ABSTRACT
JosephRitson’s Digest complicates the picture. Ritson wrote as highbailiff of the Court-Leet of the Manor and Liberty of the Savoy. A leet courtwas a medieval manorial institution, equally of local administration and ofadjudication. Courts leet were an important institution of local government inmany places prior to the reorganization of urban governmental institutions thatbegan with a wave of new ad hoc local administrative units in the lateeighteenth century, was continued with Municipal Corporations reform in the1830s, and then with the boards of health, and later the urban, rural, anddistrict boards. The examples of sanitary transgressions – persons presented and fined by theleet juries over roughly the previous century – are typical of leet jurieselsewhere. They reflect themultiple problems that arise in a closely-packed urban space. If, in retrospect, Ritson’s Savoy is administrative absurdity, it was nevertheless for centuries the horizon of sanitary possibility.
