THE KING AND HIS POWERS: INWARD AND OUTWARD DEFENCE

In late-medieval England no-one had any doubt that governance was really about kingship. By the fifteenth century the king of England sat at the head of an all-encompassing legal and fiscal system. He had a sophisticated central governmental machine, that had been developing almost continuously since the Conquest, with a chancery to make grants and send out his instructions in the form of writs, a treasury to collect and store his money, an exchequer to audit his accounts and chase up debts, and a large army of professional bureaucrats to staff his government. The growth of central government, much of it in response to the needs occasioned by the Hundred Years War, was given concrete expression in the growth of Westminster as the place where the expanding bureaucracy was located. It was the king whose abilities and ambitions determined whether there would be rule or anarchy. How had he come to acquire such power? The answer lies in the twin duties assigned to him as the defender of the realm: to preserve peace internally and to protect the realm against its external enemies. The most significant element of the first obligation was the defence of the landed property of his landed subjects. This was partly because land was almost uniquely the basis of wealth but more important was the fact that it was the basis of power – something we shall look at later on in this chapter.