The households – both the physical space and the personnel – of Tudor England and Wales were meant to uphold and maintain the ‘dignyte of a prince’, as John Russell, the mid-fifteenth-century Usher of the Chamber and Marshal of the Hall for Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, put it. For John Russell, late medieval households, particularly the servants, should perpetuate and magnify the noble status of the lord through the physical and visual reinforcement of the social hierarchy. Russell comments on the physical stress of serving in a great household: a servant should be with the lord, ‘waytynge on [him]’, and the spatial closeness of the servant and their lord and lady is reflected in the layout of many residences. The personnel and the arrangement of space within the castle were constantly adapting in order to best serve the head of the household. Servants might take on roles both in the bedchamber and the great hall, and the function of spaces changed depending on the activity taking place within them. For example, the great hall could host feasts and judicial hearings or even act as a space to sleep for servants. Moreover, the household could frequently change geographical locations: the head of the household continued to travel between properties, bringing their households, at least in part, with them. At the same time, visitors and estate officials moved widely through the countryside, staying at the residences of their employers and peers.

The early Tudor great household was the administrative and judicial headquarters of the lord's estates, and ensured landed income was collected through rents. As Mark Girouard argues, it ‘supplied the hard core of physical force through which he [the lord] exercised his authority’. Aside from these basic functions, the household also provided the setting for many aspects of gentle life, such as political discussion, literature, drama, architecture, music, and the conduct of personal relationships, and was thus composed of many different, ever-changing elements.