Mark Goldie, Unacknowledged Republic of Officeholding in Early Modern England
Evidence offered for claims about a profusion of ancient Greek-style ‘republican’ ‘direct democracy’ polities in Elizabethan and Stuart England..
Mark Goldie wrote:
Chapter 6
The Unacknowledged Republic of Officeholding in Early Modern England
Section 1
… The purpose of this essay is not to debate contemporary democratic theory, but to show historically that there is another way of conceiving of political participation, namely through the practice of officeholding. By highlighting officeholding in early modern England, we shift attention away from voting and towards governance; away from the indirect participation by which some people occasionally chose others to represent them in a distant national assembly, and towards the directness whereby large numbers of people undertook the self-management of their local communities. … Such activity took the form of duties incumbent on every householder, and included holding office, and hence ruling others, in however small a role. In this tradition, rotation of office was held to be crucial, so that citizens were sometimes rulers and sometimes ruled. …
In opening up the topic of officeholding it is helpful to begin with four premisses. … This essay first synthesizes some of the findings of social historians, and then turns to the history of political thought. The second premiss is the need to keep in mind a fundamental feature of the early modern English state, namely the lack of a national salaried bureaucracy. In the seventeenth century the royal court typically employed a mere 1200 people. Beyond Whitehall, government was amateur, part-time and unsalaried. Governance was thereby highly dispersed, and was conducted by gentlemen, yeomen and tradesmen in the interstices of their ordinary daily business. The crown’s capacity to exert its will depended upon the cooperation of county magistrates and village constables.
The third premiss is the importance of locality. Historical writing too readily focuses upon parliament and privy council. A generation ago historians began to show us that England could be conceived of as a federation of county communities. … More recently, attention has shifted to the parish, the town and the neighbourhood – and for this reason the accent here will be on the parish more than the county. …
The fourth premiss is the inappositeness of viewing early modern England as a bipolar society of rulers and ruled. Of course the social order was hierarchic and marked by massive disparities of wealth, status and power. … But historians are now increasingly doubtful that the exercise of power should be construed as the monopoly of a ruling class … Governance was not something done from on high to the passive recipients of authority, but something actively engaged in by the lesser agents of government; and every citizen was in some measure a lesser agent of government. …
Section 3
The structure of English local government was bewilderingly complex. Here it is only necessary to sketch an outline, in order to pinpoint the number and kinds of public offices which people were called upon to undertake. We may distinguish counties, towns and parishes. After 1536 there were forty counties in England and twelve in Wales. By 1689 there were approximately 180 incorporated boroughs in England … and some 9700 parishes. There were other units too: parishes were grouped into hundreds …; some parishes were divided into tithings (literally denoting ten households); parish jurisdiction often meshed with that of medieval manors which still exercised jurisdiction over their domains through courts leet; large towns were divided into wards; large counties into ridings or sokes. Counties had civil and military officers. At the summit was the custos rotulorum and lord lieutenant, typically a peer or leading courtier.
The linchpin of county government was the justice of the peace, or magistrate. In the seventeenth century a county would have between two and four dozen justices; the numbers rose in the eighteenth. Justices were appointed by the crown, but a prudent government chose the weightiest men of the shire, the leading gentry. The relationship between crown and magistrate was symbiotic. The crown needed the business of government to be transacted; the gentleman needed office as a mark of status and an instrument of social authority. The justice’s duties were both administrative and judicial. The justice was required to fix wages, set ale prices, license alehouses, license hawkers, inspect weights and measures, control guns, settle bastardy cases, assess local tax rates, regulate apprenticeships, and make provision for the repair of bridges and highways. The statutory duties placed upon the justices grew inexorably, especially during the Tudor period.
The justice was a law officer, issuing warrants and making summary convictions. He was not a trained lawyer, though often he had acquired a grounding by attending the Inns of Court. More serious criminal cases were dealt with by the bench of justices, sitting together at the quarter sessions, a certain number making up a quorum. Justices were also present when major cases were heard twice a year by the crown’s itinerant assize judges. Assizes and quarter sessions were occasions for county gatherings, feasts, speeches, and for sermons on the duties of magistrates and citizens. The most senior magistrates were likely also to be deputy lieutenants of the county militia. A gentleman of weight could expect to hold a militia captaincy or colonelcy.
There were other county officers too. The sheriff, appointed for one year, had mainly judicial functions and nominated jurymen. The coroner, elected by the freeholders, had investigative and prosecutorial powers in cases of violent death. The high constables served each hundred. All these were amateur, though they could take fees. Counties had only a small body of stipended officials, such as the justices’ clerk, the militia mustermaster, the gaol keeper, the keeper of the house of correction.
The governance of the parish was in the hands of the churchwardens, the overseers of the poor and the constable. There were lesser officers too, a surveyor of the highways, a clerk, sexton, scavenger and beadle. Community matters were deliberated in the vestry, the meeting of the chief inhabitants. In areas where land continued unenclosed there were also often field officers – reeves, haywards and pinders – who regulated cropping and drainage. The parish constable stood in parallel to the county justice, each in their respective domains, the former carrying in microcosm similar burdens to the latter. The constable went to and fro to local justices, taking instructions, receiving warrants. He too regulated alehouses and weights and measures. He apprehended vagrants, supervised the watch, enforced curfews, regulated corn supplies in times of scarcity, maintained instruments of punishment (the stocks, whipping post, cage, pillory, ducking stool), supervised the maintenance of hedges, dykes, ditches and bridges, and the extermination of vermin; he supplied testimonials for servants and apprentices. He found a quota of men to serve in the militia; he maintained muskets, swords, pikes, helmets and breastplates; he saw to the upkeep of the butts; he attended musters. He collected taxes, and distrained for non-payment of taxes and fines. He assisted itinerant royal officials, the postmasters and saltpetre men. The Elizabethan Poor Law instructed him to search once a month for vagrants in need of discipline, and for the sick, aged and impotent in need of succour.
An incorporated borough typically had a mayor and a governing body of aldermen or councillors, together with a chamberlain, recorder, clerk, coroner and bailiff. It also had officers of the nightwatch, and scavengers. … At least until the Civil War, [Exeter] borough’s member of parliament was generally treated as an extension of civic office, for the MP was often the recorder, whose task was to speak for the corporation at Westminster. Where a town was exempt from county jurisdiction, the aldermen exercised the same judicial powers as county magistrates. The structure of parish government found in the countryside also existed in the towns, and in large towns each ward also had a complement of officers. A yet further layer of governance existed in the livery companies, which regulated crafts and trades, and were governed by wardens and assistants. The livery companies were economic, convivial and charitable bodies, but they were scarcely distinct from civic government, for to be a freeman of a livery company made one a citizen, with rights of participation and office.
Section 4
Our concern here is less with the duties of office than with the significance of undertaking office. Evidence … remains partial. … Even so, we may derive several generalizations from existing case studies. I single out six that serve to underscore the extent and centrality of officeholding, but I follow that with four cautions which should prevent us drawing too optimistic a conclusion about participation.
First and foremost, an astonishingly high proportion of early modern people held office. This can readily be deduced schematically. In the seventeenth century there were approximately 9700 parishes in England and Wales. If each had one constable, two churchwardens and two overseers, then we have a total of around 50,000 parish officers at any one time. Thus, around the year 1700, about one-twentieth of adult males were governing in any year; in principle, that might mean one half were governing in any decade. …
Case studies indicate levels of involvement in particular localities, especially in London, where each of the City’s 117 parishes had a full complement of officials. Valerie Pearl found that about one-tenth of London householders in the mid-seventeenth century held office in any year. Ian Archer observed that ‘the City enjoyed a large number of elected officials: as many as one in three householders in a wealthy inner city ward like Cornhill might expect to hold some kind of office in any one year’. … In York 796 householders served as grand jurymen between 1649 and 1673. It was particularly in cities like York, which had four wards and twenty-seven parishes, that, as Philip Withington has written, ‘the intensity of civic governance propelled men into public service’. …
The second conclusion we can draw about officeholding, flowing from the first, is that it proves to have been remarkably socially extensive. In parishes, offices were held by an array of people from minor gentry to cottagers. At Stone in Herefordshire the officers included a brickmaker a blacksmith and a tanner. At Highley in Shropshire they included yeomen and cottagers. In Southwark they were typically bakers, glovers, butchers, soapboilers and cheesemongers.
Constables were characteristically yeomen, artisans or shopkeepers. … Illiteracy was no barrier. Before the mid-seventeenth century possibly more than half of rural constables were illiterate. In 1642 few constables in Dorset or Somerset could write; in Westmorland none could. One Wiltshire constable asked to be relieved of his post because he had to travel two miles to a scrivener to get warrants read.
Law-abidingness was not a prerequisite of office either. Many constables were in trouble with the law at some time in their lives, typically being fined by manorial courts for not maintaining gates and ditches, or for unlicensed ale-selling. Disposed though many puritan officers were to rigorous schemes of moral reformation, the body of officeholders was too inclusive, and the duty to take up office too dispersed, for office-holding to be confined to an oligarchy of the righteous.
Similarly, religious nonconformity was no bar. Dissenters and Catholics were never statutorily disqualified from local office. The parish remained the elementary unit of society and governance long after the dissolution of the unity of the Church of England, so that, paradoxically, church-wardens were often people who were, in some sense, nonconformists. This need not mean that they abandoned church services for sectarian meetings; more typically it meant partial conformity, either mingling church worship with attendance at illegal conventicles, or demitting from the strict requirements of the Prayer Book or canon law. …
… The social inclusiveness of officeholding was of course relative to jurisdictional spheres. Parish and county elites were dramatically different in their social make-up. There was, however, some osmosis at the boundaries. There are cases of hundredal constables becoming JPs. In the 1650s and again, momentarily, in 1687–8, a good many yeomen and urban tradesmen joined the county bench. In 1680 Sir William Jones complained of upstarts being made justices …
Our third conclusion is that the holding of office was generally a valued marker of social status. The visible evidence survives in many churches … On the whole, village elites did not thrust office upon others as a chore to be avoided. At Lewes in Sussex the ‘Fellowship of the Twelve’ was firmly oligarchical, but the burdensome office of constable rotated among them. …Mid-seventeenth-century grand jurymen, though characteristically no more than yeomen, were styled ‘gentlemen’ by virtue of the dignity of their office.
Of course office offered material advantages to the holder, in its scope for adjusting tax assessments, or for handling vagrants and mothers of bastards so as to lessen parish liabilities, or for patronage: the disposing of leases, the placing of contracts with traders to supply the workhouse or repair the church, the allocation of places in almshouses. Office offered a platform for religious zeal, whether in puritan projects for moral reformation, or Anglican attempts to purge nonconformists. Overseers could make doles for the poor dependent upon church attendance; they might be keen to help the prosecution of nonconformists because the fines helped defray the costs of maintaining the poor. There were myriad material motives for exercising local power. Yet undoubtedly the exercise of local power came with exacting administrative burdens, and the motives were mixed. … Daniel Defoe remarked that the constableship ‘takes up so much of a man’s time that his own affairs are frequently wholly neglected’. …
One common practice tended to ensure that lesser offices were not spurned by superior people. This was the cursus honorum, the principle that greater office ought not to be entered by those who had not first served in lesser office. … At Gloucester an aspirant alderman was expected first to serve twice as both steward or treasurer, and as sheriff. At Exeter one could not hope to rise to mayor without serving as steward or bailiff, sheriff and receiver. Parish officeholders generally held more than one office at different times, graduating from minor to major. …
Our fourth conclusion is a broader one. It is that the recovery of parochial officeholding reveals a national regime not only dependent on the good will and competence of county magistracies, but in turn utterly dependent upon the same at parish level. … Just as at the county level, perhaps more so, the capacity of central government to exert executive control was compromised and mediated by what was felt to be tolerable in local communities. Historians of the parish have demonstrated the pressure of ‘neighbourhood values’. Constables often would not enforce what the law strictly required, for they were guided by the community’s moral consensus. The constable was not an executive from outside the community, but a member of it: he was a neighbour as well as a governor. It has been remarked of Somerset before the civil war that the privy council ‘had no terrors to match those that the constables’ neighbours threatened’. … Equally, it was so when local officers sided with the hungry in times of high bread prices. … Local officers were the agents of their communities as much as of the crown.
The fifth conclusion is that among the important principles at work in officeholding were those of selection by rotation and by lot. It is true that some offices were filled by appointment (justices and sheriffs by the crown) and some by election (generally true of churchwardens and overseers). But many offices fell to people because it was their turn: it fell by automatic rotation among householders. This was the principle known as ‘houserow’. Chief Justice Holt stated in 1698 that ‘people are to be constables by house-row’; Thomas Gilbert in 1787 said the office of overseer ‘generally goes by house-row in rotation through the parish’. … [It] fell to the philosopher John Locke to supply a tithingman twice every nine years. The principle of rotation functioned in two senses: as a means of selection, and as a means for limiting terms of office, for most offices were held for a fixed term, usually one year.
Some offices fell to people by a form of lot. Juries were chosen by sheriffs from lists of eligible freeholders. The process was very far from ensuring random selection: status, experience, locality and political colour all drove jury selection. As well as the ‘petty’ juries of 12 men who sat in criminal trials, there were also ‘grand’ juries, of between 17 and 23 men, who sat to hear indictments and to judge whether there was a prima facie case which should go forward to trial. If men of substance tended to be found on grand juries, there were complaints that they avoided service in criminal trials. … Between 1692 and 1699, 2530 men were sworn jurors in the City of London. In the counties they were chiefly yeomen rather than gentlemen, members of village elites. Much energy was expended on keeping up lists of freeholders eligible for jury service, and an act of 1696 required constables to draw up an annual register.
In the work of the grand jury, as in that of JPs, there was no exact boundary between judicial and administrative business. The grand jury might issue addresses stating matters of common concern. Grand juries were conceived of as a kind of county parliament. Stephen Roberts remarks that ‘of all the institutions of local representation, the sessions grand jury was the closest thing to a mouthpiece for the yeomanry of the county. It was nearly a parliament of the middling sort’. The grand juries were especially active as voices of their counties in the wave of petitioning against Charles I’s regime just prior to the civil war. …
… In 1702 Daniel Defoe declared, in his Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England, that if the House of Commons should turn tyrant then grand juries should act in the people’s defence. Unelected though they were, grand juries were commonly described as ‘the representatives of the people of England’. ‘The consent of the whole people [is] given by their representatives the jury’ … without reference to parliaments or the franchise. …
The sixth and final conclusion is that an important principle at work in some aspects of officeholding was that of compulsion. The assumption was not the characteristic modern one that people would volunteer – still less ‘run’ – for office, and do so only if they felt an inclination to profess politics. Politics was not a profession. Rather, governance was the required activity of any, and every, citizen. It was expected that people would take up the burdens of office when their turn came around. It is true that many dodged officeholding, but there were fines for avoidance, and the existence of fines entails an assumption that office was an incumbent duty. …The principle of compulsion is apparent at the level of the duties imposed on every householder. … Keeping the watch was done by rotation among heads of households. Hooker wrote that in Exeter, householders ‘by course [in turn] are to watch’. In York householders took it in turns to do duty at the bars (entrances) and posterns of the city. … An act of 1662 required Londoners to sweep their frontages daily. An act of 1691 required the householders of Westminster to put out lamps from dusk to midnight. When new streets were built in the eighteenth century, householders were responsible for paving and cleaning their segments of the public highway. …
Citizens also had a duty to supply the county militia with its needs. … Many writers on the militia insisted upon compulsory service. … John Tutchin called for a revival of the ancient practice by which every freemen should personally serve in the militia, as a matter of ‘public service’. A universal duty of charitable giving was implied by the regular practice of churchwardens, sometimes accompanied by chief inhabitants, going from door to door to collect money under royal ‘briefs’ which established emergency funds, for example to help Huguenot refugees.
Many of these obligations became steadily eroded during the early modern period, and especially during the eighteenth century in the urban setting, with the creation of special rates to provide waged labour. At that period the office of county gaoler steadily became a waged public service. Yet even in the eighteenth century, communities hesitated between the ancient principle of universal citizen service and the modern principle of waged professional service. …
In the military sphere, scholars have made much of the eighteenth-century transition from the principle of a universal citizen militia to a modern professional army, and of the passionate debates that surrounded it, but they have made little of the fact that, in the emergence of modernity, much hung upon equivalent questions in the sphere of civil obligations – upon the question of who should sweep the pavements and light the streets. At a late date, the practice of civil governance was a sphere of action that was meant to lie outside the cash nexus. In 1785 Lord Chancellor Mansfield protested against the growing practice of employing ‘hireling’ overseers of the poor: the office was meant to be done ‘without fee or reward’.
The presence of the domain of compulsory service reveals that, in an important sense, officeholding was simply coextensive with being a citizen. The Latin word officia translates as ‘duties’ or ‘responsibilities’. In 1584 John Hooker began his recitation of Exeter’s particular officers and their duties with ‘the office and duty of a freeman’, and he detailed what they must do under their general responsibility ‘to keep the peace, and defend the liberties of the city’.
Section 5
It would be foolish to take too sanguine a view of the practice of early modern officeholding, and we need now to record four cautions against too roseate a picture of communal participation. Some of these have already been hinted at.
First, … [it] is certain that for some offices and some periods there was a visible reluctance. Some offices were thought too demeaning; some too laborious; some too burdened with expensive obligations. Substantial hospitality was expected from mayors and aldermen. There was a widespread system of substitution – the nomination of deputies – and of fines for refusals. There are cases of bribes being paid to avoid being picked for grand jury service, poorer substitutes being chosen instead. …
… Most unpopular of all was the office of county sheriff. It was onerous and expensive, and only had tangible advantage at parliamentary election time, for the sheriff was the returning officer who could determine when, where and for how long the poll would take place. Shrieval appointments were often a device to punish people, the victim choosing between the burden of office and the fine for refusal. …
… The second caution concerns the tendency towards oligarchy and social exclusiveness. The principle of rotation jostled with the presumption that only the socially and economically weighty were qualified for office. There are strong signs of a drift towards oligarchy during the early modern period. Anthony Fletcher concluded that during the seventeenth century ‘village society was gradually becoming more polarised’, the middling sort increasingly standing apart from the poorer sort, and ‘by the 1660s most petty constables, tithingmen and headboroughs . . . probably came from the middling ranks’.
… Of course patterns varied from place to place. … Even so, the old principle must have persisted through the eighteenth century in some measure… London government in the seventeenth century was more elitist than it had been in the fourteenth, when a constitutional revolution had limited tenures of office and created mechanisms for popular accountability. Grand juries became gentrified in the eighteenth century, their composition very different from petty juries, a disparity which had not existed in the Elizabethan era.
The drift to oligarchy was most explicit in the growth of legislation imposing property qualifications, especially from the late seventeenth century. By an act of 1691 a property qualification was imposed upon parish office for the first time: only persons of £30 per annum, ‘if such there be’, could serve as surveyors of the highways. By an act of 1693 eligibility for jury service was confined to men with freehold, copyhold or life tenure worth £10 per annum. …
… The poorest, those who received alms, were almost invariably excluded. Proverbially, the overseers’ regime was often a grim despotism of the pettily powerful over the impoverished and powerless. Even so, historians of poverty now find a relatively high degree of life-cycle mobility whereby people might move into and out of the domain of the poor. If this is so, good conduct in the office of overseer might be a form of insurance for old age, when the former officer might himself become needy. Taken together with the principle of the cursus honorum, office might be said to have been exclusive, because age-specific, yet inclusive, because part of the life cycle. Oligarchy was in part age-specific rather than status-specific.
Women were excluded. Where officeholding rotated among properties, and a property was held by a widow, we find gender substitution, the chosen woman hiring a substitute. … Women, usually widows, were sometimes employed in stipended public capacities, as gaolers, keepers of houses of correction, hospital matrons and plague searchers. Data collection for the Bills of Mortality, the demographic tables of death in London, was carried out chiefly by women plague searchers. …
The third caution concerns the susceptibility of local office to central control, which mitigated local autonomy. Both through privy council orders and the interventions of assize judges, county and parish officers were sometimes subject to powerful pressures from the centre. This is strikingly so in the relentless inquisitions by Caroline governments, for example in the Book of Orders of 1631. At various periods the office of JP was subject to political and religious purging. Under Elizabeth, Lord Burghley combed the lists of justices in order to weed out papists. …
… The fourth caution amounts to a truism of social theory. Formal structures of officeholding rarely tell the whole story of the distribution and exercise of power. The mechanics of influence operated through networks of patronage and deference, landlordship and employment, credit and debt, in ways that could readily cut across the institutional fabric of communal self-government. Village officers might gather at the inn to conduct parish business, but it might be that the inn sign – say, the ‘Duke of Newcastle’s Arms’ – is just as revealing.
Section 6
So far we have stressed officeholding, in the sense of executive and judicial functions, rather than deliberative assemblies. Yet an important office of a citizen was attendance at the parish or ward meeting. Historians’ preoccupation with national parliaments occludes the pervasiveness of the practice of deliberation and decision making in the assemblies of the parish republics. The parish meeting or vestry was both a source of policy and an electoral body which chose officers. …Generally the parish held an annual meeting around Easter – though it could be more frequent – comprising all those who paid the poor rate. In London the wardmote or ‘inquest’ occurred annually, to discuss matters of concern and elect officers.
… Ambrose Barnes, merchant and alderman of Newcastle, thought himself suitable for ‘public government’ because he was an apt ‘governor of his own family’. The householder principle was deeply ingrained, and there seems to have been an almost complete absence of modern aggregative or majoritarian notions entailing the head-counting of all adults. When parishioners of St Nicholas Bristol in 1449 spoke of ‘the unanimous consent of all the parishioners’ they clearly did not intend our sense of all the parishioners. Some communities did approximate to a democracy of householders, but of course weightier households tended to matter more. The phrase ‘the advice and consent of the major part of the inhabitants’ was frequently used, ‘major’ meaning the weightier part and not the majority. The phrase occurs in an act of 1662 which stipulated that parish surveyors were to be chosen by churchwardens and constables ‘with the advice and consent of the major part of the inhabitants’. The parish meeting at Ardeley in Hertfordshire in 1713 called itself a ‘convention’ of ‘the major part of the inhabitants’. At Highley in the 1760s a meeting of the ‘the major part’ meant about one-fifth of household heads. This is what the ancient Greeks would have called democracy, for Athens was a direct democracy, but with a limited citizenry. …
… Parish constitutions varied with bewildering variety. Some had open vestries comprising all ratepaying householders. Some had select or close vestries, which were narrow oligarchies. Even so, a select vestry in a town might comprise bakers, glovers, butchers and cheesemongers – select, but of the middling sort. Often there was a mixture of the two, a select vestry sometimes summoning the larger citizen body … In Elizabethan Lewes in Sussex the ‘general assembly of the common weal of the town’ gathered in the Castle grounds. In St Margaret’s Westminster the select vestry met in the chancel of the church while the citizenry met in the nave. … Early modern English parish history is a saga of struggles between open and select vestries …
… At St Saviour’s Southwark in 1608 the parish leaders petitioned for closure, for there is ‘great confusion if the whole parish should be electors’: it would ‘incite the ruder sort to extreme liberty’. At St Dunstan’s Stepney in 1662 a select vestry was imposed since ‘by reason of the vast number of inhabitants the public business of the said parish cannot be orderly despatched in general assemblies’. …
… There were popular uprisings and reform movements against select vestries, some succeeding and others failing. At St Mary’s Westminster in 1667 the community in the nave of the church refused to be content to hear the vestry in the chancel announce to them the choice of church- wardens, and instead elected their own; they lost their case in King’s Bench. …
… In the wake of the French Revolution, open vestries sometimes imagined themselves to be miniature revolutionary conventions, with appropriately inflated rhetoric: ‘We the said inhab- itants so assembled... do hereby consent, agree, ordain, enact, and declare ’ – thus the parish of St Patrick Exeter in 1804. It is scarcely surprising that the Reverend Hammond Robertson in 1818 denounced the turbulent anarchy of the open vestry system as ‘a kind of republic’.
Section 7
The early modern English polity was paradoxically cross-grained in character. People saw themselves as subjects of an anointed monarch who was armed with awesome prerogative powers, yet also saw themselves as citizens of self-governing communities. … The growth of the Tudor and Stuart state, of court and royal power, in fact enhanced the role of the locality, because extra burdens of legislation and administration fell upon local elites and officeholders. The machinery for raising national taxes, and above all the ramifications of the poor law, resulted in a more intensively governed nation, but still a largely self-governing one. …
… Evidence for the articulation of abstract political [Republican, participatory, and communitarian] principles amid the quotidian practices of local government is inevitably fugitive. But it is there. It was commonplace for incorporated towns and cities to be construed as quasi-republics or ‘commonwealths’. In 1677 John Nalson remarked that whereas ancient direct democracy was impossible in large, populous modern states, nonetheless it did remain possible in ‘small municipal societies, as with us in corporations in England . . . and several small republics beyond the seas’, where ‘the laws are the plebiscita, the votes of the common people in general’. In the Elizabethan period London’s self-government was lauded. A tract of 1584 pointed out that no royal viceroy governed the proudly independent City. Aldermen spoke of ‘the commonwealth of the City’. In 1771 the London Magazine remarked that ‘the civil government of cities is a kind of small independent policy [polity] in itself ’. John Hooker said of the mayor of Exeter that he was ‘head of the whole common weale’, ‘the president of the publick state’. The friends of Stuart absolutism took such civic prowess to be altogether threatening. William Cavendish warned Charles II that ‘every city is a petty free state against monarchy’. Such prowess could threaten parliament too, if parliament turned tyrant. In 1645 the Leveller William Ball claimed that although parliament was the nation’s ‘representative body’, its ‘essential body’ was to be found in ‘the counties, cities, and towns corporate’.
As with towns, so with parishes. Eloquent testimony of a parish republic in embryo is provided by an account of a meeting of the principal inhabitants of Swallowfield in Wiltshire on 4 December 1596. They met at a time of dearth and unrest, to establish peace and amity, to provide against hunger and poverty, and to instil moral reform. They took it upon themselves to adopt a form of self-government, because ‘the justices are far off’. They agreed to hold regular meetings, adopt a constitution and appoint a registrar. They would trouble the justices as little as possible. They would be ‘counsellors of one another’. They would share the public burdens: all ‘officers whatsoever concerning her majesty’s service and all other officers for the public affairs of the tythings and the inhabitants thereof shall be countenanced and borne out of us all’. There were to be scores of Swallowfields during the chaotic years of the 1640s, when the Clubmen sprang up, spontaneously reinventing local commonwealths in areas that had become the ungoverned terrain of rival armies.
The readiness to contemplate quasi-republican forms extended to national government in the concepts of regency and of national associations designed to meet dynastic emergencies. The 1585 Association, intended to sustain government in the event of the queen’s assassination, was mimicked by the Whig Association of 1680, an undertaking to take up the reins of government upon Charles II’s sudden demise. …In 1688, during the collapse of James II’s regime, county associations were formed, and, in the face of utter confusion over who was or was not commissioned as justices, leading men took it upon themselves to conduct county government. The prototype of regency schemes was William Cecil’s ‘monarchical republic’ of 1563, prompted by Queen Elizabeth’s falling ill with smallpox. Stephen Alford has shown how a feudal-baronial idea of conciliar government melded with Ciceronian ideals of public service. He explores Cecil’s education in humanist public service, above all in Cicero’s Offices, the book ‘central to the understanding Elizabethan governors had of their part in the political scheme of things’. A similar kind of mental world nurtured … [an] aristocratic republicanism … The English both imagined and enacted acephalous rule.
Another kind of evidence to which we can turn is the idealization of local self-government in English utopian writing. Utopias are imagined communities, yet they are apt to be projections or ideal types of existing social practices. In Thomas More’s Utopia (1515) each group of thirty households annually elect a syphrogrant, and for every ten syphrogrants there is a tranibor. Except for the (elective) prince, everybody holds office for one year only.155 In James Harrington’s Oceana (1656) arithmetical neatness is imposed: there are to be 10,000 parishes, 1000 hundreds, and 50 counties (renamed tribes). The existing array of local officers (over- seers, high constables, jurymen and so on) are augmented by further officers, such as censors. Each tribe is to have a council, or phylarch, of 66 persons, chosen by parishes and hundreds.
Section 8
Historians of political thought, notably John Pocock, have encouraged us to think that English republicanism was both a late and a minority tradition. In this account, the republicanism nurtured in the Italian Renaissance erupted into English discourse with drastic suddenness as a consequence of the Civil War and the execution of King Charles I. The monarchical consensus of early Stuart England was shattered, and the unthinkable began to be said. The outcome was the principal work of English republican thought, Harrington’s Oceana and a tradition of theorizing influenced by it. But this view is in danger of confining the idea of republicanism to outright rejection of monarchy, and of supposing that the monarchic idiom precluded the republican.
Recently, however, a number of studies – signally Markku Peltonen’s on Elizabethan and Jacobean humanism and Quentin Skinner’s on the humanist context of Thomas Hobbes’s political thought – make it possible for us to see that, far from being unthinkable, a certain type of republican discourse was ubiquitous in the Tudor and early Stuart era. Literary scholars have likewise shown that commentaries upon classical texts like Lucan’s Pharsalia, and plays like Ben Jonson’s Roman series, created an ambient familiarity with republican ideas well before the Civil War. To be sure, this was not an anti-monarchic republicanism: it set out an ideal of a monarchical republic. From an early moment in the sixteenth century, the humanist discourse of the Italian Renaissance was not wholly channelled, upon arrival in England, into conduct books for courtiers contemplating the service of princes. Rather, humanist writers insisted upon the duty of civic participation as the key to the public good. Liberty and the common good depended upon people governing themselves, and upon inculcating a spirit of public service. As Richard Hurd remarked in 1754, ‘in the more absolute monarchies of Europe, all are courtiers. In our freer monarchy all should be citizens’.
A tract of 1576 showed how the common good depends upon people being willing to ‘bestow pains’ on public service, and to engage in ‘civil actions’. A handbook for magistrates of 1659 pronounced that a justice should be ‘an able man, vir virtutis, a man able in body and mind to do the commonwealth service’. The author explained that the ‘best of polities’ are ‘corporations, guilds, and fraternities’, about which we may learn not only from the Greeks and Romans, but also ‘from our own practice’. In 1575 and 1584 John Hooker, addressing the governors of Exeter, described the city as a ‘civitas’, ‘this our commonwealth and city’; he cited the republican humanist Patrizi and praised government by wise senators who put the well-being of the commonwealth above their private profit. In 1600 Thomas Wilson insisted on the freedom from royal interference of English cities, for, ‘every city was, as it were, a commonwealth amongst themselves’. In 1576 the town clerk of Tewkesbury published a tract which surveyed the wisdom of the ancients, Cicero and Seneca among others, by way of establishing how peoples should be gathered up into towns and cities which were ‘a body politic and civil in themselves’.
These ideals were grounded in intimate familiarity with classical authors and exemplars. The ubiquitous textbook was Cicero’s Offices, and the ubiquitous icon of public service was Cato. Cicero urged that it was a vice to despise the undertaking of magistracy; in public service people should be ‘forgetful of their own advantage’, and citizens should ‘abandon any hesitation’ about engaging in public life. … Hooker [1584] opened his account of the duties of the officers of Exeter by quoting Cicero: ‘nothing doth more nourish love, and preserve common society, than good will performed in the offices of humanity’. Robert Sanderson, adviser to the nation’s consciences in the mid-seventeenth century, claimed to have read Cicero’s book twenty times and to know it by heart. When John Locke drew up a reading list in 1698, under the heading of morality he listed two books, the New Testament and Cicero’s Offices. As for Cato, when the leathersellers of London in the late sixteenth century appealed to Lord Burghley they addressed him as the ‘very Cato of the commonwealth’. …
… Students of the impact of Renaissance humanism tend to stress civic, in the sense of urban, ideals, which were underpinned by a Roman and Greek tradition. They take the city-state to be the paradigm of the commonwealth. Yet, as we have seen, there was an equally vigorous idealization of the rural parish republic. The ideological underpinning of the latter had an independent source: the tradition of celebration of the perfections of the Anglo-Saxon constitution. In the work of Elizabethan antiquaries, in the common lawyers’ investigations of King Edward the Confessor’s laws, in Leveller polemics against the ‘Norman yoke’, and in the mid-and late eighteenth-century craze for King Alfred’s England, there was a persistent effort at recovery of the pristine Saxon origins of juries, moots, hundredal courts, reeves and tithingmen. Scholars have yet to recover what might be called the Saxon republicanism of early modern England.
The office that was most enthusiastically idealized by Saxonists was that of juryman. Juries provided Englishmen with the opportunity to be tried by their peers, and not be convicted and punished by the summary justice of state functionaries. In 1682 Henry Care proposed that jurors should keep their hats on in court as a mark of the dignity of their office. Grand juries were especially susceptible to declamations on the dignity of officeholding, because it was the custom for judges and county leaders to deliver a ‘charge to the grand jury’. These charges mainly exhorted vigilance in the execution of the laws, but they also expatiated on the ‘dignity’ and ‘antiquity’ of the juryman’s office. Jurymen were said to be ‘watchmen upon an high tower’, keepers of ‘the public safety and benefit’.
Section 9
The old world of the parish republic ended abruptly in the 1830s, principally with the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act. As Sidney and Beatrice Webb noted, it signalled ‘the death of the parish’. It was explicitly a matter of complaint by the Poor Law Commissioners in 1833 that, without reform, ‘as things now are each parish is an independent nation . . . [there are] fourteen thousand republics’.
[MGH: Regarding that final sentence, it must have been viewed as rather an unmanageable situation to endure at home in a state that ruled over what was fast becoming the largest empire in world history.]
The Source:
Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’ in The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850, edited by Tim Harris, Palgrave 2001
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.