5 Board. In each instance, when a loan is required by a The accounts of most local authorities are now aud- 66 the duty of the Local Government Board to prepare an annual abstract of these returns for submission to Parliament.1 A somewhat curious check is provided to prevent the application of borough funds to improper or unauthorised objects. The Act provides that every order of the council for the payment of money out of the borough fund must be signed by three members and countersigned by the town clerk, and then enacts that any such order may be removed into the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court of Justice by writ of certiorari, and may be wholly or partly disallowed or confirmed, with or without costs, according to the judgment and discretion of the Court." The High Court is thus constituted a kind of casual auditor, whose aid can be called in when the regular audit fails. Judging from the reports, recourse is not often had to this deus ex machina. A defect in our municipal system is the absence of anything in the nature of a town budget. In France every commune, as well as the arrondissement and the department, has its annual budget showing its financial position, and estimating its financial requirements for the year to come. If some such system could be introduced into England it would probably do much to check local extravagance. One other point remains to be touched on, and that is the relation of boroughs to the Central Government. As we have seen, the controlling power of the Central Executive is purely negative. It can disallow certain things, such as parting with corporate property or the creation of loans on the security of the rates, but there its power of interference begins and ends. In all other matters a municipality enjoys, within the limits of the law, an unfettered liberty of action. 1 See Act of 1882, secs. 25-28. CHAPTER VI. THE COUNTY. The County-History of the Shire or County - County Officers -The Lord Lieutenant-The Sheriff - The Coroner - The Justices-County Jurisdiction-County Finance. For certain administrative purposes England is divided into counties. The term "county" is the Norman equivalent of the old Saxon "shire." 1 There is a third synonym, namely, the hybrid word "bailiwick," a term still used in legal phraseology. There are forty counties in England and twelve in Wales. In addition to the counties properly so called, there are, as we have seen, eighteen towns called "counties of cities" and "counties of towns" outside the jurisdiction of the counties within which they are situate, and which, for many purposes-chiefly in relation to the administration of justice-have themselves the organisation of a county. For parliamentary elections the counties, for the most part, have been cut up into divisions, and for electoral purposes the divisions so created are in effect distinct counties. The area of the county has no relation to any other local government area except the obsolete hundred. The boundaries of the county are intersected by the boundaries of boroughs, sanitary districts, highway districts, unions, parishes, school boards, and burial boards. Counties differ much both in size and population. Rutland contains 94,889 acres and 21,000 inhabitants. Yorkshire contains 3,882,851 acres, and has a population of 2,886,000 persons. Formerly there were many liberties exempt from county jurisdiction, but under an Act of 1850 nearly all of them have now been merged and obliterated in the counties within which they were situated. Ely and the Cinque Ports, however, for many purposes still retain their old exemptions. 1 "Shire" means share; thus the diocese of a bishop was called his "shire." The division of England into shires dates as far back, at any rate, as the reign of King Edgar, though the boundaries of some of the northern counties seem to have been altered since the Conquest. In Saxon times the government of the shires was representative. The shire moot, the governing assembly, was composed of all lords of lands, and of the reeve and four selected men from each township. The presiding officers were the ealdorman, a royal nominee, and the shire-reeve or sheriff, an elected officer, who it seems generally held office for life. The functions of the shire moot or folk moot were at once administrative, legislative, and judicial. The suitors that is, all who attended-were the judges. The power of the Central Government made itself felt but little, and the various shires were almost as independent as the different states in the United States. In early Norman times much of this independence was still preserved. The shire moot had become the county court. The royal power, however, was making itself more felt. Royal judges, the justices in eyre, made their circuits through the land, and tried the more important criminal and civil cases; but they tried these cases in the county assembly. The office of ealdorman was disappearing, and the chief officer was the sheriff or vicecomes, who was no longer elected, but was a nominee of the Crown and the farmer of the royal taxes, holding office for a single year only. The county court of the thirteenth century is thus described by Professor Stubbs:1 - "In its full session, that is, as it attended the itinerant justices of the king on their visitations, it contained the archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons, knights, and freeholders, and from each township four men and the reeve, and from each borough twelve burghers. It was still the folk moot, the general assembly of the people. It contained thus all the elements of a local parliament all the members of the body politic in as full representation as the Three Estates afterwards enjoyed in Parliament. The county court sat once a month, but the monthly sessions were only attended by those who had special business. For the holding of a full county court for extraordinary business a special summons was always issued. In the county courts, and under the presidency of the sheriff, all the business of the shire was transacted, and the act of the county court was the act of the shire in matters military, judicial, and fiscal, in the details of police management, and in questions --- when such questions arose-connected with the general administration of the county." From this time onwards the history of the county court is a history of decay. Its criminal jurisdiction has been taken from it and transferred either to royal commissioners—that is, the judges on circuit-or to the county justices, who are nominees of the Crown. 1 Const. Hist. vol. ii. p. 205. |