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Government in Provincial England under the Later Stuarts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

G. C. F. Forster
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Extract

In a paper presented on St George's day one may be forgiven for thinking of England, and not even simply of England as a nation but of provincial England, described by Professor Everitt as ‘a union of partially-independent county states’. He and other historians have paid fruitful attention to the ‘county communities’—and the urban communities too—of Tudor and Stuart England. But much of their research has been devoted to the period before 1660, and most of what little we know about the provinces under Charles II and James II is concerned with economic change, landownership, the professions, political faction and religious persecution. Recent work on government in the localities during the Interregnum has suggested that, contrary to earlier suppositions, ‘changes are often hard to seek’ and that local authorities carried out their duties ‘in much the same way as their predecessors’. Nevertheless, the impression survives that after the Restoration provincial government, like Punch, was not what it had been, that it did not recover from the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s, that local governors were left to their own devices, and that inertia set in largely because of ‘the long decline in central interference in local administration’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 33 , December 1983 , pp. 29 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1983

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