ABSTRACT
In the early fourteenth century when the period begins there were some informative parallels and contrasts in the position of the Crown and the character of the administration in the main countries of Western Europe. The great officers of state of an earlier day steward, constable, and justiciar were often holders of grandiose sinecures, working, if at all, through deputies. Royal justice was only exceptionally dispensed by the king in person and had for long become formalized in a series of courts. In England the central courts were the King's Bench and Common Pleas. The apparatus of administration available by the early fourteenth century to the rulers of England and France was commonly found in all countries of Western Europe, though it admitted of infinite variation. In surveying administrative history it should be remembered that often the politics of the region directly influence its institutions.
