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English local government: The story of the king's highway
English local government The story of the king's highway Author:Sidney Webb Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III PAROCHIAL ROAD ADMINISTRATION f- I r was, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, one thing for Parliament to enact that parishes should keep... more » their highways in repair, and quite another thing to get it actually done. We have now to describe how the various legal obligations cast upon the Parish were fulfilled, and how far the system of compulsory and gratuitous amateur service succeeded in producing the roads that were required. And in this description we shall roam over the whole country, piecing together the contemporary testimony as to what was actually done in this parish or that, and seeking to convey an impression of parochial road administration as it was during the whole period between 1660 and 1835. To begin with the Parish as a whole, and its duty of nominating persons as Surveyors of Highways?called also Overseers or Supervisors of the Highways, or, more familiarly, Waymen, Waywardens, Boonmasters, Stonewardens or Stonemen?we gather that, except perhaps during the dislocation of the Commonwealth, such nominations were made with decent regularity, though the occurrence of complaints by some persons of having to serve continuously indicate that it was not easy to find a sufficient rota of suitable and willing inhabitants. In a grumbling, but on the whole good-tempered sort of way we see the farmers, in the rural parishes, taking it in turns to serve the office, occasionally pressing into the service the village innkeeper, or a little independent craftsman or shopkeeper. We do not gather that the duties were undertaken by the " gentry," even such as were not Justices of the Peace, or that the office was often accepted by clergymen or doctors, who were legally exempt, or that itwas ever imposed on the not inconsiderable number of women occupiers or ow...« less