ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that all historians who concern themselves with governance in the centuries before the railway and the telegraph need to think about the physical space between the central government and the point of enforcement. When the government sought to do so much, while relying almost entirely on local men and local power to accomplish its tasks, is a period when this is a particularly fruitful question. It demands also that we search among our records for the priceless pieces of information that will show us how, within these varying geographical parameters, the nobility and gentry, who were both enforcers and consumers of governance, fashioned a political and social world which enabled kings to rule. Many recent studies approach space as an arena, a site for politics at all levels, and often something that was contested; even if the space itself was real for example, the inside of a church its role in politics is seen as symbolic.
