The reemergence of bailiwicks as units of provincial governance, and of the common courts as their hub, was in some respects an elegant solution to problems of royal order in the ancien régime. A class of legally educated, propertied men stationed in the ordinary courts was a logical successor to the authority of the high nobility and aristocracy. Indeed, the French legal class had become so indispensable to local government that it largely crossed the watershed of the Revolution unscathed, becoming a key part of the country notability of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the crown's perspective, the local legal elites had perhaps done a better job than anyone might have dared hope in protecting property, social order, and the family structure that underpinned the state. They thereby preserved the tax base of the French crown, not to mention the security of the privileged classes and the governing elites.

But the magistrates' position in the countryside and towns was so distinct from that of magistrates in the sovereign courts, and from other central royal administrators, that we need to see them from a new perspective. To understand their roles, we have to look in unexpected places: not in the urban centers of France but in the countryside of England, where the gentry had inherited much the same sort of power and for much the same reason.