Local officeholders and petty officials were integral components of medieval political life across Europe and the Mediterranean, central to the configuration and experience of power but whose presence and absence could also signify crisis and confusion. Modern scholarship and medieval sources alike have acknowledged that local officers could just as easily be sources of disorder as order, generators of crisis as well as crisis managers. This strand builds on such insights to consider local officers in relation to order and disorder within their immediate local and broader sociopolitical contexts. Our approach is broad, encompassing a variety of officers—civic, royal, ecclesiastical, seigneurial, etc.—as well as challenges to the notion of ‘officialdom’. It proposes a social and experiential history which highlights the roles, profiles, and possibilities of a range of officers in their individual as well as institutional and social contexts, by considering how they supported or challenged models of political and social order prevalent in their communities or promulgated by their superiors.