As I have noted, a concept of political office is now being used to explain institutional change and state formation in early modern England (above, introduction). The purpose here is not to present an alternative theory. It is, rather, principally to outline the scope of institutionalised office to complement what I have said of the ceremonial. Together, these chapters provide a background to my discussion of the unexplored reach of the vocabulary of office. In outlining this background, however, I shall touch on specific offices such as citizenship and more general notions such as republicanism. This should help avoid the impression that I am positing a social, ceremonial reality on which sits some intellectual superstructure. More significantly, surveying social organisation will also require consideration of the separation, derived from modern theoretical modelling, of a private realm from the ‘public sphere’ of offices, strongly associated with an emerging state. Neither social organisation nor its language supports such conceptions.

Office was a matter of belonging, of formal relational identity through responsibility; it gave a voice in the commonwealth and it was hardly possible to sustain any other. No man, wrote Edmund de Bohun, is without office, no aspect of life without rule.