Enacting a Local Reform in the Age of Reform: A Salary for the Chairman of Middlesex Sessions

Abstract

This article examines the unsuccessful attempts made from 1833 to 1842 by Middlesex's justices of the peace to obtain a local statute allowing them to pay a salary to their chairman. Instead of securing such an act, they had to settle for a statute enacted by the government, a statute authorising the government to appoint their chairman for judicial proceedings. The article uses the story of Middlesex's attempt to obtain a salary for the chairman to examine: justices' attempts to reform the office of chairman of county Sessions; the limited powers of justices in their county Sessions; and the centralising aspirations of central government. The statute that the government produced in 1844 originated as a public bill. In contrast, the statute that Middlesex had attempted to obtain originated as private bills. The statute enacted by the government contained defects that probably would not have marred a statute enacted under the rules governing private bills. So, this article uses the legislative misadventures of the government's bill to compare the procedures for enactment of public and private bills. The article therefore provides a case study of mid‐19th‐century legislative procedures governing enactment of local legislation, while arguing that, as of the mid 19th century, parliament had not developed procedures appropriate to both representative government and a centralising central government using public bills for local matters.

Parliament and the English County Magistrate: The Parliamentary Aspirations of Sir George Onesiphorus Paul 1780–1810*

“…15 County benches, of which Gloucestershire was a notable example, were increasingly confident in the last decades of the century; 'nourished partly by the sense that they represented a certain consensus of propertied opinion in the face of social problems, partly by the leadership which at least some elements among the county gentry displayed.' 16 It was also necessitated by the preoccupation of central government for taxation and expenditure in pursuit of national goals -encapsulated in the phrase the 'fiscal-military state' -that deflected the interest of the administration away from solving problems that were apparent to magistrates on the ground. 17 Necessitated too, as domestic policy was devolved to the English localities to be administered under magisterial supervision.…”

“…16 Langford, Public Life and Propertied Englishman, 405.17 Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany, ed. John Brewer, Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford, 1999).…”