A book on the Tudor sheriff is both welcome and unexpected. With The Tudor Sheriff: A Study in Early Modern Administration, Jonathan McGovern reasserts the central place of the sheriff in the governance of Tudor England. McGovern argues that the sheriff remained the crown's principal agent in ruling the localities. The office of sheriff, McGovern maintains, thus deserves as much scholarly attention as do the lord lieutenant, the justice of the peace, and the churchwarden, who have in their different ways seemed more significant in the transformation of early modern government. Through his study, McGovern seeks to reaffirm the relevance of administrative history to British studies. This ambition informs the approach that McGovern takes to his subject. He goes through thematically the different facets of the sheriff's office, but minimizes biographical analysis.
McGovern begins by describing the process by which sheriffs were appointed. He then surveys a sheriff's varied responsibilities; particularly valuable is his analysis of the sheriff's relationship with other royal officers. Next, he explains the most mundane of activities, the serving and return of writs. McGovern then discusses the policing powers that sheriffs exercised. Next, he explores the activities of the legal fora over which the sheriff presided, the county court and the tourn. In a discrete chapter McGovern looks at the shrieval court in London and, to a lesser extent, at the one in York. Finally, McGovern examines how the sheriff accounted at the exchequer, where he hoped, eventually, to be quitted.
For anyone interested in understanding the processes of government, The Tudor Sheriff will be an exceptionally informative and useful study. Although McGovern quips that “Readers who already know their capias from their latitat may wish to skip a few pages” (82), the few who think themselves qualified should not be so tempted. It is eye opening to have the routine business of government elucidated. As McGovern observes in the introduction, no one reading his work will be left in any doubt that Tudor England was bureaucratic. The strength of McGovern's work depends on the extensiveness of his research in manuscript sources held in twenty-four repositories. The National Archives have been mined with particular enthusiasm: sixty record classes are listed in the bibliography, which may constitute a record of a different kind. McGovern has gotten his hands dirty with some abstruse collections of writs. (In a footnote, he confesses to having broken the thong of a bundle of brevia regis files.) Presumably, there remains more that could be discovered about the conduct of sheriffs through further research into classes such as the memoranda and plea rolls of the central courts. Nevertheless, it would be ungrateful to emphasize what else McGovern could have done when so much original research is offered already.
The title of The Tudor Sheriff highlights two aspects of McGovern's approach that can be probed. First, it might have been more accurate (if less marketable) to call the book a study of the office of sheriff, rather than of the sheriff himself. As McGovern shows repeatedly, many of the sheriff's duties were discharged by undersheriffs, bailiffs, and jailers. One reason some sought to avoid being pricked must have been that the sheriff was liable for much that lay outside his direct control. In the courts over which he notionally presided, the sheriff usually delegated to legally qualified deputies. The second reflection on the title concerns the name “Tudor.” More perhaps than most current scholars, McGovern inclines to the realist, rather than to the nominalist, position. The “Tudor sheriff” is conceived as a distinct entity. In a comment redolent of Geoffrey Elton, McGovern contrasts the efficiency of Tudor government with what he sees as the vitiation of early Stuart government (8). That the sixteenth-century sheriff differed greatly from his forebears or successors may be doubted, at least in respect of England. (McGovern acknowledges the expansion of the shrievalty across Wales in the 1530s and its role in the contested government of Ireland, but his focus is England.) The conclusion identifies changes to the office over the sixteenth century. Few of these developments seem momentous; most were procedural. McGovern singles out the partition of eight joint shrievalties in Elizabeth's reign; even with this reform, however, the consequences are difficult to discern. Continuity seems stronger than change. Nevertheless, McGovern establishes convincingly his central contention that “the shrievalty was alive and well in the Tudor period” (220).
McGovern makes the case for administrative history also by commenting on the missteps (as he sees them) of recent historical writing on early modern Britain. These can be summarized as an emphasis on the interpersonal at the expense of the institutional (embodied in the term faction); reliance on specious terms that skew scholarly agendas (such as monarchical republic); a tendency to imbue ordinary people with an anachronistic sense of class; and a preference for obfuscatory terms from the social sciences (such as agency and negotiation) over contemporaries’ understanding of what they were doing. These salutary views are stated with some courage. (It is a brave historian who describes Elton's reactionary Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study [1991] as “an underappreciated polemic” [13]) McGovern's research into the office of sheriff may not prove or disprove every contention that he makes. The shrieval system could have been “generally fair and functional” (222). Yet faction and abuse of power were not generally present or absent, but rather situationally and locally so. Ordinary people possibly did feel this system to be supportive, rather than oppressive; yet the evidence examined here is not of the kind that would inform us one way or the other. In McGovern's trenchant commentary, industrious research, and explanatory clarity, The Tudor Sheriff is an Eltonian book. For McGovern, if not for all historians of the period, that would seem an unqualified compliment.
