The provision and management of much of the magnificence on which the king depended was the responsibility of the master of the jewels. Sitting at the centre of a complex web of suppliers and administrators, he controlled the care, transport, procurement and disposal of royal plate. The jewel house, over which he presided, was both an institution and a place. As a place, it was the repository in the Tower of London for royal plate and jewels not in daily use, but as an institution it stood within the royal household and it is with the household that we should start.

The household and the jewel house

The great household was one of the key political units of the late medieval world. This is a big subject and can only be discussed here to the extent that it relates to our theme. Composed of dozens or even hundreds of people, depending on the rank of its master, it was a community and a power base. The royal household was not fundamentally different from those of other great noblemen, except that it was larger and that it interacted with the court.

But the two were not the same. According to Simon Thurley, the difference was that the household provided for the king, while the court was ‘part of the setting of kingship, [giving it] a sense of spectacle’. Not that the household itself was without spectacle, not least because of its sheer numbers. Edward IV's Black Book of court protocol laid down that a duke's household would number up to 240 servants and the king's as many as 500. By the reign of Henry VIII its numbers had swelled to as many as 1,500. These retainers, most of whom had to be fed, placed a significant burden on royal finances but were justified as yet another manifestation of magnificence, enhancing the king's status in the eyes of his subjects and of foreign ambassadors. The court, by contrast, was much smaller than the household; it was not a constant community and its members swelled or contracted according to circumstances. Nor were the two entirely separate.