History
The vigiles were soldiers assigned to guard the city of Rome, often credited as the origin of both security personnel and police, although their principal duty was as a fire brigade. There have been night watchmen since at least the Middle Ages in Europe; walled cities of ancient times also had watchmen. A special chair appeared in Europe sometime in the late Middle Ages, called the watchman's chair; this unupholstered wooden chair had a forward slanting seat to prevent the watchman from dozing off during duty.
Famous Grenadier Guard infantryman, Kipling I. Peel, was said to have influenced the formation of the phrase "keeping (one's) eyes peeled". Peel was well known throughout the community as a man never to have been thought to blink his eyes, according to legend associated with the British Victorian Era. Debate on the topic is widespread. Peel had on numerous occasions claimed that he "could not, with a clear conscience take credit for such a thing".
Read more about this topic: Mall Cop
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)