Name Index

To

The Justices of the Peace for the County of Devon and the Benevolences of 1614 and 1622

Trans. Devon Assoc., vol. 9 (1877), pp. 404-406.

by

A.H.A. Hamilton

Prepared by Michael Steer

The paper was presented at the Association's July 1877 Kingsbridge meeting. It preceded Hamilton's 1878 paper on Devon's JP's under Charles I and the Protectorate. JPs constituted a major element of the English (later British) governmental system. The JP system has been termed the squirearchy (i.e., dominance by the land-owning gentry). Depending on the jurisdiction, JPs' dispense summary justice or merely deal with local administrative applications in common law jurisdictions. JPs' conducted arraignments in criminal cases, and tried misdemeanours and infractions of local ordinances and bylaws. In the two instances that are the focus of Hamilton's paper, they were required by James I to collect an annual 'Benevolence'- a euphemism for the Subsidy Tax. Google with the Archive Organization has sponsored the digitisation of books from several libraries. The Internet Archive makes available, in its Community Texts Collection (originally known as Open Source Books), books that have been digitised by Google from a number of libraries. These are books on which copyright has expired, and are available free for educational and research use. This rare book was produced from a copy held by the University of California Library, and is available from the Internet Archive.