Local Government and politics 1714-1742

source: England in the XVIII Century by J.H.Plumb

As said, the population was less than 6 million so there were only 179 peers in 1726 in Britain. They knew each other very well. Similarly, in local counties the number of people who really mattered were familiars if not friends, and the same was true of towns. The result was that politics was personal, intimate, and the institutions and local administration depended on them.

The basic unit of government was the parish (= parrocchia o il distretto servito da una chiesa). The officials (unpaid) were church wardens, overseers of the poor, surveyors of the highways, the constables. They were all under supervision and control of the Justice of the Peace, who in rural England was the squire, in the towns was the Alderman. Administrative and judicial power came under the Justice. The entire life of the countryside was under his control.

Above the Justice there were a number of county officials: sheriff, lord lieutenant, deputy lieutenant whose administrative funcions had disappeared but they were still officers of considerable social and political importance. The Lord Lieutenant controlled the appointment of the Justice of the Peace.

One of the major occupation of all these officials and landed gentry and burgesses was the control of the election of the representatives to the House of Commons. It was an age when the electoral district were not based on the number of active population. The House of Commons consisted of 513 members for England and Wales and 45 for Scotland. Each English county elected 2 members and every freeholder with 40 shilling p.a. was allowed to vote. There were counties with only one voter (Gatton in Surrey), Bath had 32 voters. These are what came to be regarded as rotten boroughs (= distretti corrotti). So the XVIII century was an age in which property had to be represented in Parliament, not people. Patronage and alliance were the common way to obtain a post. Joseph Ashe in 1710 was a member of Parliament and there is nothing strange in this, but he could boast fifty relatives who were also members of Parliament.