It is surely no coincidence that the places in the first half of the nineteenth century where we see the penitent still exhibited and the scold still ducked or bridled are those small market towns or parishes away from the babble of metropolitan politics and reform. These were also the places where rituals of popular justice were most firmly entrenched. Popular justice could only be delivered where it was possible to mobilise a crowd, where the offence was adjudged sufficiently egregious and where the participants were endowed with their own sense of entitlement. It was from a sometimes ferocious sense of local patriotism and a concern for communal reputation that the intuition that one was entitled to sit in judgement upon the acts of one's neighbours derived, although as we shall see this was not fostered by geography alone but often also bolstered amongst specific groups by a strong and additional sense of occupational affinity.

Local Patriotism

Parochial loyalty was highly developed in the early modern period but was likely getting stronger into the eighteenth and possibly even into the early nineteenth centuries. In part this was a consequence of the Poor Relief Act 1662, requiring parishes to offer relief to their own paupers but to remove paupers whose legal settlement was in another parish. Cash-strapped parishes were thereafter very keen to formalise the distinction generally acknowledged within the community, between those who genuinely belonged and those who did not.