God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [38]
In the face of these problems there was a remarkable harmony between crown policies and local officeholders: an ideological consensus among social elites supported active government and underpinned the social and political position of those benefiting from economic change. The deserving poor (the old, the young, the sick and, increasingly, the honest but unemployed) were offered help; the undeserving were set to work or punished. Vagrants were whipped and sent home. Many of these measures, and the refinements that accompanied them, originated in local solutions. Boroughs, in particular, faced the social problems associated with migration, a population with a high proportion of wage earners and a dependence on the market to supply food. Statute and Privy Council urgings lent authority to local initiative as much as they gave leadership. Where particular measures were ignored this was not because they were disapproved of in principle, or were thought to be of dubious legality, but because they were thought to be inappropriate to specific local conditions. There might be a preference in some places for Christian charity rather than bureaucratic dole as the solution for the deserving poor, but these were differences of accent rather than language.62
Over three generations prior to 1640 this system had developed flexibly and without significant tension between national and local governors. This harmony of vision reflected a harmony of interest. Local government was staffed by volunteers, who held office in order to cement their local social standing and, no doubt, out of a sense of duty. Measures intended to protect social order and the commonwealth also served the interests of these local elites. Village constables, who served for one year at a time without payment, were drawn from the middling sort, the group prospering from long-term economic change, and they were implementing measures to control the adverse consequences of the change, not to reverse it. In offering relief to their poorer neighbours, or imposing discipline on them, they reinforced their own social position. There was in general to tension for them in co-operating with national legislation or the promptings of the Privy Council. Above them stood high constables – responsible for numbers of parishes within a county and drawn from a slightly more elevated social rank – and magistrates (Justices of the Peace) – county gentlemen serving voluntarily in the Commission of the Peace appointed by the crown. These men higher up the ladder of local government and of correspondingly higher social status had no more reason to resist these measures than the village constables. In general the hierarchy of local officeholders corresponded pretty closely to the hierarchy of social status, and measures designed to preserve social order drew on this congruence of political and social aspirations. The result was successful, if we measure success in terms of a harmony of purpose between national and local governors.63
This was no less true during the 1630s than over the previous three generations. Prompted by harvest failures between 1629 and 1631, and by outbreaks of the plague, the Privy Council drew up Books of Orders which regularized practices that had evolved over a number of years. Dearth orders requiring magistrates to seize and sell stocks of grain at a fixed price were implemented in the bad harvest year of 1631 but not in the later 1630s, and this might reflect some disaffection with the implications for the property rights of the middling and richer sort. But there were marked continuities in these social policies into the 1640s: the Earl of Manchester was author both of the Caroline and of the parliamentary plague orders,