"This is a study of the social and cultural implications of the growth of governance which occurred in England in the context of social and economic change in the century after 1550. Although historians have long associated this period with centralization, with the quickening tempo of local administration, and with an increase in litigation, these trends have usually been discussed in isolation. This book analyses the relationship between these historiographies of government by exploring the growth and elaboration of the role of the early modern state. It is less concerned with institutional development than with the cultural role played by the middling sort in social and political regulation, especially through recourse to law."--BOOK JACKET.