Earlier versions of this essay have been read at seminars at the universities of Sheffield and Oxford, and I am grateful for comments from participants on those occasions. A number of people have discussed these issues with me or read drafts of this article. In particular I am grateful to Mark Greengrass, Ian Kershaw, Stephen Salter, Gareth Stedman Jones, John Walter, and John Watts for their help.

¹ “State and Society, 1130–1815: An Analysis of English State Finances,” in Zeitlin, M., ed., Political Power and Social Theory, vol. I (1980), 165–208Google Scholar. Much of the material and argument was incorporated into his book, The Sources of Social Power, I, of A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar.

² “State and Society,” 166.

³ Ibid., 196.

⁴ Williams, P., The Tudor Regime (Oxford, 1979), 77Google Scholar.

⁵ In the work of Conrad Russell, for example. See, most recently, his The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar.

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⁷ Fletcher, A. J., Reform in the Provinces (New Haven, 1986), 316Google Scholar.

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¹⁰ Krader, L., Formation of the State (Englewood-Cliffs, 1968), 13Google Scholar.

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¹⁶ Mann, “State and Society,” 166.

¹⁷ In his paper at the Anglo-American Conference of Historians, Institute of Historical Research, London, July 1990. See also the argument of Goldstone, cited below.

¹⁸ For constables, see Wrightson, K., “Two Concepts of Order,” in Brewer, J. and Styles, J., eds., An Ungovernable People? (London, 1980), 21–46Google Scholar, and, more generally, Kent, J., The English Village Constable (Oxford, 1986Google Scholar). For gentry justices of the peace, see A. J. Fletcher, “Honour, Reputation and Officeholding in Elizabethan and Stuart England,” in Fletcher, A. J. and Stevenson, J., eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), 92–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²⁰ See above, note 15.

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²⁴ This material is discussed in Braddick, Nerves of State, ch. 1.

²⁵ Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, 360 and passim; Coleby, A.M., Central Government and the Localities: Hampshire 1649–1689 (Cambridge, 1987CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Coleby has been criticised by Norrey, P. J., “The Restoration Regime in Action,” Historical Journal, 31:4 (1988), 789–812CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and by J. Morrill, “The Sensible Revolution,” reprinted in Morrill, J., ed., The Nature of the English Revolution (Harlow, 1993), 419–53Google Scholar, especially 451 and note 98. Doubt is also cast on Coleby's findings with regard to religious dissent by A. J. Fletcher, “The Enforcement of the Conventicle Acts 1664–1679,” in Sheils, W. J., ed., Persecution and Toleration, Studies in Church History, 21 (1984), 235–46Google Scholar.

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²⁹ Kishlansky, M. A., Parliamentary Selection (Cambridge, 1986CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Harris, T., London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar and “The Problem of ‘Popular Political Culture’ in Seventeenth Century London,” History of European Ideas, 10:1 (1989), 42–58Google Scholar.

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³¹ I use the term here as shorthand to describe the possibility of shared socioeconomic interests among a group defined by a common relationship to the means of production and exchange, rather than in the sense of a fully conscious class formation, something which has not been shown to exist in this period.

³² Axtmann, R., “The Formation of the Modern State: A Reconstruction of Max Weber's Arguments,” History of Political Thought, 11:2 (1990), 295–311Google Scholar, at 295.

³³ Slack, P., The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1990), 195Google Scholar.

³⁴ Ibid., 300.

³⁵ Ibid., 303.

³⁶ Ibid., 303–4.

³⁷ For godly magistracy in general, see Collinson, P., The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar ch. 4, and Underdown, D., Fire from Heaven (London, 1992Google Scholar).

³⁸ Jones, E. L., The European Miracle (Cambridge, 1987Google Scholar), especially ch. 2.

³⁹ For a concise discussion of the conceptual and empirical difficulties of isolating the interests that lie behind the exercise of power, see Lukes, S., Power. A Radical View (London, 1974CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

⁴⁰ On this, see L. Gowing, “Language, Power and the Law: Women's Slander Litigation in Early Modern London,” in Kermode, J. and Walker, G., eds., Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (London, 1994), 26–47Google Scholar, and Meldrum, T., “A Women's Court in London: Defamation at the Bishop of London's Consistory Court, 1700–1745,” London Journal, 19:1 (1994), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For some observations on scolds in the earlier period, see M. Ingram, “ ‘Scolding Women Cucked or Washed’: A Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern England?,” in J. Kermode and G. Walker, eds., Women, Crime and the Courts, 48–80. There is, of course, a much more extensive literature available with which to consider this question. I am grateful to Robert Shoemaker and Faramerz Dabhoiwala for discussing this material with me.

⁴¹ Lukes, Power, especially at 26.

⁴² Poggi, The slate, 48–49.

⁴³ J. M. Rosenheim attributes this in part to the routinisation of local government and even to “a measure of professionalization to service in the magistracy” (“County Governance and Elite Withdrawal in Norfolk, 1660–1720,” in Beier, A. L., Cannadine, D., and Rosenheim, J. M., eds., The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 95–125Google Scholar, at 122).

⁴⁴ Goldstone, J. A., Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley, 1991Google Scholar), 5n.