Twelfth-century England had no constitution. There was no general system of government in which powers were balanced, functions allotted and defined, rights protected, and principles stated or acknowledged. Instead there were the materials from which a constitution of some kind might ultimately and indirectly be compounded. Government was evolving routine procedures, methods which it found convenient to use in most, but not necessarily all, circumstances. It operated in a society in which privilege seemed to be part of the natural order of things: privilege attached to this or that particular status, or privilege which individuals held as a result of royal favour, or privilege which great corporate institutions held as necessary conditions of their function. From these primitive elements to a settled constitution was a long, tortuous and often bloody journey in which the grant of charters of liberties was but one, and that an early, step. It was nevertheless a hazardous step, one which required determination and organization on the part of those who demanded and received such grants, and one which was necessitated by the power and complexity of the administrative machine under the control of those who granted them. It was a step which required considerable sophistication on the part of both, for it involved a fusion of the government's routine on the one hand with the privileges of the subject on the other. On the one side, routine procedures which the government had hitherto developed as administrative and political convenience dictated were now being conferred as rights to which the subject was entitled. On the other side, the privileges which the subject had hitherto enjoyed because of status, grant or prescription were now being extended to cover administrative procedures which were often of recent origin, which were never the exclusive concern of one particular subject, which might not be the concern even of one particular grade within the feudal hierarchy, and which could only be held by the recipients in common, in some kind of corporate capacity.