The Tudor Sheriff: A Study in Early Modern Administration, by Jonathan McGovern

This book offers a detailed description of the office of sheriff under the Tudors, interwoven with an argument for the continued importance of the shrievalty, and bookended by calls for a return to administrative history. Jonathan McGovern is a postdoctoral research fellow at Nanjing University’s School of Foreign Studies, a literature programme. In 2019, he completed a doctoral degree in the University of York’s Department of English and Related Literature on the rhetoric of counter-insurgency in sixteenth-century rebellions. Given that background, readers might expect a different book than this. Showing no sign of a literary approach to its subject, it calls instead for a strict ‘archival empiricism’ (p. 226) and attempts to reprise the administrative histories of a past generation. McGovern claims only ‘modest ambitions’ for the book, noting that it ‘does not undertake to chart the rise of the state, excavate plebeian political culture, analyse political languages, or put the politics back into social history’ (pp. 12–13). In short sections at the beginning and end of the text, McGovern complains about the ‘social history of politics’, sometimes in ways that seem to misunderstand or to misrepresent the works listed. Studies that draw on the insights of sociology or anthropology sit alongside postmodern linguistic analyses as works marred in equivalent ways by ‘theory’. He sees studies of political culture as part of a ‘wider attempt to redefine the purpose of history by emphasizing social forces and playing down the importance of individual agency’ (p. 11)—a characterisation that might surprise some practitioners who long privileged the hunt for agency and a complaint that sits oddly in a book focused on an institution described as allowing little room for individual initiative. Later he disavows the ‘vocabulary of agency, reciprocity, mediation, participation, and negotiation’ on the same page where he suggests that historians who have used this vocabulary have been entirely too negative: ‘It would simply be wrong to assume that the lower orders were merely victims, and never beneficiaries, of the exercise of power’ (p. 223). Embracing an explicitly positive, optimistic view of Tudor governance, he asserts with equal optimism that approaching the archive from such a perspective will allow evidence to be examined without the filter of predetermined arguments.

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