Comment by scoofy
6 days ago
One of the most interesting aspects of the policing power in the premodern era was the existence and split of a powerful church.
Religious institutions had some access to legitimate violence in a way that the state couldn’t control. Once authoritarianism gave way to more democratic governance, that effectively disappeared.
not in the UK (or the US) since king Henry VIII made himself Pope of his new Anglican Church in the 1500s