the problems and significance of administrative history in the tudor period

The Problems and Significance of Administrative History in the Tudor PeriodAuthor(s): G. R. EltonSource: Journal of British Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (May, 1965), pp. 18-28Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on BritishStudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/175144 .

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The Problems and Significance of Administrative History in the

Tudor Period

During the past sixteen years "administrative history" seems to have come and gone as a term of distinction in the historical study of Tudor England. In the later 1940's there were a number of scholars newly aware of the vast wealth of government records in the English archives and enormously impressed by the achieve- ments of the medievalists - of Tout and his school - who deplored the absence of comparable studies for the post-medieval period and, for a time, came to seek salvation in an ever more stringent and particular investigation of the processes of government. But that phase did not last long. Now it can be said by Joel Hurstfield, himself a notable contributor to that flowering of administrative history, that "we have passed beyond recall the stage when the machinery alone, however intimately understood, can answer the

questions."1 The study of social history is all the rage now, by which is meant the history of a given society in its various aspects and manifestations - or rather, whatever may in fact emerge from that awesome ambition. Fashions change, and nowadays they change pretty rapidly; but one need not regret that not-so-distant dawn or believe that the evening has yet come. Let it be made clear, however, what is meant, or should be meant, by administrative history. Certainly this involves the analysis and description of past administrative processes, the discovery of principles implicit or explicit in the conduct of government, and an understanding of the manner in which the theoretical mechanism operated in practice. By itself this is enough to make one doubt whether the critic is just who speaks of understanding "the machinery alone." But beyond this, the study of government compels the historian to, investigate ideas - ideas of law and legislation, ideas concerning the purpose of the state, ideas of opposition and resistance. It involves at least a sound comprehension of a society's economy and the conditions created by it for administrative action. Administrative history runs up against problems of social, family, and personal relationships which it can neither take for granted nor ignore, but

1. Joel Hurstfield, Review of G. R. Elton (ed.), The Tudor Constitution, E.H.R., LXXVII (1962), 730.



ADMINISTRATIVE HISTORY IN THE TUDOR PERIOD

must investigate. In its concern for "machinery" it can never forget personality; the historian of administration who overlooks the fact that it is people who administer is himself best overlooked. In

short, administrative history is no more sectional or partial history than is any other of those convenient classifications with which scholars assist, and at times fetter, themselves. It has to consider

everything, and the only things which distinguish it are its point of departure and the highroad it follows through country also over- run by other historical explorers. It begins from the machinery of government and keeps its main interest centered on that. In view of the fact that down to the death of Elizabeth, at least, the bulk of surviving records is supplied by the deposits of government action, this still seems a sensible approach; and when one con- siders the state of affairs in the history of more recent centuries (to speak of England alone), one cannot be at all sure that the growing abundance of more lively and less technically complicated records is pure gain. Has it not had some unfortunate effects on writers of history who too readily come to think that where so much can be told so easily, knowledge of the "machinery" hardly matters?

In any case, to suppose that, for the sixteenth century, "the machinely alone" is yet understood with sufficient intimacy is simply not correct. Not for one moment need it be suggested that the reconstruction of that machinery is all that should be attempted or that it will answer all questions; but it should be most emphatically asserted that questions answered without such intimate

knowledge are questions spoiled and answers (to, quote Queen Elizabeth) answerless. The experience of recent years shows this. Not so long ago few subjects in English history would have been thought better known and more fully studied than Tudor government, the constitution of the sixteenth century. Yet how many of the accepted generalizations of, say, 1940 stand today? Where are Tudor despotism, the packed Parliament, Star Chamber as an in- strument of autocracy? What has become of Henry VII, the in- novator, or of William Cecil, the incorruptible? Naturally, no one would suggest either that the whole story as told before the Second World War was wrong, or that some of the important work in revising the history of the century was not done by a previous generation of historians. But where earlier scholars like Newton and Pollard were responsible for initiating a new understanding, they did so by asking pertinent, if usually isolated, questions about the manner in which things were actually done- administrative

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THE JOURNAL OF BRITISH STUDIES

questions2 - and since the War the much more systematic and con- scious assault on the realities of Tudor government has led to a recasting of the whole story in so fundamental a manner that, in truth, some have not yet realized the revolution that has taken place, others are digging in among the abandoned redoubts, and revolutionaries are inclined to be too cocky about their discoveries.

Although it may be arrogant to say so, it may nevertheless be asserted that the work of the last fifteen years, starting from a serious attempt to understand "the machinery," has brought Tudor history out of the heroic into the scientific age. The embalming fluid has given way to the scalpel, the painter's brush to the draughtsman's pencil: not all of it gain, by any means, but how much gain there has been! It was the administrative approach more than any other which subjected historians of the sixteenth century to the fundamental - the elementary - demands of all true historiography: ask to know exactly how things were done, and ask this of all the available evidence. A case in point is the extraordinary change brought about in parliamentary studies by Sir John Neale's determination to find all the surviving material bearing on his concerns: and this is only the best known example of a genuine revolution in method which replaced reliance on calendars, on Tanner's Tudor Constitutional Documents, on what happened to be in print, by a broad-fronted attack on the vast resources of public and private archives. Of course, one still uses calendars and printed materials; the latter are perfectly legitimate, and as to the former, there is so much stuff that without some short cuts nothing at all would get done. But the practice is not safe - experience of even so excellent a calendar as The Letters and Papers of Henry VIII is chastening - and scholars are now aware of the dangers in ways that Pollard, for instance, never was. Pollard could write his books without ever entering the Public Record Office. This is not to say that books on Tudor history are not still written with that same handicap, but it is doubtful if anything like Pollard's reputation could be made in that way today.

Laborious proof for these assertions is not in place here. But two small instances may be given of the sort of fundamental error easily dissipated by a real acquaintance with the governmental machinery. Take the well-known statement that the court of Star

2. For example, A. P. Newton, "Tudor Reforms in the Royal Household," Tudor Studies, ed. R. W. Seton-Watson (London, 1924), pp. 231-56; A. P. Newton, "The King's Chamber under the Early Tudors," E.H.R., XXXII (1917), 348-72; A. F. Pollard, "The Growth of the Court of Requests," E.H.R., LVI (1941), 300-03.

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Chamber used torture. Holdsworth said this, and consequently it is found in several textbooks. Yet the briefest check on Holds- worth's evidence shows that he was relying on the Privy Council Register and confusing the Council's political and police activities with the exclusively judicial functions of the Star Chamber.3 Be- hind this mistake which, despite the endeavors of better informed historians, has helped to maintain the court's bad reputation, lay, therefore, a real failure to understand the structure and nature of certain closely related but nevertheless distinct institutions: a serious misunderstanding of the machinery produced ramifying error. Or take another, very general, notion. Few statements are more regularly found in any general book on the sixteenth century than that the gentry's hold on the office of justice of the peace prevented the enforcement of legislation which was contrary to their interests. The examples usually given are the acts against enclosure and de- population, sometimes in consequence called a dead letter. But it takes only a glance at the acts - admittedly a glance sharpened by an understanding of judicial procedure - to discover that the enclosure acts were not enforceable by the J. P.s at all: as was cus- tomary with penal statutes, cases arising from them were to be brought in the central courts and especially the Exchequer.4 This is an interesting point because it touches on the whole difficult problem of the enforcement and effectiveness of legislation. Those who regard the study of machinery as inadequate for the answering of real questions - such questions as what being governed really meant to the Tudors' subjects - seem to think that the administrative historian cannot help with such issues or would even ignore them. Joel Hurstfield is justified in saying that hard work is still needed to solve these problems; but no one can in fact have any hope of solving them unless he is first quite clear about what was supposed to happen - about the administrative realities both in the blueprint of intention and in the mingle-mangle of execution.

Thus the place of administrative history in the study of Tudor

3. Cf. G. R. Elton (ed.), The Tudor Constitution (Cambridge, 1960), p. 170, note 1.

4. The acts in question are 4 Henry VII, c. 19 (1489), 7 Henry VIII, c. 1 (1515), 27 Henry VIII, c. 22 (1535), 5 Elizabeth I, c. 2 (1563). Two acts, abortive in their effect and rapidly repealed, experimented with special commissioners as enforcing agencies: 5 and 6 Edward VI, c. 5 (1551), and 2 and 3 Philip and Mary, c. 2 (1555). The new start was made in 1597, when all the previous acts were repealed; 35 Elizabeth I, c. 1 innovated as to enforcement only by empowering justices of assize to hear pleas on the statute. How far the gentry, through social pressure or political influence, might succeed in preventing successful enforcement is of course quite another question; but I incline to think that this, too, has been exaggerated.

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England seems still well assured; the point of such confidence in

understanding the machinery has not yet been reached that scholars

might advance - if that is the right term - to other considerations and methods of enquiry. Constitutional history has often enough been laid to rest by impatient historians, only to rise up again in far from ghostly form to plague them as they ran their heads into

unsuspected obstacles created by their insufficient knowledge of the way in which things actually happened - of the rules' and

mechanisms, the laws and institutions, which governed action. Hurstfield is correct in asserting that scholars should investigate such fascinating topics as "the function of patronage" or "the im-

pact of the centre on the provinces," but these seem precisely the sort of questions for which a more refined knowledge of the

machinery is indispensable. How does one properly evaluate

patronage unless one knows who disposed of what patronage - that is to say, really grasps the facts of office-holding? How does one estimate the impact of the center unless one knows the means available for the center to assert itself and those available to the

provinces for resistance? That these are major topics of study is incontestable; that they require more than a narrowly administrative treatment will be readily conceded; but that they can be man-

aged on the assumption that the machinery is now known and some other, subtler, attack must be made may be regarded as highly dubious. If a good deal that at present passes for certainty in these problems of social relationships and the work of government at the

grass roots is to be distrusted, it is because it too often seems to

ignore even what little is known of the administrative and legal framework within which everything operated. How many of the interminable discussions of the gentry show themselves aware that the sixteenth-century village community continued really to live by manorial custom settled in the manorial court, thereby often de- priving the lord of the manor of freedom to act in ways which his interests or sociological doctrine would seem to demand? Is one ever told, among the commonplaces concerning the restoration of law and order, of the extraordinary legal limitations set to royal action, or the equally extraordinary complications of the commission of oyer and terminer, or the practice of out-of-court arbitration? Or (to take an example working the other way round), how many people, confident that tax assessments made by taxpayers must be false and that tax commissioners from the gentry would, of course, weight the burden against the poor, know the administrative back-

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ground which provides pretty conclusive evidence for fair assess- ment and collection, at least in the first half of the century?5 The truth about the social questions of the day continues to depend on a better and deeper knowledge of government and administration.

Indeed, the problems of Tudor administrative history are not at present concerned with its allegedly restricted significance and range, with its having reached the limits of the useful contribution it can make. They arise rather from the formidable tasks still before it. There are, in the first place, the unsolved questions, the institutions yet unstudied. What is known of the Council? Any book on the Tudor period naturally gives some account of it, but it is really a little surprising to find on how little serious study such treatment must of necessity be based. Apart from a few attacks on pieces of the story, there are only the generalizations inherited from the past or derived from a quick survey of such master records as are in print. Yet the Council was the central institution of Tudor government, the one piece of machinery which must be thoroughly understood if justice is to be done to the whole complex of institutional and constitutional problems. Its history needs to be known: how it changed (if change it did) in function and composition. Its powers need to be known, its practice, its effectiveness - what it could do and what in fact it did. A very careful investigation of its relation- ship with other parts of the machinery is necessary, above all those pther parts which had a recent formal connection with it, the courts of Star Chamber and Requests. Fortunately, systematic beginnings are at last being made: Thomas Barnes is working his way back from the Stuarts through the Star Chamber records; one of his pupils is engaged on ten years of the Elizabethan Privy Council; the present writer is investigating the Councils of Henry VII and Henry VIII. This is not to ignore the work of C. G. Bayne and W. H. Dunham; but their notable monographs have left room for a really detailed and a really general study.6

If the Council enabled the Tudors to govern, the Exchequer supplied them with the machinery for raising and spending the money indispensable to government. Scholars are by now quite well informed about the financial organs of the early Tudors, but the Elizabethan Exchequer and Treasury have barely been touched. But until much more is revealed than is now known both about

5. This is emerging from R. S. Schofield's work. See his unpublished dissertation, "Direct Lay Taxation under the Early Tudors" (Cambridge, 1962).

6. C. G. Bayne and William H. Dunham, Select Cases in the Council of Henry VII [Selden Society] (London, 1958); William H. Dunham, "Henry VIII's Whole Council and Its Parts," Huntington Library Quarterly, VII (1943), 7-46.

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taxation and about borrowing, the most basic aspect of Tudor

government remains in darkness. What can be really said, with or without confidence, about the law courts? And yet the ordinary contact between governors and governed - the common way in which government appeared to the people - was in the courts of law. Here is a field vast enough for several scholars of exceptional courage, stamina, and indifference to physical hardship; but unless

they also possess notable imagination and that instinctive grasp for the condition of a past society which makes the true historian, they will do more harm than good. Here are a few of the questions which a study of the courts must seek to answer. What were the structure, interrelation, and separate competence of the courts, both common law and conciliar? What were the ordinary person's demands on the law and what was his experience of it? How far did the courts try to enforce the law and succeed in doing so? Who were the lawyers - can one speak of a legal profession? What influence did government exercise over the courts, or alternatively, how far was government tied by the courts? In respect to all these and other questions, did the situation change in the course of the

century? Surely these are all points of fundamental importance, knowledge of which must be vital to a real understanding of the period. Once again, it should not be denied that beginnings have been made in these matters; but the known area consists of small and barely held clearings in the encroaching jungle. And this can be asserted with equal conviction of a part of government so obvi-

ously vital that one would suppose it to be well known - local government: the actual working of law and administration in the localities and at ground level. What passes for light in this field (always excepting the occasional ray of true sunshine usually hid- den away in introductions to volumes in local records series) should not deceive a blind man. When Charles Beard, in 1904, published his book on the justice of the peace (still sometimes recommended in bibliographies), he did little more than rearrange the details of William Lambarde's Eirenarcha. On the national scale no one since then has attempted even so much. It seems im- probable that progress beyond a handbook of 1581 should really be impossible. Recent work on local government under the Stuarts highlights the Tudor neglect,7 and there is some danger that, for lack of specific studies, people may read the 1620's and 1630s back into the previous century.

7. Notably Thomas G. Barnes, Somerset 1625-1640 (Oxford, 1961).

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All this may be regarded as special pleading, searching in nooks and crannies for something more to do. Is not the constitutional history of the Tudor period notoriously "worked out"? (When Sir Lewis Namier embarked on his major studies, he was authoritative- ly informed that Lecky had done all that.) And even supposing that the examples given of gaps to be filled - gaps? vast empty deserts, rather - are in themselves just, is too much being made of them? Not if one remembers how often one can come up against blank walls in the course of an investigation, how often one sees scholars stopped in their tracks because the material on which they are working was produced by a system of which no one has more than imperfect knowledge. Furthermore, many assured assertions and received interpretations turn out to be simply impossible as knowledge of the machinery improves. The conclusion is inescap- able that administrative history still has much work before it in the sixteenth century, and that until that work is done a great deal of what passes for Tudor history must remain provisional.

But if the foregoing analysis is correct, one would certainly like to know more about this unsatisfactory state of affairs: why the study of administrative history should not only be so short of perfection but should at the same time be decried as narrow and played out. There are two major and what might be called re- spectable reasons for this. One is the superior attraction of other lines of investigation. There is, of course, every reason why men should study the economics, art, literature, religion of the age, though they would do so more successfully if they understood the machinery better. But even in the specific context of the constitution, Parliament, the Church, and ideas have held the attention more than councils, courts, and Exchequer. English historical studies in the post-medieval period have still not quite lost the teleological conviction that what matters in the last resort about the sixteenth century is the establishment of constitutional mon- archy and of a Protestant Church. Assuredly, these are important topics, though not the only ones of importance; and even they would benefit from being tackled more determinedly from the administrative rather than the constitutional end. To determine precisely how and why they worked in the way they did is now more pressing than study and restudy of their content of ideas - more analyses of parliamentary management and less hot air about constitutionalism, more understanding of the administrative structure of the archdeaconry and parish and fewer generalizations on

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Puritanism or the via media. Neale's analysis of the Elizabethan House of Commons, or the growing body of writings on Church courts may be cited as exemplary,8 but on the whole historians of Parliament and Church remain more interested in the superstruc- ture of politics, ideas, and personalities than in the understructure of organization, procedure, and practice. Important as the first will always be, it cannot be well done until the second is out of the way.

The diversion of employable energies to other concerns is as- sisted by the second chief problem attendant upon administrative

history: its difficulty. And this difficulty arises in great part, though not exclusively, from the materials from which it must be written. In particular, these suffer from two seemingly contradictory faults: there are far too many of them, and there are not nearly enough of them. W. C. Richardson's appendices to his books on Tudor Chamber Administration and the Court of Augmentations have demonstrated the wealth and variety of records available on certain sectors of the front; anyone who has ever looked at only the lists of

surviving proceedings in Chancery or the conciliar courts will know why no proper study of these institutions has yet been made; the

Exchequer records for the century baffle by their bulk quite as much as by their complexity; and as for the common law courts, there are not only the plea rolls (very little of which has been analysed so far) but, in King's Bench at least, also the writs re- turned, bundled up in sacks, stacked to the ceiling of a sizable room, and for all practical purposes totally inaccessible. Yet at the same time, important parts of the record are missing, either lost or never kept. Where are the decree books of Council and Star Chamber, or most of the warrants to the privy seal, or the signet docket books before 1584? These lost materials pose the usual problem of patchy evidence; there are ways of getting over that, but the pitfalls and snares are naturally very serious. If desirable records were never kept (as for example regular annual statements of all the revenue, or full minutes of Council meetings), that in itself reveals important things about Tudor administration but does not exactly ease the historian's path. The difficulties of the material for government at the center are nothing compared with the in-

8. I. J. Churchill, Canterbury Administration (London, 1933); B. L. Wood- cock, Medieval Ecclesiastical Courts in the Diocese of Canterbury (Oxford, 1952); R. A. Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York 1560-1640 (London, 1960); Robert Peters, Oculus Episcopi: Administration in the Archdeaconry of St. Albans (Manchester, 1963). Mrs. Margaret Bowker of Girton College, Cambridge, is engaged in a study of the diocese of Lincoln in the sixteenth century.

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sufficiencies of evidence for local government, in itself explanation enough for the pitiful state of that subject. At the very least a thorough search of all possible local and private archives is re- quired; anyone who would publish the results of such a survey, together perhaps with a bibliographical note on materials for local government in the central archives, would at least enable that study to be undertaken in a serious way. He would in fact be taking up where Bertha Putnam left off, but he would be doing better because he would be presenting a more fundamental kind of evidence than that collected by her: evidence of what actually happened in the work of local commissions and local courts, rather than evidence of what was supposed to happen.9

Even when the materials have been more fully explored and made available, the problems of the administrative historian remain large. (So will be the rewards.) The meaning of the record is by no means always plain, and one often finds oneself running round a tiresome circle. The records are the product of administrative processes and should therefore illumine these. But often the records cannot be interpreted aright until the! administrative processes are understood. This is not so impossible as it sounds. The re- discovery of the early Tudor Household system of finance is a good case in point, and an even better one is the work done recently, in an unpublished Cambridge dissertation, by R. S. Schofield on the Exchequer method of dealing with direct taxation. But assuredly, possible or not, it is difficult and uncertain work, with error always more than possible and perfection a long way off. The historiography of Tudor government is scarred by a long line of serious mistakes arising from failure to understand the meaning of the record, ranging from the elementary error of seeing significance in some piece of common form to some aspects of F. C. Dietz's studies of finance where figures are taken from apparent master records that were nothing of the kind. I speak as one who has made quite enough mistakes in his time and is sure he will make more. For instance, I now think that I accepted far too readily the apparent evidence for a restricted kind of Council in the first years of Henry VIII's reign, and it is no excuse - indeed this makes it worse - that I followed existing opinion in doing so.

These then are some of the problems which beset Tudor administrative history: large unexplored regions, stretches of scrub

9. A limited beginning has been made: Thomas G. Barnes and A. Hassell Smith, "Justices of the Peace from 1558 to 1668-a Revised List of Sources," Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, XXXII (1959), 221-42.

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but partially surveyed so far, materials of great diversity and difficulty. It must, however, be emphatically stated that the work is perfectly possible; it needs neither a genius nor a magician; the ordinary historian can do it. And the gains are well worth the labour. The main point here asserted is that no one can hope to write about any aspect of Tudor history without the solid grasp of the realities and probabilities, without the deep understanding of the records before him, which administrative history - using the term in its wide and proper sense - alone can supply. Of course, there will never be an end to the search nor will advance be un- attended by disputes and disagreements concerning the meaning of discoveries or the implications they may have for different and other facets of the period. Such quarrels over "models" are not the subject of this paper, nor are they as a rule anything but barren. Certainly there can be no understanding of history without meaning, and no meaning without some measure of systematization and imposed arrangement. But these things are hypotheses, and, con- vinced as historians should be of their hypotheses, they should be much more concerned with the continuing and continuous process of discovery. Controversies there will always be: they might at least be based on a foundation of knowledge steadily and co- operatively augmented through the years.

G. R. ELTON

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