As far as Professor Trevor-Roper was concerned public office in the seventeenth century was commensurate with wealth, and the gaining of office was one of the causes of such rises of the gentry that occurred before the civil war. This view has been substantially modified by a number of historians who have delved more deeply into the mire of departmental records, and have concluded that the rewards of officialdom were usually modest, especially under Elizabeth I and Charles I, and that the more spectacular beneficiaries were small in number. Very little work on the profits of office in the later Stuart period, however, has been atttempted. Excellent departmental studies on the post-Restoration Treasury, for instance, exist, but although they detail the official salaries of treasury personnel they do not indicate all the remunerations that they might expect from their daily toil. One of the main reasons for this neglect is the lack of evidence on which to base any far-reaching conclusions on the unofficial spoils of office. Myriads of departmental records are extant but they do not throw much light on illicit profiteering. It would be a very careless official who admitted all his gains in his accounts or departmental correspondence. Such evidence as does exist in official documents is necessarily scanty and has to be pieced together with scraps of information from private sources. Even then some of the remaining evidence has to be treated with circumspection for, as Professor Hurstfield has pointed out, allegations of corruption are not necessarily good evidence and have to be heavily substantiated.