Law and Order in Seventeenth-Century England: The Organization of Local Administration during the Personal Rule of Charles I
- 1 January 1997
- journal article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Law and History Review
- Vol. 15 (1) , 49-76
- https://doi.org/10.2307/827705
Abstract
Two of the most significant factors in the development of European nation states are the enforcement of the law and the political relationship between central government and the provinces. The establishment of powerful national institutions in the Middle Ages, the successful incorporation of its geographical fringes, and the involvement of local elites in implementing national law and policies have made England a challenging subject to test this interaction between the center and the localities. Although this relationship could never be free of tensions, reflection on the context of the English Civil War has suggested a new interpretation. Pursuing the inquiries initiated by the so-called “gentry controversy” in the 1950s and 1960s, a group of historians has studied individual counties and argued that, for local aristocrats and gentlemen, provincial values and issues took precedence over national policies. The Civil War, in their view, appeared to be a conflict between an increasingly interventionist and “nationalizing” central government and semiautonomous shires.Keywords
This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit:
- Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere: Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to DemocracyAmerican Sociological Review, 1993
- The Justices of the Peace, 1679–1760Published by University of California Press ,1984
- THE IDEA OF HOSPITALITY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLANDPast & Present, 1984
- The counties and the country: Some thoughts on seventeenth‐century historiography∗Social History, 1983
- Somerset, 1625–1640Published by Harvard University Press ,1961
- The Social Interpretation of the English RevolutionThe Journal of Economic History, 1959