During the 1630s, in the absence of parliaments and war, it was clear that in many respects English government was in rude health. Notably, local government was clearly capable of energetic and effective action. The strengths of this system, frequently described as ‘self-government at the King’s command’, had been clearly revealed in its response to rapid social and economic change. Population growth over the previous 130 years had placed great strain on the economy. The supply of necessities did not expand rapidly enough to meet demand, and there was rapid inflation in the price of basic foodstuffs. At the same time, economic growth did not create employment quickly enough to absorb the increased population. As a result there seems to have been an over-supply of labour and the value of wages fell. Over the long run this was bad news for those who bought more food than they sold, and those who earned wages rather than employing labour. England’s economy was regionally diverse and all sorts of social practices served to mitigate these crude economic facts, but it is clear that there was a large increase in the number of people suffering some degree of want as basic food prices rose and wages failed to keep up. In bad harvest years food prices went up even further, since food was an absolute necessity, no matter how scarce it became. At the same time there was less work in agriculture, and less demand for non-agricultural goods, so that employment in the whole economy was affected. With work and wages less easy to find and food prices steepling upwards serious privation threatened for many people. In Cumberland, in 1623, some people starved.60
Others thrived. Those who sold food and employed labour prospered, particularly if they owned their own land, or held long leases at fixed rents. In arable areas there was a tendency for village society to polarize, as wealthier farmers bought out their less successful neighbours, creating a newly assertive middling sort, below the level of the gentry but very clearly distinguished from their poorer neighbours. Those who had been bought out turned to wage labour or took to the roads for places where a living could be made without land – town, forest and fen were common destinations. In arable villages in particular the prospering middling sort confronted a society of labouring poor, chronically vulnerable to want and, in periods of harvest failure, threatened with catastrophe. They were also acutely conscious of the tramping vagrant poor, moving across the country in search of work or a livelihood without land.61
In the face of these problems there was a remarkable harmony between crown policies and local officeholders: an ideological consensus among social elites supported active government and underpinned the social and political position of those benefiting from economic change. The deserving poor (the old, the young, the sick and, increasingly, the honest but unemployed) were offered help; the undeserving were set to work or punished. Vagrants were whipped and sent home. Many of these measures, and the refinements that accompanied them, originated in local solutions. Boroughs, in particular, faced the social problems associated with migration, a population with a high proportion of wage earners and a dependence on the market to supply food. Statute and Privy Council urgings lent authority to local initiative as much as they gave leadership. Where particular measures were ignored this was not because they were disapproved of in principle, or were thought to be of dubious legality, but because they were thought to be inappropriate to specific local conditions. There might be a preference in some places for Christian charity rather than bureaucratic dole as the solution for the deserving poor, but these were differences of accent rather than language.62
Over three generations prior to 1640 this system had developed flexibly and without significant tension between national and local governors. This harmony of vision reflected a harmony of interest. Local government was staffed by volunteers, who held office in order to cement their local social standing and, no doubt, out of a sense of duty. Measures intended to protect social order and the commonwealth also served the interests of these local elites. Village constables, who served for one year at a time without payment, were drawn from the middling sort, the group prospering from long-term economic change, and they were implementing measures to control the adverse consequences of the change, not to reverse it. In offering relief to their poorer neighbours, or imposing discipline on them, they reinforced their own social position. There was in general to tension for them in co-operating with national legislation or the promptings of the Privy Council. Above them stood high constables – responsible for numbers of parishes within a county and drawn from a slightly more elevated social rank – and magistrates (Justices of the Peace) – county gentlemen serving voluntarily in the Commission of the Peace appointed by the crown. These men higher up the ladder of local government and of correspondingly higher social status had no more reason to resist these measures than the village constables. In general the hierarchy of local officeholders corresponded pretty closely to the hierarchy of social status, and measures designed to preserve social order drew on this congruence of political and social aspirations. The result was successful, if we measure success in terms of a harmony of purpose between national and local governors.63
This was no less true during the 1630s than over the previous three generations. Prompted by harvest failures between 1629 and 1631, and by outbreaks of the plague, the Privy Council drew up Books of Orders which regularized practices that had evolved over a number of years. Dearth orders requiring magistrates to seize and sell stocks of grain at a fixed price were implemented in the bad harvest year of 1631 but not in the later 1630s, and this might reflect some disaffection with the implications for the property rights of the middling and richer sort. But there were marked continuities in these social policies into the 1640s: the Earl of Manchester was author both of the Caroline and of the parliamentary plague orders, and the hard years of the later 1640s seem to have witnessed a fairly uncontroversial use of the powers regularized in the 1630s in the absence of Privy Council oversight.64
The system of local government which generated and enforced these measures also bound Stuart England together as an intimate political community, densely populated with officeholders. Communications were slow by modern standards although not quite as slow as is sometimes imagined. Between 1570 and 1620 royal posts took, on average, 65 hours to reach Newcastle, 80 to reach Berwick and 95 to reach Penryn. A region bounded by Newark, Chester and Exeter was within 40 hours of London, although letters slowed down considerably once they were off the main highways.65 For private letters speeds were more variable. One letter reached Ludlow in 36 hours from Charing Cross but this was unusual. Although the Harleys of Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire might know in advance of business coming before Parliament, news from London was often two weeks old by the time it got to them.66 In that sense many areas of England were somewhat remote from the seat of government.
But the chains of government were comparatively short: the localities were not in that sense at all remote from the centre of political authority. Every parish had at least one resident who was representing royal government, as a petty constable. A crude indication of what this implies is that a total population of 5.1 million was divided into about 9,000 parishes, an average of 570 people in each. Of that number 285 were men, of them 140 or so over the age of twenty-five.67 Since parish constables held office for one year at a time, there might be a dozen or more men who held, had held, or would hold office: nearly one in ten of adult males, or one in forty of the total population. Moreover, there were not many degrees of separation between a parish official and the King. A demand for reports on the implementation of the Books of Orders passed through a small number of hands before arriving in a village: from Privy Council to magistrates” bench to the high and then petty constables. Ordinary English people had little formal influence over the executive: parliaments met infrequently, the franchise was restricted, there was no ballot box, and parliamentary elections were frequently acclamations of candidates put forward by the county elite. But much more than in a modern bureaucratic state there was an intimate and continuous connection with t
he exercise of political power and, also, a degree of control over the detailed implementation of general instructions.68
The practice of active self-government connected with and confirmed the commonwealth and Calvinist ideals that were common amongst the gentry, and which were broadcast to inferior officers and wider publics in church and in court. This was particularly true among the university-educated gentry, of course, but a practical ideal of active citizenship was common too in the towns. The same period that saw the rise of the middling sort also saw a rapid increase in the number of towns enjoying independent legal powers – the boroughs. In 1640 England and Wales boasted 194 boroughs, of which only forty-eight had achieved that status a century earlier. Collectively they represented a kind of urban network, or system, in which active self-government was connected with ideals of civic identity, and civic virtue. With or without the gloss of a classical education many of the country’s governors were acting under the influence of republican values, ideals that saw in the virtuous man an active servant to the commonwealth.69 This system of participatory administration was a means of exclusion too, of course, for those outside the ranks of the village elite, those who were governed, not governors. But the language of commonwealth, in fact, was another means by which the governed could hold their betters to account – it was a term frequently invoked against grasping landlords or neglectful magistrates.70 Of course, even if neither side may have been genuinely interested in civic virtue, by choosing it as their battleground they nonetheless gave the ideas wider currency.71
Participatory administration brought politics into the villages and towns of early modern England in a more direct sense too. Those in the officeholding population, which included men of relatively humble status, as well as those with whom they dealt, made decisions about how to interpret general policies in the light of local circumstances. This served as a political education for a still wider group. Grain riots, for example, reveal both an awareness of official policies and ideals on the part of the poor, and a capacity to deploy those ideals to their own advantage. Local officeholders proclaimed themselves to be fathers of their country, taking on a duty of care for their inferiors as a consequence of their social position. When grain prices were high this paternal responsibility required them to intervene in the market to restrain profiteering and to ensure that the local population was fed. On numerous occasions the local poor acted on their own initiative, stopping and distributing loads of grain destined for the market, imposing a fair price or calling for magistrates to take up their duties. The same seems to be true of the parish poor, who were able to deploy a language of entitlement in order to secure supplements to their income. The politics of subsistence, and of the parish, brought even the poor into contact with official prescription and practice.72 During the later 1640s, when there was no Privy Council to prompt local governors to implement dearth orders, they may in fact have been responding to pressure from below, as petitioners called them to account. In doing so they used the values and terms routinely employed to justify the authority of magistrates.73 This is not evidence of informed opinions about the membership of the Privy Council, or the trend of episcopal appointments, but it does bear testimony to the administrative and political integration of seventeenth-century England.
It was not just in routine administration that politics resonated in local life. Quarter sessions were convened and presided over four times each year by the Justices of the Peace. The sessions were both a criminal court and an administrative authority, and operated with the help of juries composed of substantial freeholders – village worthies. Twice each year judges from the central courts in London went on circuit, hearing more serious criminal cases and bringing with them messages about current priorities at the heart of government. Here, too, local officeholders and jurymen (drawn from the ranks of the local gentry and middling sort) were brought into direct contact with essential functions of government. Many of them would have had experience of the law in more local settings too: in manor or borough courts, defending their property rights or participating in the regulation of local society.74
English criminal law was not inquisitorial – crimes were presented to the courts, rather than sought out and investigated by officers of the court. Here, too, local discretion was a regular and informed feature of the system and in many cases it seems that there was a preference for more informal sanctions. Those cases that did come to court usually required the agreement of juries that there was a case to answer, and the judgement of juries about the guilt or innocence of the accused. This participatory legal system overlapped with the institutions of local government, and was dependent for its life on the voluntary action of substantial local inhabitants.75 Institutional connections between the political centre and the English localities therefore offered a practical political education, both about what was going on and how things worked, and the social depth of that political education was marked. In some institutions, such as the assizes, quarter sessions or Parliament, national and local interests mixed. At the assizes local legal and administrative issues took their place alongside the transmission of ideas and policies from the King and Privy Council.76
Godly Protestants, the Puritan populists of hostile stereotype, were as likely as anyone to see the virtue in measures of social regulation, perhaps more so. Most of those who saw popery in the religious policies of the late 1620s were not natural rebels; nor were they necessarily radical on social questions.77 In fact, many of the leading figures behind secular policies of social discipline were ‘Puritans’ in relation to the established church. In the Essex village of Terling, for example, illegitimacy rates were successfully reduced in the early seventeenth century, suggesting that an alliance of magistrate and minister could affect the most intimate areas of human life. In Dorchester, after a catastrophic fire in 1613, a similar alliance of magistrate and minister sought to appease God’s righteous anger through an assault on sin, and an invigoration of charity, again with notable results.78 Similar alliances have been observed in the Stour Valley, on the Essex and Suffolk borders, in Gloucester, Salisbury and Ipswich. In such places, before popery was intruded into the church, there was no necessary tension between local views of the correct form of reformation and royal government. There might be a difference between an indulgent paternalism, willing to wink at the harmless festivities of the poor, and a more austere Puritan social discipline; but it was certainly not the case that all disciplinarians were Puritans or that there was anything socially levelling or necessarily anti-monarchical about Puritanism.79 For those who were not particularly offended by Laudian practices the tensions were even less marked. But the smooth running of local government rested on informed consent among county and village elites: the King’s command was hugely influential, but so too was the practical reality of self-government. In that sense there was a republic of officeholders, acting independently and with discretion to preserve local religious and social order. No doubt many of them had not read Lucan, but many of them knew about the importance of active service of the commonwealth. That could clearly work for the crown.
In the absence of parliaments and active warfare some of the heat had gone out of English politics. Charles, an art collector of refined and fashionable tastes, was entertained at court with elaborate masques, designed by Ben Jonson and at the cutting edge of literary and dramatic fashion. Criticism was voiced, but so too was compliment, and a prominent theme was the reconciliation of conflict through the love and wisdom of the monarch.80 However, some of the problems with parliaments were problems not only for parliaments but also for local governors, and they had not gone permanently away. Military mobilization, for example, was close to the heart of the political difficulties with parliaments and tensions were to re-emerge in the mid- and later 1630s even in the absence of parliaments.
Across the whole of Europe the increasing use of gunpowder weapons by infantry made it more expensive to equip soldiers, and increasingly important that foot soldiers w
ere properly trained and drilled. This too was expensive and a number of governments in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe got into financial trouble as a result of over-spending on military mobilization. England had been relatively protected from these developments by the sea, a far more effective defence. Over the long term, however, there were attempts to improve the military potential of the nation through reform of the militia. In the end, then, this made it a problem for local officeholders.
There was a longstanding obligation on adult males to present themselves at the general muster each year, and to offer military service when called upon. From the mid sixteenth century onwards this peasant army was gradually transformed and from within the general body of able-bodied men a more select group – the Trained Band – was given something more like proper equipment and training. This was supported by local rates so that for many people an obligation to serve in the militia was transformed into a cash payment to support the Trained Bands.81
Naturally enough, this created frictions. From the 1590s onwards the militia was increasingly run by Lords Lieutenant – usually relatively prominent noblemen – responding directly to the promptings of the Privy Council. They passed on their instructions via deputies to village constables. General demands from the Privy Council were translated, in a short series of steps, into the imposition on particular villages and towns of the duty to provide a particular number of men, armed and equipped according to a specified standard. It was not necessarily a smooth process, however. Rates were unpopular, and it proved impossible to establish a basis on which they could be raised without also producing wailing and gnashing of teeth about inequalities. There was also a legal difficulty in that the statute which empowered the Lords Lieutenant was repealed in 1605, leaving them with duties but perhaps no legal authority. The mustering and drilling of the Trained Bands was a palaver, causing considerable inconvenience both to the mustered and to those mustering them. Many of the local officeholders responsible for achieving all this – even Lords Lieutenant, but certainly village constables – clearly thought it a chore that was not worth losing much sleep over. These were men, after all, who held office in order to cement their social standing and the good opinion of their neighbours. Mustering and raising rates, in other words, offered little by way of direct benefit to local people, and the level of co-operation achieved was often unimpressive.82
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