The Ambiguities and Vagaries of Popular Control: Trust and Parochial Corruption in Early Modern England

Abstract

Abstract Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and across Britain’s empire, the idea took hold that a public office was a fiduciary trust, with legally and rhetorically enforceable duties of accountability, selflessness, and duty of care. Coupled with a remarkably free press which enabled the exposure and pursuit of corrupt activity, and petitioning activity that put pressure on Parliament, this development fostered important ideas and practices of public accountability. Yet, as the second half of the article shows, these were often difficult to effect and sustain at the local level, especially in large urban parishes, where campaigners were sometimes able to mobilize popular support for anti-corruption investigations but also faced a degree of indifference that meant change and reform were protracted, patchy, and by no means certain. Thus, on the one hand, popular control—or perhaps better, popular accountability—advanced in conceptual, legal, and some practical ways; but on the other, in some circumstances it was difficult to implement and was blunted by a range of factors that limited popular pressure and worked against reform. This article thus problematizes a linear narrative of unfailing progress toward greater accountability, highlighting instead the variety of local experiences and the nature of anti-corruption as an ongoing process. Both the central state and the parish state faced similar challenges, albeit in different contexts.