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ordinance of Henry VII (1493) and a ceremonial of the same reign are in H. O. 107. The documents of Henry VIII's time are complicated. There appear to be three sets of ordinances: (a) the Eltham Articles drawn up by Wolsey (Halle, ii. 56) in Jan. 1526 (Lord Steward's Misc. 299, ff. 158, 163; Exchequer T. of R. Misc. 231; H. O. 137-61, from Harl. MS. 642); (b) ordinances related to a 'new book of household', c. 1540 (H. O. 228-40); (c) scattered ordinances, c. 1532-44 (H. O. 208-27). Subsidiary lists and documents of about the period of (a) are in Lord Steward's Misc. 299, and, perhaps with some of other dates, in Brewer, IV. i. 860. Those printed from a Dunch MS. in Genealogist, xxix, xxx, appear to belong to the 'new book' of (b). A third set, of c. 1544-6, are in H. O. 165-207. Much other material is scattered through the twenty-one volumes of the Calendar of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (1862-1910, cited as Brewer), including some of earlier date than the Eltham Articles.—I need hardly add that for the purposes of this chapter I have rarely been able to go beyond printed sources.]

The ordering of court life and ceremonial was in the hands of a group of departments which made up the somewhat complicated establishment of the royal Household. But the Household, at a time when the personal capacity of the Crown was as yet imperfectly differentiated from its national capacity, was not merely a domestic organization; it was still to a large extent an instrument of central executive government. It must in fact be regarded as the direct descendant of the eleventh-century curia regis, through which all the important functions, deliberative, judicial, financial, and administrative, had been carried out. The curia had consisted partly of the territorial magnates, earls, and barons, who had been, or whose fathers had been, the King's comitatus in battle; partly of knights still in attendance upon the King's person, and hoping some day, in reward for their services, to become territorial magnates in turn; partly, and to an increasing extent as government became more complicated and difficult, of clerks whose trained skill with the pen and with figures made them more practically useful than the lay knights in all those branches of affairs which entailed book-keeping and correspondence. All the members of the curia, in smaller or greater numbers, according to the magnitude of the business to be transacted and the willingness of the lords to leave their estates, sat with the King from time to time, and advised him as his consilium; but except on great occasions of state it was left to the knights to wait at his table and order his servants about, and to the clerks to write and send his letters, and to act as his assessors or his deputies in the exercise of justice or the collection and spending of his revenue. In course of time some of the functions of the original curia had become specialized in distinct departments, which acquired a permanent habi