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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from Explore Bristol Research, http://research-information.bristol.ac.uk Author: Williams, Richard Title: County and municipal government in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset 1649- 1660. General rights Access to the thesis is subject to the Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International Public License. A copy of this may be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode This license sets out your rights and the restrictions that apply to your access to the thesis so it is important you read this before proceeding. Take down policy Some pages of this thesis may have been removed for copyright restrictions prior to having it been deposited in Explore Bristol Research. However, if you have discovered material within the thesis that you consider to be unlawful e.g. breaches of copyright (either yours or that of a third party) or any other law, including but not limited to those relating to patent, trademark, confidentiality, data protection, obscenity, defamation, libel, then please contact [email protected] and include the following information in your message: •Your contact details •Bibliographic details for the item, including a URL •An outline nature of the complaint Your claim will be investigated and, where appropriate, the item in question will be removed from public view as soon as possible. COUNTY AND MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT IN CORNWALL, DEVON, DORSET AND SOMERSET 1649-1660 by RICHARD WILLIAMS xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx A THESIS Submitted to the University of Bristol for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1981 XXXXXXX*1XXXXXXXXXXX County and Municipal Government in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset 1649-1660. by J. R. Williams SYNOPSIS This thesis is an examination of the workings and personnel of the major administrative institutions in four counties during the Interregnum. It seeks to identify how those institutions differ from - and in what ways they are similar to - the bodies that ran the shires before the Civil War. It also examines the participation of the local governing class in the army and in Parliamentary elections during the period. The theme of the work is continuity. It is demonstrated that the two major traditional institutions of local government - the Justices of the Peace acting alone or in Quarter Sessions, and the borough corporations - carried out the same functions and were run essentially by the same types of men as they had been pre-war. The thesis also seeks to show that what is often regarded as a major administrative innovation of the Civil Wars and Interregnum - the growth of a county committee structure to administer certain types of taxation and run the militia in the counties - was in fact merely a logical extension of pre-war developments, and that the type of work undertaken by committees did not to any great degree take over the functions of older bodies. The high degree of taxation during the 1650s, and the continuous presence of substantial numbers of regular and militia soldiers in the counties, were both novel developments in England during peacetime. These phenomena are examined in terms of the administrative burden they imposed, and of their effects on the localities. Some attempt is made throughout the thesis to assess the effect on public opinion of political changes as expressed through the gentry's perceived willingness to serve in local administrative bodies. This analysis is complemented in the final chapter of the thesis which considers the behavious of voters and candidates in Parliamentary elections during the period. * * * * * * * * * * * Acknowledgments In writing this thesis I have received a great deal of help and advice from many people. I thank them all. In particular, I am grateful to my supervisor, Professor Patrick McGrath, for his guidance, and to the staffs of the Record Offices of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Bath, Bristol, Plymouth, and Poole, of the British Library, and of the Public Records Office at Kew, Chancery Lane, and Portugal Street, without whose guidance the writing of this work would not have been possible. To my mother, who typed the final version, and to my wife, who for six years tolerated the presence in our various dwelling places of a great morass of books, pamphlets, files, and other papers, my gratitude knows no bounds. * * * * * * * * I declare that this thesis is entirely my own work. CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION: 1 Chapter One: The Administrative Functions of Quarter Sessions and Assizes, 15 Chapter Two: The Municipal Corporations and the Interregnum. 65 Chapter Three: County Committees - origins and Membership. 121 Chapter Four: County Committees - Taxation and Sequestration. 194 Chapter Five: The Military Presence in the West Country. 245 Chapter Six: The Impact of the Military 1649-60. 290 Chapter Seven: The Local Governors and the Election of MPs. 313 Concluding Chapter: 339 Bibliography and Abbrevations: 354 Appendix I: 370 Appendix II: 413 Appendix III: 439 Appendix IV: 610 Appendix V: 630 * * * * * * * * * * * 1. INTRODUCTION Recent studies of the English Civil War and Interregnum have tended to emphasise the importance of local events in the chain of causation leading to the great national developments of the period. Indeed one could almost argue that the investigation of the relationship between central government and local community has dominated the thought of modern historians of the time to the exclusion of all else. Particularly important has been the work of David Underdown, Alan Everitt and J. R. Morrill.(1) It might be possible to summarise the conclusions of such historians - bearing in mind that any such brief summary is bound to be something of a caricature - as being that the turbulence of mid- seventeenth century society was a result of tension between the successive centralising regimes of the period and the fiercely independent local gentry who ran the local governing institutions. These tensions first destabilised the government of Charles I, and after his execution, the attempt of the successive Interregnal regimes to reimpose the authority of central government - and indeed to strengthen it by setting up new local institutions more directly responsible to the Council of State or Privy Council in London - caused the chronic instability which led to the Restoration. At the local level, in the counties, the result of these crises was a constant (1) Underdown's thesis is summarised in his "Settlement in the Counties 1653-8" in Aylmer (ed). The Interregnum, 1972, pp.165-82. An important local study by him is Somerset in the Great Civil War and Interregnum. A.M.Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, was pioneer work in this field. J.R.Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces., deals coherently with relations between government and the localities in the period before the Civil War. Derek Hirst's study of "Court County & Policies before 1629" in Faction and Parliament ed. Kevin Sharpe, Oxford, 1978 throws important light on relationship between central government and 'country l in an earlier period. 2. quarrel between the proponents of centralisation and the upholders of local power; the latter have usually been identified with the "traditional country gentry". The ground has been well-trodden, and it must be asked - is there really a need for yet another investigation into this well-researched area? I hope to be able to answer that question in the affirmative over the course of the succeeding chapters of this.thesis. But in the meantime, perhaps the ground may be cleared by a number of observations about the nature of the work that has been undertaken in this field. The mid-seventeenth century was a period of profound change. Local historians have therefore looked in their work to find the changes that occurred at national level mirrored in the communities they have studied. Work has accordingly been concentrated on people rather than institutions, and on quarrels and turbulence rather than on the running of the bodies which administered local society. Underdown, for example, in his study of Somerset, argued powerfully that there was a split in Somerset society during the period so fundamental that it obscured all else, and that all local events during the 1650s must be seen in terms of the dispute between the centralisers - the minority who supported the government - and the ry gent . (2) Even Everitt - in his excellent study of the Kent county committee - tended to argue that a small clique monopolised local power throughout the Interregnum and accordingly split the county along partisan lines. (3) Furthermore, both men - and others - argued that the central government actively exacerbated this split by setting up new and revolutionary institutions with the deliberate aim of removing power from the traditional local bodies the gentry dominated. (4) 3 UtftrniereZe,pt1/491% II 4 See, for example, p.15 below. 3. NO one can deny that there were fundamental differences of opinion amongst country gentry in the 1650s about how government at local and national levels should be ordered. Furthermore, it would be foolish to suggest that there were not important changes in the way counties were run during the Civil War and Interregnum. However, quarrels over power and influence were not new. T. G. Barnes, in his excellently balanced study of Somerset during the Personal Rule of Charles I, noted that the appointment of local officials was closely dependent on the relative ascendency of the county magnates who nominated them, arguing that "The result was a growing factionalism intruded onto the rural bench which was not calculated to increase efficiency". (5) In reality, the split amongst the country gentry after the Civil War was just one in a long line of patronage quarrels, intensified perhaps by the turbulence of the War years and by the differing political philosophies of those magnates who took part in the quarrels.

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