Reform in the provinces

by Anthony Fletcher

The foundation of the English state from the reigns of the Tudors to the age of Queen Victoria was a partnership between the crown and the country gentlemen who exercised administration and justice in the localities. This book is about a formative period in the making of that partnership. Anthony Fletcher suggests that the gentry's vigorous response to a gathering social crisis in the early decades of the seventeenth century enabled them to strengthen their nearly dominant hold upon local power. Although reform in the provinces, directed towards improving the efficiency and effectiveness of government, was not a tidy or even an entirely consistent process, there was enough continuity of administrative effort to ensure that by the reign of Queen Anne the enforcement of order had been streamlined in many respects. This book - the first synthesis of work done in the last two decades on local government - also provides fresh archival data on a number of counties. Fletcher begins with an ac