In some ways, the concept of “state formation” is a term that obscures as much as it reveals, if only because The Papers of Nathaniel Bacon raise suspicions that protagonists like JPs never had the time to think about the nature of the collective enterprise in which they were engaged. The concept has been defined, explored, and refined in great depth through the work of Anthony Fletcher, Steve Hindle, Michael Braddick, and Joanna Innes. They have charted the relationship between the administrative center in the Privy Council and the Justices of the Peace, who acted as brokers between the imperatives of royal government and the interests, anger, and apathy of the panoply of local officials, from the sheriff to the parish constable. They have shown how the early modern “state” was not just a republic of country houses, in John Cannon's words, but a tangled, pulsating, and often incoherent network of patronage, familial, and landlord relations, whose strands were pulled for many different governmental functions—the administration of justice, tax collection, militia training and provision, political horse-trading, security crack-downs, as well as metaphorical (and literal) fire-fighting of all kinds.

This multifarious activity was as incoherent as it was comprehensive and is illustrated in full in the seven volumes of the papers of Nathaniel Bacon, which have been published by the Norfolk Record Society. The first volume, published in 1979, began to detail Bacon's affairs as a Norfolk Justice of the Peace, landowner, and eminent local figure (son of Lord Keeper Bacon), starting particularly with early letters between Bacon and his father covering the years 1556–1577. Volume Seven extends the story from 1614 until Bacon's death, aged c. 78, in September 1622. It reveals that for Bacon, the “state” was probably no more coherent than a collection of spinning plates. At any one time he had to deal with judicial administration (within and beyond the courts), collection of government revenues (“voluntary” or otherwise), staffing and maintaining the militia without letting over-bearing muster-masters walk all over local sensitivities, managing vital infrastructure and the grain trade, protecting local royal prerogatives and jurisdictions from encroachment, moderating recurrent enclosure disputes and contents over (sheep) fold-courses, not to mention running his own estates and mediating between his increasingly fractious step-family. The personal, clientage, and administrative networks that Bacon used for any one of these operations might easily be deployed for any of the others—hence it may have been difficult for him to know where or when the “state” began or ended.

The Bacon papers also reveal in greater depth than many other collections two other obvious, but still surprising, facets of Fletcher's government in the provinces. The first is just how voluntary it was, in the sense that action was initiated by nothing more than officious letters from the Privy Council or the Lord Lieutenant, and diligent officials like Bacon tried to find a way to cajole, entice, or frighten their neighbors into action—with recourse to little more than the occasional exemplary fine or imprisonment. The end results were often partial or approximate realizations of the Council's intentions, but the motive force was primarily a reluctant but shared sense of moral obligation to the Crown and the “common peace.” The second is the way that the Bacon papers provide insights into the most hidden but probably most important function of the JPs—their role in extra-judicial mediation, particularly in personal or property disputes among neighboring landowners. So, in April and May 1616, Bacon attempted to mediate a dispute between Mr. Green of King's Lynn and a creditor to one of Bacon's neighbors, Allan Lampkin, over a complex debt transaction. He received a letter on behalf of Green from another (well-researched) Norfolk JP, Sir Hamon Le Strange of Hunstanton Hall. Then he, Sir Augustine Palgrave, and Christopher Calthorpe, as “indifferent assessors,” attempted to work out what was the nature of the original and subsequent bonds, how much was owed in interest, and when installments should have been paid. All of this, plus (presumably) all the undocumented “emotional labour” required to deal with the participants, was done simply to prevent a lengthy and expensive equity case—but it functioned, in effect, as uncosted equity based on the unofficial authority of the “common mind” of the local gentry.

The other feature of this volume, and its predecessors, is that it draws on extensive editorial labor to reassemble a lost archive. Bacon's papers were dispersed gradually over time. In his lifetime, some papers went astray because he maintained two houses and two muniment rooms. Subsequently, individual items were taken, some ending up in the British Library, and others in other family collections. Then, in the later nineteenth century, editors and publishers moved in on the collections, removing, reordering, mixing up, and losing bundles of papers, before early twentieth-century estate sales further dismantled the archive. In 1979, surviving papers were in at least eleven archives in the UK, USA, and Australia, and since then, approximately 40 deposits of documents have been identified, as well as untraced materials listed in auction sale catalogues. The published volumes reassemble a sizeable portion of Bacon's original collections and attempt to reconstruct their chronology. Although much has been lost, what survives not only serves as a monument to the diligence of Bacon (and his clerks) over a lifetime, but also provides the opportunity for historians to experience “state-formation” from the inside, in all its plate-spinning, head-spinning variety.