When we speak of the Anglo-Norman or the Angevin empire, we must accordingly dismiss from our minds at the outset any notion of a government with a capital, a central treasury and judicature, and a common assembly. A fixed central treasury existed only in the most advanced of the individual states, and it was many years before the courts established themselves permanently at Westminster and Rouen. Government was still something personal, centring in the person of the sovereign, and the ministers of the state were still his household servants. The king had no fixed residence, and as he moved from place to place, his household and its officers moved with him. Indeed kings were just beginning to learn that it was safer to leave their treasure in some strong castle than to carry it about in their wanderings; it was not till 1194 that the capture of his baggage train by Richard the Lion-Hearted taught the French king Philip Augustus to leave his money and his title-deeds at Paris when he went on a military expedition. We must not be surprised to find that the principal common element in Henry’s empire was Henry himself, supplemented by his most immediate household officers, and that many of these officers, such as the seneschals and the justiciars, were limited in their functions to England or Normandy or Anjou, and usually remained in their particular country to look after affairs in the king’s absence. There was, however, one notable exception, the chancellor, or royal secretary. Regularly an ecclesiastic, so that there was no chance of his turning the office into an hereditary fief, the nature of the chancellor’s duties attached him continuously to the person of the sovereign and made him the natural companion of the royal journeys. He was far, however, from being a mere private secretary or amanuensis, but stood at the head of a regular secretarial bureau, which had its clerks and chaplains and its well-organized system of looking after the king’s business. The study of the history of institutions goes to show that, on the whole, there is no better test of the strength or weakness of a mediæval government than its chancery. If it had no chancery, as was the case under the early Norman dukes, or if its methods, as seen in its formal acts, were irregular and unbusinesslike, as under Robert Curthose, there was sure to be a lack of organization and continuity in its general conduct of affairs. If, on the other hand, the chancery was well organized, its rules and practices regularly observed, its documents clear and sharp and to the point, this meant normally that an efficient government stood behind it.