The local administrative officers of the crown are important to us for two principal reasons: first, the composition of the officer class tells us a lot about status and can also contribute to our evaluation of the rate of social mobility; secondly it is enormously significant in the study of local power structures. Because of the devolution of power to the localities during the previous century, whoever held the local offices or could control the men appointed to those offices was potentially in a position of immense local authority. This is a subject on which much more will have to be said in the context of political developments within the county. For the present it suffices to perform a rapid survey of the offices that really mattered in local politics.

First and foremost among these was the shrievalty. Although the office had sadly declined since its great days of the twelfth century, and difficulties in accounting made it in many ways an unattractive post, the sheriff retained one key power. This was to administer locally all the writs sent out by the royal government and especially those of the central courts of law. Since it was land that lay at the basis of all landed society and political power, the defence of that land and the rights that went with it were the fulcrum of local politics. From the late twelfth century, the official agency for this had been the king's common law. By this time a large proportion of the litigation concerning landowners, whether civil pleas in the Common Bench or in the plea side of the King's Bench, or crown prosecutions in the Rex side of King's Bench, was taking place at Westminster.