The sergeants (a term derived from "servant") and bailiffs attached to the principal city officers and to the bureaucratic arm of government, the chamber, were responsible for executing tasks set them by their masters and so were frequently out and about in the community, enforcing court orders and collecting fines or other revenues. This provided ample opportunity for venality to those so inclined, and sergeants appear to have been chosen in part for their brawn, enabling them to be forceful in the execution of their duties. However, it does not follow that all cases in which such officials are accused of extortion under colour of their office represent a straightforward matter of corruption.

The first case above, although presented initially as an act of extortion by one of the sheriffs' staff, is in fact concerned with whether the city would be able to impose fees for trading licences on the butchers. The city authorities recognized the importance of this case when the record of it was copied into one of the volumes of city memoranda and precedents, the Liber Custumarum, along with other proceedings of the London eyre of 1321. Although the jury verdict went against the city, it may be that the jury membership – which included fishmongers and likely other victuallers – saw in the two shilling annual fee the thin end of a wedge that might later be used against them. Goscelin is here the scapegoat in a political battle, with the butchers making a concerted attack on an unpopular levy on their trade; a levy the city authorities, far from disowning Goscelin, were eager to protect. We need not believe Goscelin's claim that the levy had been in effect since the beginning of the thirteenth century, but nor need we see it as a personal initiative of Goscelin at extortion. We may also note that Goscelin was one of several bureaucratic officials dismissed for abuses of office, as a result of a royal investigation of London government in 1319; but without placing too much emphasis on this, for the investigation was part of another political battle, as a populist party led by victualling interests sought successfully to overthrow a faction of professional administrators that had held power for several years.

The venue for the accusation of Goscelin must also be taken into account, for the 1321 eyre was an attempt to challenge many of the powers of the city government. The bakers complained at the eyre about a fee the city had imposed for weighing grain at the time they purchased it. The men of Billingsgate, a ward associated with the fish trade (and also containing East Cheap), accused Goscelin le Serjaunt of having, when in the office of bailiff of the queen's river, taken 1 fish per basket from a fish cargo brought to the wharf by foreign merchants, on the grounds of a toll, although no such toll ever existed; the jury placed the blame for this innovation on a previous bailiff, and the court banned further exactions. The bailiff of London Bridge and Old Fish Street (one of the locations of a fish market) was also indicted for taking unwarranted tolls from residents of the street; he was imprisoned, and the exaction banned. Another man was likewise condemned for levying a new toll on boats transporting rushes and other goods.

On the other hand, the description of Goscelin as the farmer of this revenue source may indicate that the sheriffs had either contracted out the collection to someone not one of their regular officers, or had assigned to one of their officers a specific target that had to be collected towards the city fee farm, payment of which was one of the fundamental duties of the sheriffs. In either case, it would have been left to the collector to raise this sum as he thought fit, and pocket a surplus, if any. Such an arrangement was an incentive to extortion, but in this case the butchers' target seems not to have been Goscelin's behaviour, which may not have exceeded his mandate, or any profit he may have been making therefrom, but the toll itself. It is not clear what the resolution of the dispute was; however, just before the attention to Goscelin's case, the justices had ordered the butchers' stalls in East Cheap torn down, after a complaint by the men of Candlewick ward (into which the street of East Cheap led). The mayor protested that this would result in the butchers selling meat from within their houses, which would make the trade harder to police; he did not mention, but may have had in mind, that it would also deprive the city of licence fees from the stalls. Just possibly the complaint was a desperate ploy by the butchers to rid themselves of the toll.

As the second text above indicates, there were certain long-standing customs involving small gifts, and it was widespread in medieval society to grease the wheels of administration, or to curry favour with men of in positions high and low, through small payments. Clerks in the employ of urban governments often charged small fees for the undertaking of official acts on behalf of private citizens; this was not seen as improper, so long as the fees were modest. However, such practices were open to exploitation; gifts could easily turn into bribery or blackmail. One example of this is seen at Colchester, but examples can also be found in other towns.

It may have been not that the situation had greatly worsened by 1419, but that this year saw in the mayoralty a man not inclined to tolerate such abuses. William Sevenok has been described as "A pious, even puritanical man" [Carole Rawcliffe, History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1386-1421, IV, 340], and a generous benefactor to several city churches, as well as founder of a grammar school at Sevenoaks, Kent, where his father or step-father had been based. This prominent citizen had served in a wide range of capacities in London, before going into semi-retirement six years before his death in 1432. For the city he was an auditor of accounts (first in 1399/1400 and on two later occasions); a tax collector (1402); warden of London Bridge (1404-06); a post that brought him the reputation as an expert on bridge maintenance; alderman (1411-26); sheriff (1412/13); parliamentary representative (1417); and mayor (1418/19). For his community he was a churchwarden of St. Dunstan's in the East around 1400 and was called on to act as arbitrator in various disputes between private citizens. For the king he served on various commissions relating to recruitment of troops, judicial proceedings, and victualling of the army; as regards the last, in his capacity as alderman he assisted the mayor to set prices for the ale to be supplied, the containers they were to be sent in, and for costs of transporting them. For his fellow merchants he was warden of the Grocers' Company in 1404/05, having begun his career in 1394 as an ironmonger, but shortly afterwards paid a large sum of money to transfer to the grocers; in the years that followed he is seen exporting wool and salt, and importing wine and cloth, as well as buying large quantities of wheat in northern England, for sale in London. During his mayoralty, in addition to forbidding the sergeants to seek perks at Christmas time, he took action to suppress mummery and other rowdy behaviour at that season. He also prohibited the fraudulent abuses of adding artificial colouring to lower-quality wine in order to pass it off for better wine, or of mixing different types of wine, at the encouraging citizens to inform on any trader adulterating wine in that way. Furthermore, he closed down Ludgate prison, on the grounds that citizens convicted of debt were choosing to go there rather than repay those debts and, once inside, were using their money to make themselves comfortable and continue their bad habits (including bringing false charges against members of the city elite); the inmates were transferred to the harsher conditions of Newgate. His successor as mayor, Richard Whittington, however, reversed this because the transfer resulted in the deaths of several prisoners.

Sevenok's severity, if a feature of his administrative career as a whole, may be guessed to have made him some enemies. In 1413, during his shrievalty, he was informed that an elderly scrivener, John Askwyth, had let escape (whether from custody or sanctuary is unclear) a priest caught in the act of fornication; he summoned Askwyth to answer the charge. During the interrogation, Askwyth became angry, took hold of Sevenok and insisted he show him justice regardless of any personal prejudice. Sevenok had him thrown into one of the Counters, and complained to the court of mayor and aldermen. Askwyth confessed and threw himself on the mercy of the court but, despite his age, it was decided to make an example of him, and he was stripped of citizenship and put into Newgate for a year (itself a likely sentence of death for an old man). Two years later Sevenok was interrogating grocer Thomas Maynelle, a resident of Tower ward of which Sevenok was alderman, about unspecified "irregular and sinister doings and sayings" [Riley, op.cit., 605]; Maynelle became angry with what was being laid at his door and warned Sevenok to act honestly, or he would suffer the same fate as Nicholas Brembre, a former mayor. Maynelle was again sentenced to a year in Newgate, but in this instance Sevenok intervened and obtained leniency.