County Government in Caroline England 1625–1640

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