Power of the County: Sheriffs and Violence in Early Modern England

Abstract

In 1780 after Gordon rioters seized London, the Orientalist Sir William Jones wondered whether “the civil state” could have restored order without military action. He determined that the posse comitatus or power of the county could have quelled the riot.1 Summoning the power of the county, that is, calling all able-bodied residents to assist the sheriff in thwarting disturbers of the peace, would seem a quaint prescription for the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, and nothing more than a patriarchal conceit by the eighteenth century. Jones’s speculation may therefore be said to measure the gap between legal theory and governing realities of the early modern state. Yet Jones’s common-law mindedness2 demonstrates that an inherited rhetoric of law enforcement survived into the heyday of urban rioting,3 thereby raising the abiding question of how early modern England regulated violence absent a modern bureaucracy or military. Historians have confronted that problem by contrasting or relating order and disorder,4 proposing riot and rebellion as constituent features of political culture,5 treating faction as a stabilizing tension,6 and insisting that participation by the commonalty in the course of justice created a conundrum for crown officers.7