wanted.

Specials were again attested in 1867 during the Fenian terrorist campaign and again in 1911 when Specials were called upon to assist with law and order during a rail strike.

In all these (and other) cases, the Specials were enrolled for a particular purpose and were disbanded again after the emergency had gone. The outbreak of the Great War led to the establishment of the Metropolitan Special Constabulary as a permanent organisation and in 1915, they were issued with uniforms and began to undertake crime prevention and law enforcement duties.

During the Second World War, reservists were called to the colours and the police force was left severely understaffed. This led to the government establishing the Police War Reserve and for the duration of the War, Specials were able to volunteer for full time police service and receive pay.

In 1947, the Police Federation decided to admit women members and the government launched a strenuous recruitment campaign, emphasising that policewomen "naturally specialise in work with women, children and young people" and in 1950, Women Specials were introduced to the Metropolitan Police for the first time.

Since then, the role of women in the police service has increased, although there are some who still complain that they are treated as "inferior" by their male counterparts.

In the 1960's, after trials in Kirkby, Widnes and Bury (Lancashire) the unit beat policing scheme gained favour. Originally prompted by the shortage of police officers, the idea was also to improve contact with police and public. The force area was divided into beats and each beat was covered by a group of officers on foot and in cars supported by radio communications and detectives. By 1968, 60% of the population was covered by a unit beat scheme.

In the late 1970's and early 1980's, the police were to become an integral part of government law and order policy. The Police & Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) increased police powers over search, entry and seizure and arrest by placing existing police practices on a statutory footing, whilst at the same time increasing the rights of the suspect against an abuse of police power. It also increased police accountability by creating a new independent body to deal with police complaints - The Police Complaints Authority.

The Security Service Act 1989 allowed the Security Service (MI5) to gather intelligence with regard to serious crime so as to assist the police and the setting up of the National Criminal Intelligence Service in 1991 resulted in the rationalisation in the overall number of regional crime squads, linked with the creation of the National Crime Squad following the Police Act 1997.