This chapter analyses the first prime minister, Robert Walpole, against Boris Johnson – the prime minister at the time of the office’s 300th anniversary. The two PMs bookend 300 momentous years of history, but what has changed about the office of prime minister? Comparing personal and political, the chapter examines the machinery of government, from patronage in Parliament to departmental power as well as the core driver for the role of prime minister. While the country and office have changed, some core functions and political realities remain the same in the British system.

This chapter samples signs from educational institutions at various levels and a few school and government offices.

By the second quarter of the fourteenth century, England had developed many attributes of a ‘constitutional monarchy’: one that would later expand and contract, in cycles, across the British Isles. This constitutional monarchy has been subject to many minor recalibrations; more major recalibrations have occurred between 1640 and 1690, and also between 1820 and 1870. To focus on the function and form of this hereditary institution of governance, it can be seen operating in accordance to rules and conventions within three separate if overlapping spheres: that is, the parliamentary, the personal and conciliar, and the judicial.

The history of the relationship between the executive and the administration has been largely invisible to lawyers and constitutional law. The provision of the Magna Carta 1215 in which King John promises to ‘[ ] appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs, or other officials, only men that know the law of the realm and are minded to keep it well’ is not well known.

The Introduction argues that the common scholarly terms feudalism, lordship, state-building, bureaucracy, officeholding and government all promote a misleading narrative about Europe’s transition from the medieval to the modern period. To better understand how power and authority functioned at the local level, it is essential to focus on the people who provided protection and exercised justice – and to recognize how little their corrupt practices changed between 750 and 1800. At the center of this study is the position of advocate (Latin: advocatus; German: Vogt), which emerged in the Carolingian period. Advocates then proliferated, especially in the German-speaking lands, and were responsible for providing protection and exercising justice on ecclesiastical estates, in some towns and even for entire regions. Examining how advocates profited from their positions across a millennium offers the opportunity to reassess the standard narrative of European political progress and to rethink the concepts we rely on to tell that story.

This chapter surveys the proliferation of different types of advocates from the late thirteenth century onward, not only in the German-speaking lands but also along the Baltic coast. It begins by demonstrating that, despite churches and monasteries’ efforts to buy back their advocacies from local nobles, many church advocacies survived throughout the period 1250 to 1500. It then turns to urban advocates, who were responsible for providing protection and exercising justice in many towns in the German-speaking lands, and territorial advocates, who exercised authority on some large conglomerations of royal and aristocratic estates. The central argument of this chapter is that these new types of advocates should not be understood as officeholders in developing bureaucracies. Although there is evidence of rulers trying to hold these advocates accountable, the sources on their local activities show them pursuing many of the same corrupt practices of justice and protection as advocates of the period before 1250.

This chapter presents a concept of office as the central, organising concept in public law. Public law is, effectively, the law of public offices. An office is a stable, institutionalised social role tantamount to an artificial legal person that is occupied by a person from time to time in virtue of which that person acts ‘outside themselves’ and for the political community as a whole. This is the key to understanding the law of judicial review, which is uniquely concerned with this official mode of action. The concept of office has languished at the margins of public law theory since the nineteenth century reform of the English civil service. Its reinstatement is essential to understand the judicial review of official action beyond statute, and would reinvigorate and enrich public law theory more broadly as well – up to and including the foundation of a powerful conception of the rule of law.

This chapter introduces the central technical apparatus to describe official action and thus, also, to describe the mechanics of judicial review of official action implicit in the traditional terminology of ‘ultra vires', that is, acting ‘beyond one's powers'. Officials are reposed with powers in virtue of rules of two types, which I call rules of competence and rules of conduct. These are not just labels of convenience, they explain the constitution of office and the inherently legal and limited nature of official vires. They box out the ‘space’ in which an official (i) can and (ii) may act lawfully, which space I call ‘Spielraum'. This concept relates to a modified Hohfeldian schema of jural relations which removes the temptation of "residual liberties" as a valid category of the official legal position.

This chapter provides an account of the Crown and its officials (and the relationship between them). This is the first of three chapters that provide fundamental building blocks for the judicial review of non-statutory executive powers. The Crown is an ambiguous term, which can specify the Queen, HM Government, and even the organised political community ('commonwealth') as a whole. Working through these ambiguities is essential in order to describe who is being reviewed (and why), and this entails working through some long-standing questions about the Crown's legal personality and relation to the person who is Monarch. Rejecting the idea that the Crown is a natural person (ostensibly because the Queen is a natural person) is the first step that leads, logically, to a theory of judicial review via a theory of office,official empowerment, and action in an official capacity.

The envoyship of Abū Jaʿfar al-ʿAmrī generated expectations of succession, culminating in Ibn Rawḥ al-Nawbakhtī’s accession to the role upon his death. Quasi-Imamic mechanisms of designation (naṣṣ) and initiatic inheritance (waṣiyya) were invoked to support this. However, it is argued in Chapter 6 that long-present pressures against a centralizing Imamate now led to the collapse of the envoyship. Ibn Rawḥ fell afoul of the complex machinations of the ʿAbbasid court. He was imprisoned, then was challenged by his aide, Shalmaghānī, who claimed to embody Imamate and divinity. Ibn Rawḥ issued a denunciation of Shalmaghānī, and the caliph al-Rāḍī had him executed as a heretic. However, soon after Ibn Rawḥ’s death, a rescript from the hidden Imam declared the termination of the office of envoy. Thereafter, the diffuse leadership of earlier elites, especially scholars, came to replace the centralizing bureaucratic leadership of the envoys, and the defunct envoyship was canonized as orthodox history.

The feast day of St Margaret of Antioch (20 July) was observed almost universally in the liturgical calendar. Witnesses of the Sarum Ordinal prescribe without variation the observance of Margaret’s feast with texts taken from the Common of Saints, including a procession to an altar of St Margaret. However, there are several Office books extant which preserve complete sets of coherent and well-crafted Proper texts for Margaret. Despite its unlikely and scant survival rate, this Office for Margaret, which survived the imposition of contradictory instructions in the Ordinal, was not haphazardly created or transmitted: it demonstrates how a saint’s legend recognised as potentially spurious at an early stage could be interleaved with a familiar liturgical framework of psalmody and sung texts.

Liturgical offices for the patron saints of particular dioceses or individual churches often deliberately emphasise the saint’s importance for the place where they were venerated. The sets of chants for their feast days frequently refer to episodes in their life on earth and the miracles worked after their rebirth in heaven and culminate with a call for the saint’s intercession on the day of judgement. These cycles of chants, for Vespers, Matins, and Lauds, usually two or three dozen in number, were commonly called historia and complemented the writings about the saint in the passio, vita, and miracula. The chapter surveys the topographical references in some forty saints’ offices, across England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, and also comments on some musical features of their new composed chants.

For a society to be labelled “complex” in the conventional sense it must be one touched by processes of institutionalisation, requiring that structure be embodied in designated ranks and roles. Those positions can be ascribed or achieved, distinguishing between those positions gained by birth-right and those by selection or competition.1 A role may require certain experience, skills, or specialised knowledge that is actively learnt, but like status exists only within a matrix of human relations – no lone person can stand resplendent as king or queen. Titles, therefore, serve to specify two, sometimes overlapping, purposes, defining aristocratic privileges as well as functional specialisations. These political personas need to be maintained and communicated through the medium of symbols (e.g. Cohen 1974, 1981). Elite distinction is most often expressed by special insignia or attire, but it can include everything from subtle codes of etiquette to grandiose architectural statements. Where items can be fashioned from rare and exotic materials, or highly charged with artistry and aesthetic value, the projection of eminence will be all the more effective (Clark 1986; Robb 1999; Joyce 2000).