Now that some of the concepts which shaped and sustained the government of fifteenth-century England have been explored, the time has come to examine the means by which they were normally put into effect. Since the birth of ‘administrative history’, the discussion of government has been more or less dominated by the examination of institutions. At first, this was because the institutions of the royal administration were believed to be the real venue for the struggle between royal and ‘constitutionalist’ forces which earlier generations of historians had located in parliament. More recently, that point of view has been abandoned, but the institutional approach has, broadly speaking, been retained. By those who discuss it in detail, government tends to be seen as an essentially uncontroversial and bureaucratic exercise, carried out to a large extent by professional administrators under the king's general command. While this way of looking at government certainly avoids the ‘excessive addiction to constitutional issues’ which vitiated earlier accounts – and, indeed, reflects the important perception that, in the later middle ages, consensus over the management of affairs was more normal than division – it does raise certain problems. For one thing, it may, as we shall see, go rather too far in playing down the constitutional implications of governmental forms: administrative convenience was not the only factor shaping the development of institutions. A second problem is that the continuing emphasis on institutional and ‘official’ structures for the expression of royal authority can lead to a sense that ‘unofficial’ organisations of power were antithetical, or at least extrinsic, to royal ones; that they were not part of the enterprise of government.