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Participatory administration brought politics into the villages and towns of early modern England in a more direct sense too. Those in the officeholding population, which included men of relatively humble status, as well as those with whom they dealt, made decisions about how to interpret general policies in the light of local circumstances. This served as a political education for a still wider group. Grain riots, for example, reveal both an awareness of official policies and ideals on the part of the poor, and a capacity to deploy those ideals to their own advantage. Local officeholders proclaimed themselves to be fathers of their country, taking on a duty of care for their inferiors as a consequence of their social position. When grain prices were high this paternal responsibility required them to intervene in the market to restrain profiteering and to ensure that the local population was fed. On numerous occasions the local poor acted on their own initiative, stopping and distributing loads of grain destined for the market, imposing a fair price or calling for magistrates to take up their duties. The same seems to be true of the parish poor, who were able to deploy a language of entitlement in order to secure supplements to their income. The politics of subsistence, and of the parish, brought even the poor into contact with official prescription and practice.72 During the later 1640s, when there was no Privy Council to prompt local governors to implement dearth orders, they may in fact have been responding to pressure from below, as petitioners called them to account. In doing so they used the values and terms routinely employed to justify the authority of magistrates.73 This is not evidence of informed opinions about the membership of the Privy Council, or the trend of episcopal appointments, but it does bear testimony to the administrative and political integration of seventeenth-century England.

It was not just in routine administration that politics resonated in local life. Quarter sessions were convened and presided over four times each year by the Justices of the Peace. The sessions were both a criminal court and an administrative authority, and operated with the help of juries composed of substantial freeholders – village worthies. Twice each year judges from the central courts in London went on circuit, hearing more serious criminal cases and bringing with them messages about current priorities at the heart of government. Here, too, local officeholders and jurymen (drawn from the ranks of the local gentry and middling sort) were brought into direct contact with essential functions of government. Many of them would have had experience of the law in more local settings too: in manor or borough courts, defending their property rights or participating in the regulation of local society.74

English criminal law was not inquisitorial – crimes were presented to the courts, rather than sought out and investigated by officers of the court. Here, too, local discretion was a regular and informed feature of the system and in many cases it seems that there was a preference for more informal sanctions. Those cases that did come to court usually required the agreement of juries that there was a case to answer, and the judgement of juries about the guilt or innocence of the accused. This participatory legal system overlapped with the institutions of local government, and was dependent for its life on the voluntary action of substantial local inhabitants.75 Institutional connections between the political centre and the English localities therefore offered a practical political education, both about what was going on and how things worked, and the social depth of that political education was marked. In some institutions, such as the assizes, quarter sessions or Parliament, national and local interests mixed. At the assizes local legal and administrative issues took their place alongside the transmission of ideas