Edward Coke
Sir Edward Coke was an English barrister and politician, considered to be the greatest jurist of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Born into an upper-class family, Coke was educated at Trinity College, before leaving to study at the Inner Temple, where he was called to the Bar on 20 April 1578; as a barrister he took part in several notable cases, including Slade's Case, before earning enough political favour to be elected to Parliament, where he served first as Solicitor General and as Speaker of the House of Commons. Following a promotion to Attorney General he led the prosecution in several notable cases, including those against Robert Devereux, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Gunpowder Plot conspirators; as a reward for his services he was first knighted and made Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. As Chief Justice, Coke restricted the use of the ex officio oath and, in the Case of Proclamations and Dr. Bonham's Case, declared the King to be subject to the law, the laws of Parliament to be void if in violation of "common right and reason".
These actions led to his transfer to the Chief Justiceship of the King's Bench, where it was felt he could do less damage. Coke successively restricted the definition of treason and declared a royal letter illegal, leading to his dismissal from the bench on 14 November 1616. With no chance of regaining his judicial posts, he instead returned to Parliament, where he swiftly became a leading member of the opposition. During his time as a Member of Parliament he wrote and campaigned for the Statute of Monopolies, which restricted the ability of the monarch to grant patents, authored and was instrumental in the passage of the Petition of Right, a document considered one of the three crucial constitutional documents of England, along with Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1689. Coke is best known in modern times for his Institutes, described by John Rutledge as "almost the foundations of our law", his Reports, which have been called "perhaps the single most influential series of named reports".
He was a influential judge. In America, Coke's decision in Dr. Bonham's Case was used to justify the voiding of both the Stamp Act 1765 and writs of assistance, which led to the American War of Independence; the surname "Coke", or "Cocke", can be traced back to a William Coke in the hundred of South Greenhoe, now the Norfolk town of Swaffham, in around 1150. The family was prosperous and influential – members from the 14th century onwards included an Under-Sheriff, a Knight Banneret, a barrister and a merchant; the name "Coke" was pronounced during the Elizabethan age. The origins of the name are uncertain. Another hypothesis is that it was an attempt to disguise the word "cook". Coke's father, Robert Coke, was a barrister and Bencher of Lincoln's Inn who built up a strong practice representing clients from his home area of Norfolk. Over time, he bought several manors at Congham, West Acre and Happisburgh, all in Norfolk, was granted a coat of arms, becoming a minor member of the gentry. Coke's mother, Winifred Knightley, came from a family more intimately linked with the law than her husband.
Her father and grandfather had practised law in the Norfolk area, her sister Audrey was married to Thomas Gawdy, a lawyer and Justice of the Court of King's Bench with links to the Earl of Arundel. This connection served Edward well. Winifred's father married Agnes, the sister of Nicholas Hare. Edward Coke was born on 1 February 1552 in one of eight children; the other seven were daughters – Winifred, Elizabeth, Anna and Ethelreda – although it is not known in which order the children were born. Two years after Robert Coke died on 15 November 1561, his widow married Robert Bozoun, a property trader noted for his piety and strong business acumen, he had a tremendous influence on the Coke children: from Bozoun Coke learnt to "loathe concealers, prefer godly men and briskly do business with any willing client", something that shaped his future conduct as a lawyer and judge. At the age of eight in 1560, Coke began studying at the Norwich Free Grammar School; the education there was based on erudition, the eventual goal being that by the age of 18 the students would have learned "to vary one sentence diversely, to make a verse to endight an epistle eloquently and learnedly, to declaim of a theme simple, last of all to attain some competent knowledge of the Greek tongue".
The students were taught rhetoric based on the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Greek centred on the works of Homer and Virgil. Coke was taught at Norwich to value the "forcefulness of freedom of speech", something he applied as a judge; some accounts relate. After leaving Norwich in 1567 he matriculated to Trinity College, where he studied for three years until the end of 1570, when he left without gaining a degree. Little is known of his time at Trinity, though he studied rhetoric and dialectics under a
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state located in the northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The Appalachian Mountains run through its middle; the Commonwealth is bordered by Delaware to the southeast, Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, Lake Erie and the Canadian province of Ontario to the northwest, New York to the north, New Jersey to the east. Pennsylvania is the 33rd-largest state by area, the 6th-most populous state according to the most recent official U. S. Census count in 2010, it is the 9th-most densely populated of the 50 states. Pennsylvania's two most populous cities are Philadelphia, Pittsburgh; the state capital and its 10th largest city is Harrisburg. Pennsylvania has 140 miles of waterfront along the Delaware Estuary; the state is one of the 13 original founding states of the United States. Part of Pennsylvania, together with the present State of Delaware, had earlier been organized as the Colony of New Sweden.
It was the second state to ratify the United States Constitution, on December 12, 1787. Independence Hall, where the United States Declaration of Independence and United States Constitution were drafted, is located in the state's largest city of Philadelphia. During the American Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg was fought in the south central region of the state. Valley Forge near Philadelphia was General Washington's headquarters during the bitter winter of 1777–78. Pennsylvania is 170 miles north to south and 283 miles east to west. Of a total 46,055 square miles, 44,817 square miles are land, 490 square miles are inland waters, 749 square miles are waters in Lake Erie, it is the 33rd-largest state in the United States. Pennsylvania has 51 miles of coastline along Lake Erie and 57 miles of shoreline along the Delaware Estuary. Of the original Thirteen Colonies, Pennsylvania is the only state that does not border the Atlantic Ocean; the boundaries of the state are the Mason–Dixon line to the south, the Twelve-Mile Circle on the Pennsylvania-Delaware border, the Delaware River to the east, 80° 31' W to the west and the 42° N to the north, with the exception of a short segment on the western end, where a triangle extends north to Lake Erie.
Cities include Philadelphia, Reading and Lancaster in the southeast, Pittsburgh in the southwest, the tri-cities of Allentown and Easton in the central east. The northeast includes the former anthracite coal mining cities of Scranton, Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton. Erie is located in the northwest. State College serves the central region while Williamsport serves the commonwealth's north-central region as does Chambersburg the south-central region, with York and the state capital Harrisburg on the Susquehanna River in the east-central region of the Commonwealth and Altoona and Johnstown in the west-central region; the state has five geographical regions, namely the Allegheny Plateau and Valley, Atlantic Coastal Plain and the Erie Plain. New York Ontario Maryland Delaware West Virginia New Jersey Ohio Pennsylvania's diverse topography produces a variety of climates, though the entire state experiences cold winters and humid summers. Straddling two major zones, the majority of the state, with the exception of the southeastern corner, has a humid continental climate.
The southern portion of the state has a humid subtropical climate. The largest city, has some characteristics of the humid subtropical climate that covers much of Delaware and Maryland to the south. Summers are hot and humid. Moving toward the mountainous interior of the state, the winter climate becomes colder, the number of cloudy days increases, snowfall amounts are greater. Western areas of the state locations near Lake Erie, can receive over 100 inches of snowfall annually, the entire state receives plentiful precipitation throughout the year; the state may be subject to severe weather from spring through summer into fall. Tornadoes occur annually in the state, sometimes in large numbers, such as 30 recorded tornadoes in 2011; as of 1600, the tribes living in Pennsylvania were the Algonquian Lenape, the Iroquoian Susquehannock & Petun and the Siouan Monongahela Culture, who may have been the same as a little known tribe called the Calicua, or Cali. Other tribes who entered the region during the colonial era were the Trockwae, Saponi, Nanticoke, Conoy Piscataway, Iroquois Confederacy—possibly among others.
Other tribes, like the Erie, may have once held some land in Pennsylvania, but no longer did so by the year 1600. Both the Dutch and the English claimed both sides of the Delaware River as part of their colonial lands in America; the Dutch were the first to take possession. By June 3, 1631, the Dutch had begun settling the Delmarva Peninsula by establishing the Zwaanendael Colony on the site of present-day Lewes, Delaware. In 1638, Sweden established the New Sweden Colony, in the region of Fort Christina, on the site of present-day Wilmington, Delaware. New Sweden claimed and, for the most part, controlled the lower Delaware River region (parts of present-day Delaware, New Jersey, Pe
Archery
Archery is the art, practice, or skill of using a bow to shoot arrows. The word comes from the Latin arcus. Archery has been used for hunting and combat. In modern times, it is a competitive sport and recreational activity. A person who participates in archery is called an archer or a bowman, a person, fond of or an expert at archery is sometimes called a toxophilite; the bow and arrow seems to have been invented in the Paleolithic or early Mesolithic periods. The oldest signs of its use in Europe come from the Stellmoor in the Ahrensburg valley north of Hamburg and dates from the late Paleolithic, about 10,000–9000 BC; the arrows were made of pine and consisted of a main shaft and a 15–20 centimetres long fore shaft with a flint point. There are no definite earlier bows; the oldest bows known so far comes from the Holmegård swamp in Denmark. Bows replaced the spear-thrower as the predominant means for launching shafted projectiles, on every continent except Australasia, though spear-throwers persisted alongside the bow in parts of the Americas, notably Mexico and among the Inuit.
Bows and arrows have been present in Egyptian & neighboring Nubian culture since its respective predynastic & Pre-Kerma origins. In the Levant, artifacts that could be arrow-shaft straighteners are known from the Natufian culture, onwards; the Khiamian and PPN A shouldered. Classical civilizations, notably the Assyrians, Armenians, Parthians, Koreans and Japanese fielded large numbers of archers in their armies. Akkadians were the first to use composite bows in war according to the victory stele of Naram-Sin of Akkad. Egyptians referred to Nubia as "Ta-Seti," or "The Land of the Bow," since the Nubians were known to be expert archers, by the 16th Century BC Egyptians were using the composite bow in warfare; the Bronze Age Aegean Cultures were able to deploy a number of state-owned specialized bow makers for warfare and hunting purposes from the 15th century BC. The Welsh longbow proved its worth for the first time in Continental warfare at the Battle of Crécy. In the Americas archery was widespread at European contact.
Archery was developed in Asia. The Sanskrit term for archery, came to refer to martial arts in general. In East Asia, one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea was well known for its regiments of exceptionally skilled archers. Central tribesmen of Asia and American Plains Indians became adept at archery on horseback. Armored, but mobile archers were excellently suited to warfare in the Central Asian steppes, they formed a large part of armies that conquered large areas of Eurasia. Shorter bows are more suited to use on horseback, the composite bow enabled mounted archers to use powerful weapons. Empires throughout the Eurasian landmass strongly associated their respective "barbarian" counterparts with the usage of the bow and arrow, to the point where powerful states like the Han Dynasty referred to their neighbors, the Xiong-nu, as "Those Who Draw the Bow". For example, Xiong-nu mounted bowmen made them more than a match for the Han military, their threat was at least responsible for Chinese expansion into the Ordos region, to create a stronger, more powerful buffer zone against them.
It is possible that "barbarian" peoples were responsible for introducing archery or certain types of bows to their "civilized" counterparts—the Xiong-nu and the Han being one example. Short bows seem to have been introduced to Japan by northeast Asian groups; the development of firearms rendered bows obsolete in warfare, although efforts were sometimes made to preserve archery practice. In England and Wales, for example, the government tried to enforce practice with the longbow until the end of the 16th century; this was because it was recognized that the bow had been instrumental to military success during the Hundred Years' War. Despite the high social status, ongoing utility, widespread pleasure of archery in Armenia, Egypt and Wales, India, Korea and elsewhere every culture that gained access to early firearms used them to the neglect of archery. Early firearms were inferior in rate-of-fire, were sensitive to wet weather. However, they had longer effective range and were tactically superior in the common situation of soldiers shooting at each other from behind obstructions.
They required less training to use properly, in particular penetrating steel armor without any need to develop special musculature. Armies equipped with guns could thus provide superior firepower, trained archers became obsolete on the battlefield. However, the bow and arrow is still an effective weapon, archers have seen action in the 21st century. Traditional archery remains in use for sport, for hunting in many areas. Early recreational archery societies included the Finsbury Archers and the Ancient Society of Kilwinning Archers; the latter's annual Papingo event was first recorded in 1483. The Royal Company of Archers was formed in 1676 and is one of the oldest sporting bodies in the world. Archery remained a small and scattered pastime, until the late 18th century when it experienced a fashionable revival among the aristocracy. Sir Ashton Lever, an antiquarian and collector, formed the Toxophilite Society in London in 1781, wit
Secondary school
A secondary school is both an organization that provides secondary education and the building where this takes place. Some secondary schools can provide both lower secondary education and upper secondary education, but these can be provided in separate schools, as in the American middle and high school system. Secondary schools follow on from primary schools and lead into vocational and tertiary education. Attendance is compulsory in most countries for students between the ages of 11 and 16; the organisations and terminology are more or less unique in each country. Within the English speaking world, there are three used systems to describe the age of the child; the first is the'equivalent ages' countries that base their education systems on the'English model' use one of two methods to identify the year group, while countries that base their systems on the'American K-12 model' refer to their year groups as'grades'. This terminology extends into research literature. Below is a convenient comparison.
The building needs to accommodate: Curriculum content Teaching methods Costs Education within the political framework Use of school building Constraints imposed by the site Design philosophyEach country will have a different education system and priorities. Schools need to accommodate students, storage and electrical systems, support staff, ancillary staff and administration; the number of rooms required can be determined from the predicted roll of the school and the area needed. According to standards used in the United Kingdom, a general classroom for 30 students needs to be 55 m², or more generously 62 m². A general art room for 30 students needs to be 83 m ². A drama studio or a specialist science laboratory for 30 needs to be 90 m². Examples are given on, and 1,850 place secondary school. The building providing the education has to fulfil the needs of: The students, the teachers, the non-teaching support staff, the administrators and the community, it has to meet general government building guidelines, health requirements, minimal functional requirements for classrooms and showers, electricity and services and storage of textbooks and basic teaching aids.
An optimum secondary school will meet the minimum conditions and will have: adequately sized classrooms. Government accountants having read the advice publish minimum guidelines on schools; these enable environmental establishing building costs. Future design plans are audited to ensure. Government ministries continue to press for cost standards to be reduced; the UK government published this downwardly revised space formula in 2014. It said the floor area should be 1050m² + 6.3m²/pupil place for 11- to 16-year-olds + 7m²/pupil place for post-16s. The external finishes were to be downgraded to meet a build cost of £1113/m². A secondary school locally may be called high senior high school. In some countries there are two phases to secondary education and, here the junior high school, intermediate school, lower secondary school, or middle school occurs between the primary school and high school. Names for secondary schools by countryArgentina: secundaria or polimodal, escuela secundaria Australia: high school, secondary college Austria: Gymnasium, Hauptschule, Höhere Bundeslehranstalt, Höhere Technische Lehranstalt Azerbaijan: orta məktəb Bahamas, The: junior high, senior high Belgium: lagere school/école primaire, secundair onderwijs/école secondaire, humaniora/humanités Bolivia: educación primaria superior and educación secundaria and Herzegovina: srednja škola, gimnazija Brazil: ensino médio, segundo grau Brunei: sekolah menengah, a few maktab Bulgaria: cредно образование Canada: High school, junior high or middle school, secondary school, école secondaire, collegiate institute, polyvalente Chile: enseñanza media China: zhong xue, consisting of chu zhong from grades 7 to 9 and gao zhong from grades 10 to 12 Colombia: bachillerato, segunda enseñanza Croatia: srednja škola, gimnazija Cyprus: Γυμνάσιο, Ενιαίο Λύκειο Czech Republic: střední škola, gymnázium, střední odborné učiliště Denmark: gymnasium Dominican Republic: nivel medio, bachillerato Egypt: Thanawya Amma, Estonia: upper secondary school, Lyceum Finland: lukio gymnasium France: collège, lycée Germany: Gymnasium, Realschule, Fachoberschule Greece: Γυμνάσιο, Γενικό Λύκειο, Ενιαίο Λύκειο, Hong Kong: Secondary school Hungary: gimnázium, k
Thames Valley Police
Thames Valley Police known as Thames Valley Constabulary, is the territorial police force responsible for policing the Thames Valley area covered by the counties of Berkshire and Oxfordshire. It is one of the largest territorial police forces in England covering 2,200 square miles and a population of over 2.1 million people. The police force consists of 4,244 constables, 506 special constables, 466 Police Community Support Officers and 2,576 police staff. Policing in Thames Valley dates back to 1773 when Newbury Borough Police were operating as a small police force; the force was one of around twenty borough forces. These were Buckinghamshire Constabulary, Oxfordshire Constabulary, Berkshire Constabulary, Reading Borough Police and Oxford City Police founded in 1857, 1857, 1856, 1836 and 1868 respectively. Under the Police Act 1964 these five forces were amalgamated on 1 April 1968 to form Thames Valley Constabulary. Thomas Charles Birkett Hodgson, David Holdsworth Peter Imbert Colin Smith Sir Charles Pollard Peter Neyroud Sara Thornton Francis Habgood John Campbell Thames Valley Police is overseen by a locally elected Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner.
The incumbent commissioner is Anthony Stansfeld, a Conservative Party candidate elected with 34.7% of the votes in the first round of voting and 57.2% of the votes after the second round. The police and crime commissioner is scrutinised by the Thames Valley Crime Panel. Thames Valley was overseen by a police authority consisting of 19 members, made up of councillors, members from unitary authorities, independents and a magistrate. In April 2011, the force adopted a Local Policing Model; as a result, the force is now split into each led by a superintendent. These consist of two local authority areas; these are in turn split into a number of neighbourhoods which are based off ward and parish boundaries. This alignment is to ensure. Aylesbury Bracknell and Wokingham* Cherwell and West Oxfordshire Chiltern and South Bucks Milton Keynes Oxford Reading South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse Slough West Berkshire Windsor and Maidenhead Wycombe Each area is responsible for delivering response policing, neighborhood policing teams and a local priority crime and Criminal Investigation Department.
Other functions that used to be held at Basic Command Unit level are now delivered at Force Headquarters level using a shared service approach. A number of teams are run from Force Headquarters with their staff deployed at various locations around the Force area: Major Investigation Team Control and Communications Police Dog Section Counter Terrorism Squad Intelligence Agency Thames Valley Police has a local policing team working from every police station; these teams consist of officers, community support, special constables and police staff who work to patrol and attend local incidents. They use marked vans which read neighbourhood policing on the side rear panel under the Thames Valley Police corporate logo; these officers will be unarmed and carry taser weapons. The neighbourhood police vans double up as prisoner transport vans. However, most LPA police vehicles are available to this unit. LPA Response units work out of most major stations in the force area and are tasked with patrolling and responding to 999 calls.
These officers are constables issued with Taser weapons. These officers may be tasked to patrol high crime areas for an increased police presence or to conduct follow up investigations. Both the Neighbourhood Policing Group and Incident Response Unit units all share the LPA standard Vauxhall Astra police car; some rural police offices make use of Mitsubishi L200's as a more effective vehicle. Thames Valley Police have 52 operational police dogs; the dogs are donated from the RSPCA or public, are trained at the force headquarters. They serve until they are 8 years old, receiving refresher training every year, living with their handler after retirement, they are part of the Joint Operations Unit with Hampshire Police. The dog section operates with marked and unmarked Mitsubishi Outlanders as well as Ford Mondeo estates. Thames Valley Police patrols 196 miles of motorways including the M1, M4, M40, A329, A404 and M25, as well as many other'A' route roads including the busy A43; the Unit Mainly uses Marked Volvo V70s and New BMW 530d touring's, Unmarked BMW 330ds and Volvo V80's along with some Marked BMW X5s and Mitsubishi Shoguns.
These units are based at 6 geographical traffic bases. Roads Policing in Thames Valley is part of the Joint Operations Unit which works together with Hampshire Constabulary's Roads Policing Unit. Thames Valley Police's Armed Response Unit is a 24/7 unit that responds to major and serious crimes where firearms may be involved; this unit is shared with Hampshire Police as part of the Joint Operations Unit. The training facility is at Sulhamstead with a state of the art firearms range; the unit uses the traffic bases within the force basing themselves out of Three Mile Cross, Milton Keynes, Bicester. This unit can be identified by the red asterisk on the marked patrol cars they use, which includes the Volvo XC70 and BMW X5; the unit use
Buffer zone
A buffer zone is a zonal area that lies between two or more other areas, but depending on the type of buffer zone, the reason for it may be to segregate regions or to conjoin them. Common types of buffer zones are demilitarized zones, border zones and certain restrictive easement zones and green belts; such zones may be, but not be, comprised by a sovereign state, forming a buffer state. Buffer zones have various purposes, political or otherwise, they can be set up to prevent violence, protect the environment, protect residential and commercial zones from industrial accidents or natural disasters, keep prisoners intent on escaping from acquiring hostages or a hiding place, have uses in several other scenarios. Buffer zones result in large uninhabited regions which are themselves noteworthy in many developed or crowded parts of the world. For use in nature conservation, a buffer zone is created to enhance the protection of areas under management for their biodiversity importance; the buffer zone of a protected area may be situated around the periphery of the region or may be a connecting zone within it which links two or more protected areas, therefore increasing their dynamics and conservation productivity.
A buffer zone can be one of the protected area categories or a classification scheme depending on the conservation objective. The term'buffer zone' gained prominence in the conservation of natural and cultural heritage through its usage in the establishment of UNESCO's World Heritage Convention, the term was intended to be used as follows: —World Heritage ConventionThe buffer zone is one of the Best Management Practices. A buffer zone is intended to avert the effect of negative environmental or human influences, whether or not it embodies great natural or cultural value itself; the importance and function of a buffer zone and the necessary protective measures derived thereof is a new concept in conservation science and can differ for each site. It shows that the quality of surface water in many countries is getting worse because humans do not use land properly. Although the buffer zone occupies a small area, it improves the quality of water in the agricultural watershed due to its filtering effect on nutrients in the underground water and surface water.
Because farmland is sprayed with large amounts of pesticides, some of which can seep into surface water. It will have a negative impact on fish and other aquatic life, which can lead to environmental damage. Vegetation buffer has been proved to be an effective filter for sediment for sediment-bound pesticides; when pesticides are sprayed in excess, a vegetation buffer can be built to reduce the penetration of pesticides into surface water. The buffer zone prevents heavy metals or toxins from spreading to protected areas; when the riverbanks are low, due to the plant root can enter the interior of the riverbank vertically, the sediment of riverbank is affected by the action of plant root, the ability to resist erosion is higher than that without plant root. But when the riverbanks are higher, the roots of the plants do not penetrate into the soil, the lakeshore soil is not strong. Herbaceous plants can play a role to some extent, but in the long term, vegetation buffer zone can solve the problem of water level rise and water erosion.
The adsorption capacity of buffer zone can reduce the speed of surface runoff and increase the effective water content of soil. Through increasing soil organic matter content and improving soil structure, it has a positive effect on soil water storage performance. In addition, plant roots make the soil stronger, withstand waves and rainstorm, mitigate the erosion of riverbanks by floods, control the erosion of the beach; the riparian buffer zones have been used in many areas to protect the habitats of many animals which are being devastated by increased human activity. The areas around the buffer zone can form the habitat of many animals, the woody parts and leaves of plants can become food for small aquatic animals; the buffer zone itself can support the life activities of various amphibians and birds. Plants and animals can migrate or spread in response to these buffer zones and increasing the biodiversity in the area. A study shows that the species and number of animals and plants in riparian zones are higher than in other ecosystems.
Because of their ability to provide abundant water, soft soil and stable climate, small animals such as Myotis and Martes prefer to live along riverbanks rather than in hilly areas. The buffer zone can provide a good environment for upland habitat, in line with the living conditions of freshwater turtles, making them more dependent on the wetland environment; the protection level of the buffer zones will affect the habitat range of amphibians and reptiles, the environmental management of the wetland habitat around buffer zone is important. As an important part of riparian zone, the vegetation buffer zones form a variety of landscape, the landscape pattern of combining land and water improves the aesthetic value of river basin landscape; the riparian buffer is rich in plant resources, the wetland and forest ecosystem make the landscape more beautiful. In addition, some recreational facilities can be built in the buffer zone to provide better living conditions for residents or tourists and improve people's quality of life.
In the buffer zone, those trees up to 6 meters tall enhance the aesthetic value of the landscape. These tall trees have luxuriant branches and leaves their upright posture, making them of higher ornamen
Civil parish
In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government, they are a territorial designation, the lowest tier of local government below districts and counties, or their combined form, the unitary authority. Civil parishes can trace their origin to the ancient system of ecclesiastical parishes which played a role in both civil and ecclesiastical administration; the unit rolled out across England in the 1860s. A civil parish can range in size from a large town with a population of about 75,000 to a single village with fewer than a hundred inhabitants. Eight parishes have city status. A civil parish may be known as and confirmed as a town, neighbourhood or community by resolution of its parish council, a right reserved not conferred on other units of English local government. 35% of the English population live in a civil parish. As of 31 December 2015 there were 10,449 parishes in England; the most populous is Weston super Mare and those with cathedral city status are Chichester, Hereford, Ripon, Salisbury and Wells.
On 1 April 2014, Queen's Park became the first civil parish in Greater London. Before 2008 their creation was not permitted within a London borough. Wales was divided into civil parishes until 1974, when they were replaced by communities, which are similar to English parishes in the way they operate. Civil parishes in Scotland were abolished for local government purposes by the Local Government Act 1929, the Scottish equivalent of English civil parishes are community council areas, which were established by the Local Government Act 1973; the Parish system in Europe was established between the 8th and 12th centuries and in England was old by the time of the Conquest. These areas were based on the territory of one or more manors, areas which in some cases derived their bounds from Roman or Iron Age estates. Parish boundaries were conservative, changing little, after 1180'froze' so that boundaries could no longer be changed at all, despite changes to manorial landholdings - though there were some examples of sub-division.
The consistency of these boundaries, up until the 19th century is useful to historians, is of cultural significance in terms of shaping local identities, a factor reinforced by the adoption of parish boundaries unchanged, by successor local government units. There was huge variation in size between parishes, for instance Writtle in Essex was 13,568 acres while neighbouring Shellow Bowells was just 469 acres, Chignall Smealy 476 acres; until the break with Rome, parishes managed ecclesiastical matters, while the manor was the principal unit of local administration and justice. The church replaced the manor court as the rural administrative centre, levied a local tax on produce known as a tithe. In the medieval period, responsibilities such as relief of the poor passed from the Lord of the Manor to the parish's rector, who in practice would delegate tasks among his vestry or the monasteries. After the dissolution of the monasteries, the power to levy a rate to fund relief of the poor was conferred on the parish authorities by the Act for the Relief of the Poor 1601.
Both before and after this optional social change, local charities are well-documented. The parish authorities were consisted of all the ratepayers of the parish; as the number of ratepayers of some parishes grew, it became difficult to convene meetings as an open vestry. In some built up, areas the select vestry took over responsibility from the entire body of ratepayers; this innovation allowed governance by a self-perpetuating elite. The administration of the parish system relied on the monopoly of the established English Church, which for a few years after Henry VIII alternated between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, before settling on the latter on the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558. By the 18th century, religious membership was becoming more fractured in some places, due for instance to the progress of Methodism; the legitimacy of the parish vestry came into question and the perceived inefficiency and corruption inherent in the system became a source for concern in some places.
For this reason, during the early 19th century the parish progressively lost its powers to ad hoc boards and other organisations, for example the loss of responsibility for poor relief through the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. Sanitary districts covered England in Ireland three years later; the replacement boards were each entitled to levy their own rate in the parish. The church rate ceased to be levied in many parishes and became voluntary from 1868; the ancient parishes diverged into two distinct, nearly overlapping, systems of parishes during the 19th century. The Poor Law Amendment Act 1866 declared all areas that levied a separate rate: C of E ecclesiastical parishes, extra-parochial areas and their analogue, chapelries, to be "civil parishes". To have collected rates this means these beforehand had their own vestries, boards or equivalent bodies; the Church of England parishes, which cover more than 99% of England, became termed "ecclesiastical parishes" and the boundaries of these soon diverged from those of the Ancient Parishes in order to reflect modern circumstances.
After 1921 each ecclesiastical parish has been the responsibility of the parochial church councils. In the late 19th century, most of the ancient irregularities inheri
