We have already heard the central government's pessimistic perspective on local justice as it was communicated in Nicholas Bacon's parliamentary speeches. In his closing oration, the Lord Keeper addressed the country’s provincial magistrates, admonishing them to put into practice the statutes that were especially prioritised by central policy. He warned of the dangers of bad justices who failed to enforce the law, and especially of negligent and corrupt officeholders who posed the most insidious threat to order by inviting the contempt of all authority. Beyond parliamentary chastisement, however, what could actually be done ‘to remove from the bench those that are drones and not bees’? At the turn of the seventeenth century, the court of Assize was responsible for overseeing and reforming the execution of local justice and governance throughout the country. The court was an itinerant tribunal that convened twice a year, generating a cyclical representation of central authority in which judges from the Westminster courts brought legal expertise, the voice of the sovereign and the Privy Council, and imposing ceremonial grandeur to their sessions in the English counties.