The Official and his Administration to the Eleventh Century a.d.

Administration is so essentially a social activity in which a high degree of co-operation and co-ordination is needed to create a sort of communal memory that the importance of records as a fundamental administrative instrument does not need to be emphasized. A scholar of the West in the early years of the eleventh century of era, looking back over the reaches of universal history, would have discerned little to suggest a natural progress in government through the ages and even less to indicate the existence of administration as a distinguishable activity. By the eleventh century a.d. all basic means for effective office work and record-keeping had become available. One certainly gains the impression that the senior public administrator of the eleventh century a.d. was facing daily tasks that differed little from those of his successor in succeeding ages and that a scribe of that period transferred to, say, an eighteenth century public department would have had very little to learn.