ABSTRACT
Contemporary witnesses hand down a vivid picture of the typical day of Elizabethan clerks, often captured in the speeding letters up and down the long corridors of the royal palaces. This chapter situates the production of the state papers in their physical, political, and archival context. The work of the secretariat took place in royal palaces, and it involved the monarch, her ministers, anonymous workers, and often, a chain of offices. The geography of the Tudor court has been reconstructed in the works of David Loades, David Starkey, and Simon Thurley, among others, but the space allocated to the administration and to the writing offices has not received targeted attention. Mobility varied from one reign to the other and was in fact limited in the reign of Elizabeth, when the most distant destinations of royal progresses were Kenilworth and Norwich in the 1570s. The prerogative duty of the clerks of the Council was the correspondence of the Privy Council.
