Abstract
The powers of central government in seventeenth-century England were hollow without the active cooperation of the army of local authorities upon whom enforcement depended. Professor G. E. Aylmer has put this relationship as clearly as any scholar writing of the period:
In the localities the will of the central government depended for its execution on the voluntary cooperation of a hierarchy of part-time unpaid officials: Lord and Deputy Lieutenants, Sheriffs, Justices of the Peace, High and Petty Constables, Overseers of the Poor, and Churchwardens. Without their co-operation the central government was helpless: witness the failure in 1639–40 to collect Ship Money or to raise an efficient army against the Scots.1
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Bibliography
Dr. Valerie Pearl’s recent study, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics, 1625–43 (Oxford 1961).
See also Lindsay Boynton ‘Billeting: The Example of the Isle of Wight’, ehr (1959).
Two older studies which have held up very well are W. Notestein’s The English People on the eve of Colonization (1954)
W. B. Willcox’s, Gloucestershire: a study in local government, 1590–1640 (New Haven 1940).
For the student who wishes to get the first-hand flavour of local government in the seventeenth century there is no better introduction than the many printed Quarter Sessions records.
Alan Everitt, Change in the Provinces: The Seventeenth Century (Leicester 1969).
Alan Everitt, The Local Community and the Great Rebellion (Historical Assoc. 1969).
Alan Everitt, The County Committee of Kent in the Civil War (Leicester 1957).
Alan Everitt, Suffolk and the Great Rebellion: 1640–1660 (Ipswich 1961).
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© 1973 Conrad Russell, Michael Hawkins, L. M. Hill, Nicholas Tyacke, Robin Clifton, P. W. Thomas, Penelope Corfield, M. J. Mendle, J. H. Elliott
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Hill, L.M. (1973). County Government in Caroline England 1625–1640. In: Russell, C. (eds) The Origins of the English Civil War. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15496-8_3
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