334 The Period of Constitution Making
humble yet substantial property. It was a queer jumble
of the ecclesiastical, economic, and governmental, of
things new and old; its officials reflected all times and a
most checkered history; there were things about the civil
parish as new as Elizabethan statutes and others older
than Alfred. The chief importance of its mention here
is, however, the fact that it strikingly embodies in the
later time the principle of unpaid public service resting
upon the humblest of the people. The parish
as an administrative unit was regarded by no one as an
organ of autonomous self-government. It was, if we may coin
a new phrase, an organ of local obligation—a many-sided in-
strument by which the national government and the estab-
lished church sought to arrange for the due performance of
such collective regulations and common services as were
deemed necessary to the welfare of the state. And they did
this, be it noted, not by the creation of a salaried hierarchy
of government officials, working tinder the control of the
king, but by the allocation of unpaid offices and burden-
some duties among the ordinary citizens serving more or
less in turn; and ... by the strict subordination of these
amateur parish officers to a superior organ of local self-govern-
ment, the justices of the peace of the county or municipal
corporation.1
The chief offices of the parish, such as those of church-
warden, constable, surveyor of the highways, and over-
seer of the poor, though they
differed widely in their origin, in their antiquity, and in their
scope, had many attributes in common. They all rested upon
a different basis from the modern conception of a public offi-
cial. They were unpaid. Service in them was compulsory,
with certain legal exemptions, upon all who belonged to the
parish.2
1 Webb, English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal
Corporations Act: the Parish and the County, pp. 40, 41. While Webb
thus emphasises what is undoubtedly the most significant feature of this
local government, it was not within the purpose or scope of his investiga-
tion to relate it to the history of earlier institutions or the tradition of royal
policy with respect to local affairs.
*Ibid., p. 15.