This account has been a deliberate attempt to restore the public dimension to historians' increasingly ‘privatised’ account of kingship and politics in the fifteenth century, while giving the private element its proper place within the body politic. It has aimed to place politics within a context of structures of private power and public government and to examine how they affected the whole of the political society that participated in those structures, nobles and gentry as much as monarchs. What has emerged very clearly is the degree to which fifteenth-century governments, like all others, were bounded by recognised limitations, and the importance of discovering what those limitations were. Thus, for example, there is little point in berating a ruler for failing to punish infractions of the peace by landowners systematically, once it is apparent that he was not expected to do this, did not expect to do it himself and had not the means to do it. It is equally inapposite to lament non-interventionist rule if that was the norm and if it worked. These long-term structures should not normally be labelled ‘long-term weaknesses’: no governmental system is perfect, all systems will have areas where they function less well than the participants, whether rulers or consumers of rule, would like. The test is whether the polity can absorb and find ways round such shortcomings. It has been argued in this work that under normal circumstances the constitution of late-medieval England was perfectly workable.