Why 1829? 143wealthier property owners: one vote was allowed for each £25 of rateable
property owned, up to a maximum of six votes. David Eastwood rightly
comments that the act was ' ... designed to place power unequivocally in
the hands of large property-owners, major tenant farmers, and the bigger
employers'.^80 The second act (59 Geo. III c. 9) made it easier for those
parishes that wished it to establish select vestries and to hire professional
poor law overseers.^81
What parochial reformers wanted in London, however, was more repres-
entative local government, not the more restrictive version of the Sturges
Bourne Acts. Reformers' associations were organized in several London
parishes in the 1820s such as St Martin-in-the-Fields, St Pancras, St Mary-
lebone, and the united parishes of St Giles and St George, Bloomsbury.
Parish meetings were one of the few types of public meetings that did not
need the ptior approval of a magistrate. Disagreements at these meetings
became quite heated at times. Demands made by reformers to be allowed to
examine vestry records in St Martin-in-the-Fields ended in a riot in 1822
when the reformers tried to force their way physically into the vestry room.^82
Police officers from the Hatton Garden police office were called in to put
down the riot that erupted at a vestry meeting in St Matthew, Bethnal Green,
in 1823.^83 Suits and counter-suits were filed in the law courts over the right
of ratepayers to see the accounts of the vestries of St Giles-in-the-Fields, St
George, Bloomsbury and St Paul, Covent Garden.
On rare occasions reformers succeeded in obtaining local acts that replaced
a particular select vestry with an elected one. In St Paul, Covent Garden, a new
local act in 1829 ended the life of the select vestry. Anyone who had paid the
rates for at least three months and whose property was rated at £20 or more was
allowed to attend vestry meetings. The vestry then elected an executive com-
mittee to manage day-to-day administration.^84 In other parishes-St Maryle-
bone, St Pancras, and the united parishes of St Giles and St George,
Bloomsbury, for example -neither vestry nor reformers gave any ground and
the disputes and lawsuits continued for some time.
In Stoke Newington, the vestry was already open but the lighting and
watching trustees were a self-elected, self-perpetuating body. They too
were challenged in the spring and summer of 1829 over their accounting
procedures and the management of funds that came to them from local
rates. The vestry demanded that trustees allow the parish to audit their
books and publish their accounts and resolved if Peel's Police Bill did not
supersede the trust, 'that it will be expedient to take measures to obtain for
the Inhabitants rated for that purpose the power of filling up the vacancies
in the said lhlst and also to obtain an annual public Audit and publication
of the Accounts'. In its reply to the vestry, the Stoke Newington trustees
seem to have taken great satisfaction in informing the vestry that not only
were the parishioners welcome to appoint auditors, but also