God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [39]
The system of local government which generated and enforced these measures also bound Stuart England together as an intimate political community, densely populated with officeholders. Communications were slow by modern standards although not quite as slow as is sometimes imagined. Between 1570 and 1620 royal posts took, on average, 65 hours to reach Newcastle, 80 to reach Berwick and 95 to reach Penryn. A region bounded by Newark, Chester and Exeter was within 40 hours of London, although letters slowed down considerably once they were off the main highways.65 For private letters speeds were more variable. One letter reached Ludlow in 36 hours from Charing Cross but this was unusual. Although the Harleys of Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire might know in advance of business coming before Parliament, news from London was often two weeks old by the time it got to them.66 In that sense many areas of England were somewhat remote from the seat of government.
But the chains of government were comparatively short: the localities were not in that sense at all remote from the centre of political authority. Every parish had at least one resident who was representing royal government, as a petty constable. A crude indication of what this implies is that a total population of 5.1 million was divided into about 9,000 parishes, an average of 570 people in each. Of that number 285 were men, of them 140 or so over the age of twenty-five.67 Since parish constables held office for one year at a time, there might be a dozen or more men who held, had held, or would hold office: nearly one in ten of adult males, or one in forty of the total population. Moreover, there were not many degrees of separation between a parish official and the King. A demand for reports on the implementation of the Books of Orders passed through a small number of hands before arriving in a village: from Privy Council to magistrates” bench to the high and then petty constables. Ordinary English people had little formal influence over the executive: parliaments met infrequently, the franchise was restricted, there was no ballot box, and parliamentary elections were frequently acclamations of candidates put forward by the county elite. But much more than in a modern bureaucratic state there was an intimate and continuous connection with the exercise of political power and, also, a degree of control over the detailed implementation of general instructions.68
The practice of active self-government connected with and confirmed the commonwealth and Calvinist ideals that were common amongst the gentry, and which were broadcast to inferior officers and wider publics in church and in court. This was particularly true among the university-educated gentry, of course, but a practical ideal of active citizenship was common too in the towns. The same period that saw the rise of the middling sort also saw a rapid increase in the number of towns enjoying independent legal powers – the boroughs. In 1640 England and Wales boasted 194 boroughs, of which only forty-eight had achieved that status a century earlier. Collectively they represented a kind of urban network, or system, in which active self-government was connected with ideals of civic identity, and civic virtue. With or without the gloss of a classical education many of the country’s governors were acting under the influence of republican values, ideals that saw in the virtuous man an active servant to the commonwealth.69 This system of participatory administration was a means of exclusion too, of course, for those outside the ranks of the village elite, those who were governed, not governors. But the language of commonwealth, in fact, was another means by which the governed could hold their betters to account – it was a term frequently invoked against grasping landlords or neglectful magistrates.70 Of course, even if neither side may have been genuinely