‘My Charges About the Highways’: Constables and Infrastructure in Seventeenth-Century Yorkshire

Abstract

The processes through which northern townships, customarily governed by strong manorial institutions, came to embrace the structures and routines of vestry governance and supervision by county justices have long required further scholarly investigation. This paper presents a reassessment of the role played by the constables of the West Riding township of Sowerby, Halifax parish, in managing the highways function over the seventeenth century. This is feasible through the happy combination of contemporaneous paper records for the Wakefield court leet and of unusual and exceptionally revealing petty constables’ accounts. Sowerby’s constables creatively exploited mechanisms at the leet to enforce tenurial and township obligations for road repairs. While the appointment of surveyors is unattested before 1694 and statute duty arrangements are, at best, uncertain, a precocious policy of tax-funded maintenance became embedded in governance routines, as the township’s propertied and clothier elite responded to the mid-century political crisis and pulses of assertiveness from the Justices’ bench. Independency and improvisation are strongly supportive of change from below as the north’s distinctive contribution to state formation in early modern England.