The importance of the Caroline Book of Orders has not gone unrecognized by historians of early Stuart England. Admirers of the personal rule of Charles I saw in it a cornerstone of that regime's paternalism. Historians of county government, while noting doubts about its centralizing tendencies, have shown it pushing local magistrates towards more efficient methods of poor relief and social welfare. Students of popular attitudes and the moral assumptions of the crowd find the Book of Orders confirming traditional values which helped to guarantee social cohesion in periods of economic crisis. Yet the origins of so remarkable an enactment have attracted little attention, beyond the unfounded assumption that it owed much to Laudian policies of ‘Thorough’. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that its genesis has no less historical interest than its impact; and that we shall better appreciate its social and political implications if we are aware of the complex forces which shaped it.

The literature relating to Winston Churchill is by now so extensive, and our evidence about him so abundant, that the approaching completion of the official life by Martin Gilbert may seem to herald the end of historical inquiry into Churchill for at least a generation. This may be so; but it is more likely that he will continue to be the focus of animated discussion. Churchill, like Roosevelt or Trotsky, has inspired a perennial curiosity which springs as much from complexity of character as from fame. A. J. P. Taylor has justly applied to him Dryden's couplet: ‘A man so various that he seemed to be, not one, but all mankind's epitome.’ Admittedly, there are individuals so prejudiced for or against Churchill as to lack interest in assessing him. But for anyone who overcomes this barrier, Churchill holds the fascination of a rare species of animal which no one can easily place in the scheme of creation. A part of this curiosity stems from the fact that Churchill as a policy-maker was both peculiarly inspired and peculiarly disaster-prone. Military historians, evaluating his strategic conduct of the Second World War, are pursuing a controversy which began at Gallipoli in 1915. Political historians, too, are intrigued by the fact that Churchill's judgment was so prescient on some issues, and so mistaken on others. Like Churchill's contemporaries, they tend to detect in him strands of genius interwoven with strands of folly.

One of the most obvious novelties of the eleventh century is the appearance of the crowd on the stage of public events. It would not claim to rival its counterparts in Antiquity or the Renaissance in the permanence of its presence or the scale of its activity, still less in the vividness with which it can be portrayed, or the wonders of analysis that can be performed upon it by its historians. Some of them, indeed, might hesitate to distinguish categorically between the populus which attacked the clergy of Milan in 1056 or formed an army for Peter the Hermit and that which surrounded the tomb of a Merovingian saint or attended the court of a Carolingian lord. But to indulge that hesitation to the point of silence would be to grant to semantics priority over common sense. It is impossible to contemplate the events of the eleventh century, to observe the turbulence of Florence in the 1060s or the Flemish and Rhineland cities in the 1070s, to hear a Gregory VII appealing to the people to boycott their priests and spurn their bishops, a Sigebert of Gembloux lamenting ‘sudden unrest among the populace, new treacheries of servants against their masters and masters’ mistrust of their servants', or a Marbod of Rennes protesting that to denounce the errors of the clergy before the people was ‘not to preach but to undermine’, without conceding not only that a new fear of social upheaval had been generated, but that in some manner it was founded in reality, that the course of events had been changed, and changed significantly on occasion, by the availability of the force of popular indignation to those who knew how to raise it. And quite clearly ‘knowing how to raise it’ was, for the greater part of the century, a religious matter, at least in the sense that the language that stirred the passions of the mob was religious language: the cry that brought out the crowds was that priests were unchaste, or simoniacal or corrupt, a whole generation and more before it became effective to raise the shout for a commune, or against the Jews, or towards the holy places.

Historians are in general agreement on the problem of United Kingdom food supplies during the First World War. The broad picture is as follows; during the first eighteen months or so of the war, supplies both from home and abroad were well maintained. The government therefore had no need to intervene, either in procuring or distributing food, although it took certain measures to safeguard future supplies for the Army. During 1916, however, the position changed; there had been poor harvests both in the United Kingdom and the Americas (the chief source of imported food), and the German High Command were known to be planning a new, ‘unlimited’ submarine campaign, with the aim of sinking as much shipping as possible (whether British or neutral), in order to drastically curtail imports of food and war material, and thus force a British surrender.

One of the historian's most difficult tasks is to distinguish between mere alterations of idiom, fashion or expression, and substantive changes of attitude and behaviour from one epoch to another. Efficient reforming ministers and officials can be found at work in English central government in (I should guess) every century from the twelfth (if not earlier) to the twentieth. Yet are these men and their achievements as important in explaining the development of administration as technological innovations such as new kinds of paper, the printing press, shorthand writing, the typewriter and the duplicating machine, and finally the telephone and its electronic successors? The most characteristic features of bureaucracy in the everyday, commonsense usage of the term—pen-pushers at desks, jacks-in-office, delays, high-handedness, form-filling, record-keeping, and so on—can of course be found many centuries before there was a modern civil service; that is, one with competitive entry examinations, grades, salaries, security of tenure, retirement pensions and the rest. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the description ‘persons in offices’ or simply ‘officers’ was normal, rather than office-holders, while the designation ‘civil servants’ was slow to take hold even during the nineteenth century.

It is just fifty years since Thomas Frederick Tout died on 23 October 1929. Apart from a few formative years at St. David's College, Lampeter, Tout spent the whole of his academic career in Manchester. It was there that in 1908 he read and reviewed Eugène Déprez's Etudes de diplomatique anglaise and soon afterwards conceived the monumental work of a lifetime, modestly entitled Chapters in the administrative history of Mediaeval England. This six-volume work describes the organization of the household of England's medieval kings between the Norman conquest and the revolution of 1399, and the way in which the great administrative departments of state sprang from it. Beginning as a study of the king's personal chamber and wardrobe, it blossomed into a study, first, of the principal and less personal offices of the chancery, the exchequer and the privy seal—their growing complexity and bureaucratization, their increasing professionalism and specialization, and their eventual permanent settlement in or near London—and, second, of the way in which these offices affected, and were affected by, the relationship between individual kings and their subjects. The focus of Tout's work was the court and the central government, institutions and administration.

Historians love to sail under bare poles with the spares tophamper of theoretical disquisition. Yet in the last resort their differences resolve themselves largely into differences of methodology, and nowhere more patently than in the history of bureaucracy where contingency and a priori ideas have long contested for the key position in historical explanation. This must be the excuse for an historian of colonial rule who finds himself driven to study the richer historiography of bureaucracy in metropolitan Britain and to trace out its movement with the simplicity of caricature before he can settle to his satisfaction the mechanics of historical causation in government house and secretariat.

The terms bureaucracy and bureaucratization are altogether loaded with emotional connotations. In order to get beyond this and to reach an understanding of what is actually meant when we talk of bureaucracy and bureaucratization it is worth while turning to Max Weber. Weber was among the first sociologists to discuss systematically the consequences of bureaucratization for Western societies. He developed an ideal-typical theory bureaucratization which has been extremely influential far beyond the confines of sociology as such. Undoubtedly it is of major interest to historians as well, for though systematic in its intent, it draws on a wide range of historical cases; furthermore, it was intended to throw light on significant historical developments, in particular the processes nowadays associated with the concept of modernization. Indeed, Günther Roth pointed out recently with good reason that Max Weber's retreat from history was in fact strategic rather than fundamental; his ideal-typical systematizations were meant to serve as tools and guidelines for empirical historical research just as much as for sociological analysis. ‘Socio-historical models (such as bureaucracy, patrimonialism, feudalism or the charismatic community) are useful to us in so far as they organize historical knowledge in a specifically sociological way, that is, in the form of generalizations that emphasize the general and repetitive side of history without assuming the existence of laws in any strict sense.’ Moreover, in Weber's methodology ideal types are then used in a genuine historical manner.

Sir Edward Bridges, when he was trying in 1952 to guard against the dissolution of an official inquiry into economic organization which he hoped would establish a set of principles for civil servants to follow, sent a minute as Head of the Civil Service to the Cabinet Secretary which included a powerful rhetorical question: ‘If those of us who have lived all our working lives in Whitehall, and have studied the Whitehall organization, give up as hopeless all attempt to reform it from inside, then what hope is there of any reform in our time?’ In the context of Winston Churchill's return to power in October 1951, Bridges was implying that the new Prime Minister had unilaterally imposed his own conception of Cabinet organization on his official advisers, and ignored their claim that they could effectively design what was required. Churchill had in some sense broken a convention that senior civil servants were primarily responsible for the official side of what they called ‘the centre of the machine’.

The Lenthall family acquired Latchford in Oxfordshire by marriage in the fifteenth century and settled there. They were lesser gentry, but Thomas Lenthall was M.P. for Oxford in 1542 and John Lenthall—the elder brother of the Speaker of the Long Parliament—was made marshal of the King's Bench prison and knighted in 1616, and he married a daughter of the Temples of Stowe. Before the Civil War at least the family might be said to belong to the rising gentry. Sir John was alleged to be corrupt and extortionate as marshal, accepting money for the improper release of prisoners. But as early as 1645 he was being harried by his creditors, and a substantial part of the estate was under mortgage in the early 1660s. The debts do not appear to have arisen directly from the Civil Wars—in which the senior line of the family took no active part—but may have been the result of Sir John's exceptionally large family. In 1678 his grandson and successor, William, raised money by a method which indicated severe financial difficulties, the sale of an annuity for twenty-one years, and in 1679 his second wife's family found him a Parliamentary seat at Wallingford to enable him to evade his creditors. In the early 1680s the various debts on the estate were bought up by Sir John Cutler, the wealthy money-lender and the hero of Wycherley's Praise of Avarice, and in 1685 were consolidated in a single mortgage of all Lengthall's propery, including his profits from the King's Bench prison, for £12,000. The rate of interest was 5½ per cent, a high rate for the period, and after 1689 the interest fell into arrears, so that by 1700 there was owing on account of this debt over £20,000. In addition, in the 1690s William incurred judgment debts of some £6,500 to two Londoners, and in 1700 had to give these creditors a second mortage on his assets. Thus by 1700 the total of his debts was well in excess of the capital value of his property, and the income from the estate was in the hands of Sir John Cutler's executors and heirs who attempted to foreclose the equity of redemption in order to sell the estate. Their attempt was frustrated by the death in 1702—in the midst of these proceedings—of William without direct issue, but leaving as his legal heirs the descendants of his numerous aunts, some living beyond the sea and others, though in England, untraceable. For this reason two private Acts of Parliament were obtained vesting the equity of redemption of the Lenthall estate in trustees to sell in order to discharge the debts secured on it.