The whole of Edward’s declining years were not equally strenuous, though his finances steadily grew worse. Before the end of the old century Edward had got over the worst of his troubles abroad. He therefore determined to devote himself with characteristic energy to the conquest of the “rebel” Scots. Since therefore Scotland now became the king’s chief anxiety, Edward made his headquarters in the north of England. In those days, where the king lived there the machinery of government was to be found. For though England in the thirteenth century had centralised institutions, those institutions were not centralised in a local capital. It is true that one English city was immensely more important than all the rest. London, in the thirteenth as in the eighteenth century, was, relatively to other towns, even greater and more important than is the case nowadays. Of course Edward I’s London to our eyes would be quite a little place, but at a time when there was, outside London, perhaps no town of more than 10,000 inhabitants and very few of that population, a city four or five times that size was something portentous. Yet this greatness of London was due to its commercial activity, much more than to the fact that it was the “capital” of the country or its seat of government. In reality there was no capital in the modern sense, for the English tradition was that the government should follow the king. It was only very gradually that the governing machinery of the land was permanently settled in Westminster or London. There was, however, already a tendency towards making the great city, or rather its neighbouring court suburb, a centre of permanent administrative offices, a capital in the modern sense. Thus the Court of Common Pleas had been settled in London since Magna Carta and the Exchequer, that is the department of finance, had also been fixed there since the reign of Henry II. These were, however, still the exceptions which proved the rule. The office of the Chancery—which was not then a law-court, but the secretarial office of state—followed the king. So also did certain branches of the administration which depended on the court, and were intended, first of all, to be the machinery for the government of the king’s household. In the middle ages no distinction was made between the king and the kingdom. If the king had devised a useful machine for governing his household and estates, he naturally used it for any other purposes for which he thought it would be useful. We find, therefore, the court offices of administration and finance working side by side with the national offices, not only in dealing with household affairs, but in the actual work of governing the country.