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 *tation at Westminster, ceased to follow the King's wanderings, and were no longer regarded as part of the personal Household. Thus the curia as a judicial body became the Courts of Law; the curia as a financial body became the Exchequer; while at a somewhat later date the Chancery undertook the double function of issuing royal grants and other formal correspondence of the Crown, and of supplementing the Courts of Law by exercising an equitable jurisdiction in cases which ordinary law was inadequate to cover. To the central curia or Household, still composed of lay and clerical officers lodged in the King's palace and eating in his hall, wherever that might happen to be, three things were left. It ministered to the material well-being and splendour of the Sovereign himself; it exercised under his personal direction such functions of administration, for example the control of foreign policy and war, as had not passed to the specialized departments; and, perhaps most important of all, it remained potentially able to resume at his will the exercise of functions precisely analogous to those which had so passed. This paradox of the duplicate exercise of royal functions, through the specialized departments and through the Household, lies at the bottom of an understanding of mediaeval government.

The differentiation of the Courts of Law, the Exchequer, and the Chancery from the Household was complete by the thirteenth century; but the same tendency towards the budding off of quasi-independent departments of state from the administrative nucleus continued to manifest itself in a minor degree up to and even, for all their centralizing instinct, within the period of the Tudors. Moreover, as the scale of the Household became larger and its individual ministers began to require assistance, there grew up a corresponding tendency towards the formation of separate offices within the nucleus itself. The staffing of these offices with servants of various grades, their responsibilities and interrelations, and the control of them through the chief officers of the Household, were determined by royal ordinances, which go into minute detail, and reveal a complex organization, based upon long-standing tradition, and at the same time flexible in its capacity of adaptation to shifting circumstances. The main structure of the Household, as we find it under Elizabeth, appears to have been already fixed in the time of Edward IV and even in that of Edward II, although minor changes had been introduced, largely through Tudor imitation of the French hôtel du roi, just as there had been minor changes under Richard II and his Lancastrian successors,