The latter part of the twentieth century may not find many of us wishing to pay tribute to bureaucrats, but as Helen Cam reminded us, the civil servant “deserves more credit than he has yet had for building up and maintaining our precious tradition of law and order.” In the late twelfth century and the thirteenth century the process of “bureaucratization” first got underway in England. An early professional civil servant, one specializing in judicial activity, was Simon of Pattishall. His name surfaces in the records in 1190, and it disappears after 1216. His time of activity, then, coincides with an important period for English common law: the years between “Glanvill” and Magna Carta.

Simon was one of that group of royal judges who might be termed the first “professionals,” a group that took shape by the middle years of Richard I's reign. By the time of John, about ninety men acted at various times as royal judges, either at the Bench at Westminster, with the court following the king, or as itinerant justices. Many of these had only temporary appointments, making circuits in the counties; but a core of fifteen, who concentrated on the work of the courts, can be regarded as early members of a professional judiciary. Simon of PattishalPs is perhaps the most respected name among the fifteen. He had the longest career on the bench, from 1190 until 1216. He founded a judicial dynasty, for his clerk, Martin of Pattishall, became a judge, as did his clerk, William Raleigh, who had as his clerk Henry of Bracton, author of the great treatise on English law.

Except for the Visitations and occasional obedientary rolls preserved in cathedral libraries, the intimate records of English monastic life are disappointingly scarce. They are particularly scarce in East Anglia, where many documents had already been destroyed during the Peasants' Revolt, long before the usual ravages following the Dissolution. It is therefore surprising that one of the few important manuscripts which did survive has received very little attention from scholars. I refer to the priors' accounts from the Cluniac Priory of Our Lady at Thetford, Norfolk.

While very little remains to tell us about life at the priory during the middle ages, we are at least fortunate to have these extremely detailed and almost complete priors' accounts for the final forty-four years of the priory's existence. They are now bound together in a single well-preserved volume, and are deposited at the University Library, Cambridge (Add. Ms. 6969). Although this lengthy manuscript has apparently been at Cambridge for a very long time, it was unknown to the great Norfolk antiquarian, F. Blomefield, when he wrote his History of Thetford (1739). Thomas Martin was unaware of the document when he published his own History of Thetford (1779)—even though he had access to other important materials, including notes from the priory's Cartulary which had perished in the disastrous Cotton Library fire of 1731. The manuscript was also unknown to the committee which compiled the Victoria County History of Norfolk in 1906, despite the fact that L. G. Bolingbroke had seen it and printed two entries from it in “Pre-Elizabethan Plays and Players in Norfolk.”

King Charles I's dissolution of the Short Parliament, 5 May 1640, proved politically disastrous. Six months later he was forced to call another Parliament, which immediately launched an attack on his councillor, the early of Strafford. Within two years civil war had broken out. The dissolution of the Short Parliament came only the day after Charles had sent to the Commons a message, apparently offering a compromise in the dispute whether his supply or their grievances should be handled first. The Commons discussed the King's offer all day and finally adjourned, requesting permission to resume their debate the next morning, thus making it possible for negotiations to continue. His Majesty, however, closed the door to further discussion and ended the Parliament. No compromise was concluded.

The idea of compromise, or “the arrangement of a dispute by concessions on both sides,” was not foreign to the Englishmen of the early seventeenth century. The words, compromise, mediate, compound and its substantive composition, all appear in the O.E.D. with sixteenth or early seventeenth-century dates. Nor were they divorced from the context of Parliament. When early seventeenth-century Englishmen thought of Parliament, they thought of an assembly where King, Lords, and Commons met and together served the interests of both King and subject. Although ideally these interests were not supposed to conflict, procedures existed to facilitate agreement within Parliament. The King might communicate with the two Houses through his councillors, while the Commons used their Speaker and the Lords relied upon various of their own number to voice concerns to his Majesty.

Few of us really know much about the way in which we are perceived by the rest of the world—we as Americans, we as scholars, we (in this case) as historians of Great Britain. Indeed, to many this last question probably appears irrelevant; insofar as we function as historians, we are members of an international community of scholarship, whose compass transcends national boundaries, and conscious as we may be of our cultural and temporal biases, we seek as far as possible in our work to throw them off, and as scholars we welcome any contributions by our fellows throughout the world if what they say adds to the store of knowledge.

So the studies, the monographs, the interpretive works pour out, year after year; certainly few specialists of the Stuart period could hope to master the vast mass of material which exists. Why then be concerned with what a group of professors and dockworkers in a provincial Chinese town has to say about British history? With one or two exceptions, their sources are a half-century or more old; have they read Hill, Stone, Trevor-Roper, Hexter? There is no evidence of it. Are they aware of the work which is being done in local history, in demographic history, in the studies of the composition of Parliament? Do they know anything of what court and country parties stood for? Do they appreciate at all the impact of Puritanism (which after all was perhaps not too far from Maoism in its techniques of mobilization and organization)?

Samuel Smiles' popular book Self-Help (1859) is usually cited as a convenient example of mid-Victorian individualism and middle class values. Yet the source and meaning of the self-help ideal is not to be found in the 1850's. Instead, the historian must first turn to eighteenth century values.

The article will therefore trace the intellectual origins of Smiles' ideal of self-help, and show that it was strongly influenced by Enlightenment concepts. Secondly, and a central theme of the article, it will be argued that Smiles' ideal of self-help in fact consisted of two avenues to reform-one active and one passive-and that these avenues to reform can only be understood in the context of the intellectual origins of the self-help ideal. Thirdly, the paper will analyse the continuing relationship between the active and passive components of Smiles' avenues to reform, and will contend that between the 1830's and the publication of Self-Help, Smiles' ideal of self-help as two modes of reform remained consistent. In order to support these claims the article will trace the development of Smiles' thought, concentrating firstly on Smiles' earliest book, Physical Education (1838), then on his time as editor of the reforming Leeds Times (1839-1845), and finally on his place in the health and education reform movements of the late 1840's and early 1850's leading into the writing of Self-Help (1859).