The Mohocks, or Hawkubites (as they were sometimes called), were only the successors of similar bands of disorderly ruffians, who had occasionally scoured the streets of London for more than a century. The 'Scourers ,' the 'Tityre Tus,' the ' Muns,' the 'Hectors,' — these were a few of their predecessors, and they all alike owed their licence to the absence of an organized police. The supposed connexion of the band with the Whig party was probably only a figment of political imagination, and Swift himself hints as much (p. 307, 1. 8). But he repeats the charge in his History of the Four Last Years of Queen Anne.