{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02224199288256228, 'fraction_numerical': 0.010083036773428233, 'mean_word_length': 5.3641509433962264, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
David Eastwood, Governing rural England: tradition and transformation in local government, 1780–1840 . (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.) Pages xiv + 311.

As David Eastwood comments in his introduction, studies of early-nineteenthcentury government have since the Webbs presupposed the sterility and inefficiency of local government so as to make the rise of the modern bureaucratic state seem natural and inevitable. Building on the work of Joanna Innes, Eastwood adopts instead an eighteenth-century perspective that takes the independent, uncoordinated local-government institutions of parish and county as normal, efficient and capable of considerable self-reform in the face of sweeping early-nineteenthcentury social changes. Drawing principally on his own close empirical study of rural Oxfordshire, Eastwood paints a picture of a 'traditional order' in rural society, in which locally autonomous propertied men ruled according to the precepts of patriarchal Christianity. Horizons were constricted. Labourers were mobile but did not travel far, rarely outside the county, mostly within ten miles of their home parish. Farmers were also encouraged to cleave to their parish by slow agricultural growth and the stake they had in village institutions. Landlords found ample scope for their governing ambitions in the magistracy, acting singly as dispensers of justice, enhancing their individual authority through petty sessions which displaced the early modern panoply of manorial courts, and in Quarter Sessions as a virtual county legislature. Eastwood's account of the working and reform of Quarter Sessions provides the most original and insightful sections of his book. In his period the Quarter Sessions of many counties were directed by a reforming elite of active magistrates with an elected chairman. They met not once a quarter but once a month, sometimes once a fortnight. They had an executive officer, the clerk of the peace, and standing committees to deal with goals, police and public works, and increasingly after 1815 they made policy decisions about poor relief and lawenforcement practices for implementation by parishes. The bulk of the book scrutinizes magisterial policy-making and parochial administration in these two areas to demonstrate the continuing adaptability of traditional local government through the Napoleonic era and into the turbulent postwar years. A careful reconstruction of poor-law expenditure in Oxfordshire between 1780 and 1830 gives a continuously rising graph. This was due to magistrates' promotion of the allowance system, portrayed here as a realistic, socially sensitive response to (and not a cause of) falling wages and rising population. Given the lack of any coherent alternative direction from Parliament, the allowance system was probably the only feasible short-term response to the extraordinary crisis of the rural economy and was administered effectively and humanely until cut off by the deus ex machina of the New Poor Law, to which 'counties acquiesced in resigned unbelief (p. 184). A similar story is told about crime and policing. Again, a careful abstract of Oxfordshire records reveals, at least from 1805, a rising tide of crime with which parish and county had to cope. Again, 'sentimental paternalism' animated the justices' response, but a paternalism reinforced by substantial administrative