the University of Oxford and a PhD from the University of York. His work has won a number of prizes, including the Parliamentary History Essay Prize (2019), the Sir John Neale Essay Prize (2018) and the Gordon Forster Essay Prize (2018). He has published widely on the history and literature of the sixteenth century, on themes ranging from allegory, sermons, and balladry to political and parliamentary history.
McGovern applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Tudor Sheriff: A Study in Early Modern Administration, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book falls within the fourth chapter, entitled “The Execution and Return of Writs”. It provides information about the nature of jury panels in Tudor England (1485–1603). It explains that when a lawsuit came to jury trial, the courts would issue writs known as venire facias writs to sheriffs, who then had to choose twenty-four qualified jurors and summon them to court on a given day. All of the jurors had to dwell in the county where the cause of legal action had accrued (e.g., where a debt had been incurred or where a trespass had taken place), and at least four had to come from the ‘visne’ (local area) where the dispute had arisen. Page 99 also talks about the administrative processes involved in empanelling and selecting jurors, including the detail that when the writs were returned into the court, twelve names out of the twenty-four who were ultimately chosen to serve on the jury would be marked with the Latin word ‘Jur[ator]’ (juror). It explains what happened when jurors failed to show up at court, and it reminds readers that the modern function of the jury had begun to emerge by the mid-sixteenth century: once a body of expert local witnesses, the jury was now typically required to give a verdict based on facts presented to them in court.Follow Jonathan McGovern on Twitter.
If a browser used page 99 as an exemplary page from my book, this would give a generally fair sense of its overall style, purpose and content. The book basically seeks to explain in detail what English sheriffs and their staff got up to in the sixteenth century, including collecting revenue, holding courts, arresting wrongdoers and executing court writs. Page 99 is one piece of this jigsaw. The book is an intervention in what I and several other historians have called ‘the new administrative history’. This style of history calls for greater attention to institutions (including institutions of government) and their procedures. It takes as axiomatic a comment made by the great medievalist T. F. Tout in 1920: ‘[T]he work most specially needed in English mediaeval history [and by extension other periods] is just the patient and plodding working out of apparently unimportant detail.’ The new administrative history promises to be a very rewarding enterprise, not least since a large proportion of the documents which historians must rely upon were generated in the course of administrative activity. My book also contains a large dose of legal history, which is well reflected in the contents of page 99. One element which the test fails to capture is the dry humour I have made light use of throughout – the page largely contains technical analysis, and so there was sadly no occasion to crack any jokes.
--Marshal Zeringue
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