In its dish-thegns , bower-thegns , horse-thegns and the rest we may discern the butlers , chamberlains and stewards , the constables and marshals , of a later day .sx Add the royal chaplains , who are known to date at least from Edward the Confessor's reign , but are almost certainly far earlier , and the tale is more or less complete .sx These chaplains managed the royal correspondence , official and unofficial there is no distinction yet between them :sx the chief of them was probably entrusted with the king's one seal and , again as early as Edward the Confessor's time , but hardly earlier , may have enjoyed the name of chancellor .sx This household , in the absence of any fixed capital , itinerated with the king , and its leading members were not only present at the Witan , in the somewhat spasmodic meetings of that vague body , but actually carried on between those meetings the inchoate and simple duties of a primitive central government .sx One tendency was present from the first .sx As the members of the household advanced in years and honour with the king , they would naturally expect to receive pensions in the shape of lands and titles , whose conversion into hereditary holdings and distinctions was only a matter of time .sx This is in fact the process which is now known to have changed gesiths to thegns , and many thegns to earls , before the Conquest .sx It resulted in a state of affairs common both to England and the continent , namely the duplication of butlers , stewards and the rest into titular Butlers and real butlers , titular Stewards and real stewards ; that is into distant grandees who seldom came to court after they had delicately commemorated their menial origin in symbolic coronation ceremonies , and deputies who remained near the king's person and actually did the work .sx The appointment of these deputies seems to have passed from the first into the king's hand , at any rate in England , though it might well have been assumed that a titular Steward , for example , had the right to appoint his own deputy steward of the royal household , as Thomas of Lancaster , moved by political considerations , urged in the days of Edward II .sx This was approximately the stage reached on both sides of the Channel at the time of the Norman Conquest , though continental household developments were perhaps the more advanced , in proportion as continental areas stood nearer than England did to those Frankish household institutions which may have been the common parents of them all .sx After the Conquest there was in England a rapid growth in both importance and complexity of the real household ; that is to say there was , excluding the titular officials , a development among the deputies who remained .sx Their numbers were increased , especially the numbers of the chamberlains , and their duties were multiplied so as to take on something of a public hue .sx More-over , the most important of them are called regularly to that prolific curia regis , which perhaps deserves better than her grand-daughter the title " mother of parliaments , " and for that matter " mother of law-courts " and " mother of government departments " as well .sx We find , moreover , that before very long new positions are created , such as those of treasurer and justiciar , positions which in one important respect resemble the chancellorship , still in itself little more than the royal secretary-ship combined with the chief royal chaplaincy , but now possessing a constant , if not a local , habitation and a name .sx That respect is the fact that neither chancellor , treasurer , nor justiciar , though sometimes associated with deputies , is a deputy himself :sx they represent the king's will immediately , not indirectly as the representatives of absent grandees .sx Yet they are still technically members of the king's household and will long be regarded as such .sx Meanwhile the Norman genius for order and administration is producing a rapid growth in the complexity of government .sx The king's chancellor is working overtime at writs and charters , letters , deeds , commissions :sx his staff must be enlarged .sx It is no longer possible for the king's chamberlains to store his infrequent cash revenue in a box beneath his bed .sx There is constant communication with the old treasury at Winchester ; the cameral staff too has increased ; every year more and more tallies are cut for the illiterate chamberlains to hand as receipts to the illiterate sheriffs ; then clerks are added , for tallies are now inscribed , and the inscriptions will one day be copied out by them on rolls :sx finally the sheriffs' renderings become of such importance that they must dispute them laboriously in counters across a squared cloth .sx At that point , somewhere in Henry I's reign , we are in fact witnessing the closing stages of the first great period of household gestation , the birth of the exchequer .sx True , the curia regis is theoretically the parent , but the curia regis is an elastic body from which , as we have seen , the leading members of the household are not to be excluded , and it is precisely this household element in the curia which will staff the new department , so that in a sense the household may be .sx u2 .sx taken as the parent after all .sx With the long history of this first , and most illustrious , of its progeny we are not concerned here :sx what is important to notice is that the Anglo-Norman household has proved fertile , and that the distinction between public and private in matters of revenue has been hinted at , though the ultimate cleavage lies far down in later history .sx Meanwhile what is the king to do ?sx He is no mere English monarch :sx he has continental possessions which absorb much , if not most , of his time , and demand his continual presence :sx yet he can hardly take with him wherever he goes this sturdy infant of an exchequer with its rolls and writs and tallies , its clerks and abacus , its treasuries , and its biennial summoning of sheriffs .sx The main solution , under Henry II , was found in the retention of the ancient chamber with the king , rather than in the foreign use of at least one local ( the Norman ) exchequer .sx For not all the king's revenue flowed into the new departments :sx much of it went into the chamber , as before , and was spent , without the new-fangled formalities , as simply and directly as it used to be .sx So the old chamber persists behind , but in amicable communion with , its successor the exchequer , until the reign of John .sx Meanwhile similar difficulties are arising with the chancellor :sx he is what we have called and should now call the king's secretary , though the word , if used , means little more than " confidant " for two more centuries ; more correctly , he is the keeper of the king's seal , and so must naturally accompany the king in his ceaseless wanderings on both sides of the Channel .sx But what is the much more sedentary exchequer to do in the chancellor's absence , for in its early days the chancellor is an important member of that body , and without the authorisation of the seal he holds , which is needed to set the writs and summonses and warrants it requires in motion , it can hardly be of much effect ?sx There are two solutions to that problem :sx the first is the duplication of the seal itself , a copy of which will now be kept in the ex-chequer , and the second the ultimate representation of the chancellor by a clerk , whose official descendant , as Chancellor of the Exchequer , will one day become the leading financial officer of the Crown .sx Both steps are important , for the first suggests aproposition which we shall find broadly true for the rest of the Middle Ages , namely that the creation of a new department carries with it sooner or later , and generally sooner , the creation of a new seal , whose appearance is a sure sign of that department's growing independence ; while the second points the way towards the slow evolution from the household of a second independent institution , the chancery .sx That evolution is a lengthy one , but it is carried sensibly nearer in the reign of Richard I , that most migratory of our rulers , whose preoccupation with the East and with his French possessions leads directly to the first important separation of the king and chancellor in the time of Longchamp , and probably , though the point is an obscure one , to the intended employment of a third or " small " seal , created it may be by Henry II himself , to replace that which is carried out of Europe by the king .sx Whether or not there were three seals at one time under Richard or his father ( all originating , be it noted , in either case , from the household ) , there were certainly three under John , whose small seal is , as we have learned to expect , especially associated with the growth of a new secretariat , in this case serving the chamber .sx More mysterious is the change , perhaps little more in essence than a mere change in nomenclature or emphasis , from this very financial organisation called the chamber to the chamber's natural offshoot , the wardrobe , attached to which a similar financial organisation is now rapidly growing up .sx Just as the chamber was originally the king's bedroom , in which stood the chest containing his treasure , so the wardrobe was originally a closet off the king's bedroom in which he kept his furs and jewels and his valuables in general .sx But why the young Henry III came to attach to it , instead of to the chamber , the more important members of his household staff , together with the business which that staff controlled , remains a mystery which has not yet been solved .sx Be that as it may , from this time on the chamber all but disappears from history for a century , and in its place must be set the young and vigorous wardrobe , as against the now adult exchequer , and the expanding business of the small seal ( soon to be called the privy seal ) , against the adolescent chancery or office of the " great " seal , the seal of England .sx There the matter might perhaps have rested , but for one disturbing factor .sx Though contemporaries then and long after failed to make any distinction between the two , what we should now call public business was provided for , as the thirteenth century wore on , by the exchequer on the financial and the chancery .sx on the executive or administrative side , each with its own seal , while the private and personal needs of the Crown could have been amply met , as far as funds allowed , by the more domestic organisations of the wardrobe and what ( still rather in anticipation ) we may now call the privy seal , and the staff beginning to be attached to it .sx But in fact this symmetrical delimitation of functions was not made ; perhaps was never made .sx The reign of Henry III opened with only two official seals in existence , that of the exchequer and the great seal , a fact due solely to the king's minority .sx The young king had his wardrobe for his private needs , but it accounted to the exchequer ; and it was some years before he was sufficiently self-conscious to demand a seal of his own , and some years more before he was able to put that demand into effect .sx In 1227 , however , Henry declared him-self of age , and he secured the seal he needed , on the model of his father , in 1230 .sx Almost immediately the familiar struggle , naturally dormant during the minority , between king and magnates revived .sx In 1232 Henry got rid of the conservative Hubert de Burgh ; in 1233 , emboldened by success , he dismissed the whole baronial entourage .sx By slow stages the hostile feelings on both sides deepened to the crisis of 1244 , which produced the first forma , or written constitution , intended to bind the king , since the enabling clause of the original Magna Carta ( 1215) .sx It was never put into effect ; but the question at issue , which was really a simple one , remained .sx Henry needed money .sx It was not only that he was by nature a lover of beautiful and costly things , and was further given to expensive military expeditions on the continent ; he had been bound twice in infancy and again of his own free will to observe the great charters of liberties , and the obligations involved were more than merely negative .sx