Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Local society and particularly local government in eighteenth-century Britain has often been misrepresented. This was an age of oligarchy, when the currency of public life was patronage, repaid in the small change of deference. Landed acres, increasingly manicured and stylized, were a grand metaphor for effortless control by a landed elite. Squires and parsons ruled rural areas with a comfortable complacency, whilst variously growing affluence or genteel decline led to an atrophying of urban government. Walpole's ‘Venetian oligarchy’ held provincial England in its thrall even more completely than it had subordinated parliament. The nearest the twentieth century came to an official history of Britain was the Oxford History of England. For half a century the eighteenth-century episode in this essentially Whiggish national history was captured in Basil Williams's The Whig Supremacy 1715–1760 (1939), which held its place until a new wave of scholarship broke with the publication of Paul Langford's successor volume, A Polite and Commercial People , in 1983. Williams's picture of local government was puzzlingly dismissive. Provincial institutions and the fabric of local life represented ‘an historical scrap book’. England was governed by ‘various haphazard methods’, which could not be ‘dignified with the name of a system’. On the ground there was an‘amazing hotch-potch of authorities ... log in or subscribe to read full text