The vestry as a political institution

Abstract

The precise origins of the parish vestry lie embedded deep in the historical process. Joshua Toulmin Smith, the arch-opponent of centralization in the mid-nineteenth century, saw vestries as part of that ancient Anglo-Saxon collection of ward-motes, folk-motes, borough-motes and shire-motes which were the pride of English local self-government. The right of assembly in the vestry was the heritage of all English freemen and it was upon the vestry that with the passage of time many administrative functions devolved. In many places there was a complex intermingling of parochial and manorial institutions but by the nineteenth century manorial authority had become effete while the vestry was still vital and politically alive. In London particularly, vestries had become by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the main organ of local government and had a wide variety of administrative and quasi-judicial functions.

‘The House of Commons is not the House of Commons of my time, and I have no wish to re-enter it. If I had a taste for business, I might be a member of the Marylebone vestry.’ ‘Mr Ormsby’ in B. Disraeli, Sybil (1877 edn), 299