Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 2 (2006), p. 351

incl. p&p from Mr David Wilson, AAS Publications Officer, Stone Science, Bryn Eglwys, Llanddyfnan, Llangefni, Anglesey, ll75 8ul.

The evolution of county government in nineteenth-century Britain has received relatively little attention from modern scholars. Yet the sources for such a project are vast, especially for the period after the 1840s when central government insisted that greater attention be paid to the preservation of locally-generated records. The appearance of a heavyweight study on the form and reform of county administration in nineteenth-century Anglesey which draws on this almost ignored repository of contemporary documentation is thus very welcome.

In twenty chapters stretching across four hundred pages, William Griffith sets out to chart the history of county administration from the onset of the French revolutionary wars to the eve of the Great War. Throughout the first hundred years of the period, the prevailing theme in Anglesey was the endless struggle to find men willing – let alone competent – to carry out the business of local government. The reasons for the shortage of manpower are not far to seek. A well-placed anecdote highlights the grim reality of what service in the country magistracy actually involved, sitting all day in damp clothes in a cold room listening to trivial cases (p.66). In Anglesey the internecine squabbling of the local gentry was an additional factor, and in the 1840s reduced the apparatus of local administration to a near standstill.

So few magistrates were active that the bench relied heavily on its professional employees, and in one of the most illuminating sections of the book, Griffith details the work of officers such as the clerk of the peace and the county treasurer. Nevertheless, by 1860, with additional functions (such as policing) being heaped on their shoulders, questions began to emerge as to whether the quarter sessions as currently constituted was really the best body that could be found to deal with county administration.

Despite the wide political consensus on the need for some kind of change, it was not until the mid-1880s that pressure mounted for reform. At this point, the advent of a democratic franchise, together with mounting radical attacks on the existing aristocratic magistrates and the new importance of particularly ‘Welsh’ issues in politics – issues suitable for local settlement such as licensing – focused attention on local g overnment reform.

The chapters on the new county council elected in 1889 are full of interest. Griffith calculates that the new bodies galvanized attention in Wales to a far greater degree than they did elsewhere: 70 per cent of seats in Wales were contested compared with an average of 54 per cent for England and Wales as a whole, and voter turnout was an impressive 80 per cent (p.267). Public interest in county government declined somewhat after the initial outburst of enthusiasm, but this had the desirable effect that the council remained very stable in terms of personnel, its predominantly agricultural nature reflecting the core industry of the island. The new councils also reflected local preferences in other ways, notably in their championship of the Welsh language. Not only did the Council take on the local railway company when it threatened to dismiss monoglot Welsh-speaking employees, but it was careful to ensure that its literature relating to vital new services such as midwifery appeared in both languages.

Griffith concludes his account with a survey of the work of the council after 1889; a chapter on the 1902 education act; and an interesting examination of the magistracy on the eve of the Great War. Although the gentry and aristocracy still held places on the bench they were, as Griffith says, by now ‘a marginal irrelevance’ (p.396) and the active portion of the magistracy was made up of farmers. The magistrates’ bench had come to resemble the new county council.

For all its strengths there are times when a broader ‘social history’ context would have been valuable. There is a lot more here about the finance of local administration than there is about the society which the quarter sessions helped administer. As a consequence, local government sometimes seems a strangely disembodied institution. We get little impression of the impact on Anglesey society of events ranging from the French wars to the cattle plague crisis of 1865–7 and the tithe war of the late 1880s, even though the responses of the quarter sessions are faithfully chronicled.

More use might also have been made of the extensive reports of quarter sessions business which appeared in local newspapers. Particularly during crises such as the cattle plague, members of the bench often took it upon themselves to be representatives of their particular localities, lending the session the air of a county parliament. Similarly, the press offers a rich source of comment concerning the activities of the magistrates, and there were various stages during the century when complaints about ‘justices’ justice’ in relation to the game laws might form the starting point for a wider critique of county government as a whole.

It would be wrong to end on a negative note, however. Griffith has managed to produce a big and important book on a subject of considerable interest. It is a study that can, and hopefully will, become a model for the history of county government in other parts of Britain.