Fourth and last adjustment: no royal official with pretensions to gentle status could possibly tolerate not being named to that essential organ of local government, the county commission of the peace, which the Crown or its local delegates issued for every shire or county in England. Since the fourteenth century, the justices of the peace (JPs) had taken on more and more local powers: they were ideal agents from the monarchy’s point of view, since apart from a fairly nominal daily payment for turning up at the ‘quarter sessions’ every three months, they cost nothing (most of them got ample
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