ABSTRACT
Constables and overseers had, in those days, a very straightforward way of doing business. In the early decades of George III's reign Stockport district gentry seemed quite secure in their positions of power and prestige. It might have been expected that from the first half of the 1780s to the second half, misdemeanour cases involving Stopfordians would have increased demobilisation after major eighteenth-century wars frequently produced that phenomenon. Locally, there was a perception that the gentry, the professional men and the major industrialists could work together to form institutions which were close-knit but never closed. Local government was thus poised ambiguously between an oligarchic elite and a government thrown open to talent and ambition. This gave it a measure of continuity, a collective memory of how institutions and relationships functioned in pre-industrial times, and a pragmatic notion that repression, charity and reform each had a place in good governance.
