Chapter 12
It is no part of the purpose of this book to re-tell the constitutional history of England between 1066 and 1087, but a study of William the Conqueror cannot wholly avoid the task of attempting to isolate the Norman factor in such changes as then occurred, and of estimating the personal contribution which was made by the king in bringing them about. Yet even if the problem be thus rigorously restricted, it does not admit any easy solution. The institutional developments of these years, and their social consequences, were due to a bewildering interplay of Norman and English influences. In governing his conjoint realm William found himself at the mercy of distinct and often opposed traditions, and he was faced also with the results of powerful social and economic tendencies which the Norman conquest had set in motion or accelerated.
Nevertheless, it would be rash to minimize the king's own importance in instigating or deflecting the developments which ensued. It was a personal monarchy which he exercised, and his personal influence was here always potent, and sometimes decisive. He was feudal overlord with direct and compelling rights over his greater vassals: he was a sanctified king, inheriting the prestige of the Old English monarchy, and the administrative machinery which that monarchy had created. He was placed at the very centre of power, and it is inconceivable that a king of dominating will and political genius should not have wished to seize the opportunities offered by such a position. Any consideration of his administration, or of the influence he individually exercised on the social changes which he witnessed, must, therefore, begin with the king himself and with the officials who were the chief executive agents of his will.
It was in the king's household that the king's most intimate and trusted servants were to be found. It is fortunate therefore that there has survived a document of slightly later date – the Establishment of the King's Household1 – which reflects what must have been the organization of the Conqueror's household, and reveals the primitive notions of government still prevailing in his time. As was proper to a personal monarchy, the king's administration could still be regarded as the responsibility of the king's personal servants. In the household, as described in this text, the chancellor will be found in the company of personal servants such as the king's huntsmen, while important officials bear such titles as steward, butler, and chamberlain. The holders of these offices were none the less among the most important men of the land. Many, if not all, of their purely domestic duties were discharged by deputy, and they themselves were directly responsible for much of the royal administration. The development of the royal household under the Conqueror is thus of considerable importance since it contributed substantially to the efficiency of his rule, and since it was to entail extensive constitutional consequences in the future. And the process will be found once again to illustrate the Conqueror's policy of effecting a major change with the least possible disturbance of English usage.
William had found established in England a royal household which was not dissimilar from the ducal household in Normandy, but the men who surrounded the Confessor were designated by titles unknown to Latin Europe, and the widespread use of the Danish term ‘staller’ to describe any ‘placeman’ makes it impossible to distinguish with any precision among the duties discharged by his household officials.2 There were, however, at the Confessor's court men of standing who were content to hold domestic titles as a mark of honour, and the rough equivalents of the butler, the chamberlain, and the marshal, as these offices were understood in Normandy, could already, before 1066, be found in England. It was possible for William to retain in his household during the early years of his reign several laymen who had been officials at the Confessor's court. Bundi the staller was one of these; so possibly was Ednoth the staller; and so, certainly, was Robert ‘fitz Wimarc’, a man of Breton origin, and perhaps of royal connexions, who served both the Confessor and the Conqueror.3 Very soon, however, William began, in his household, to replace men of native English ancestry by members of the Norman aristocracy who had risen to power during his reign as duke. Haimo, who was a steward in England as early as 1069, was the son of Haimo dentatus who was killed at Val-ès-Dunes; Roger Bigod who was prominent in the Cotentin before 1064 possibly acquired during the reign of William the Conqueror the stewardship he subsequently held; and Eudo dapifer, already a steward in England from about 1072, was the son of that Hubert of Ryes who gave sanctuary to the young Duke William in 1047.4 The advancement of these men was typical of a policy which by the time of the Conqueror's death was almost fulfilled. By 1087 the household of the king of England was overwhelmingly Norman in personnel.
Such men, scions of the new Norman nobility, brought to the offices they held the traditions with which they had been made familiar at the Norman court. Indeed, many of them had already held office in the ducal household. Chief among these was William fitz Osbern, who, already steward before 1066, retained the office even after he had become an English earl.5 Despite his exceptional power, however, he was representative of an aristocratic group who performed service in the Conqueror's court both before and after the Conquest. Similarly, Hugh of Ivry succeeded to the office of butler before 1066 and retained the title until after 1082.6 Finally there is the constableship, which in this respect is particularly significant.7 For the constable was essentially the man in charge of the household knights of his lord, and the military organization of England in the time of the Confessor had as yet given no occasion for such an officer to be established at his court. The office, however, already existed in Normandy, where it was held by Hugh II of Montfort-sur-Risle, and this man, who fought at Hastings, retained the position after the Conquest, receiving the ‘Honour of the Constable’ for his services.8
It would, moreover, be rash to assume that during the Conqueror's reign there was any rigid separation between his household in England and his household in Normandy.9 The instance of the chamberlain is here of interest. The office, it will be recalled, had been held in Normandy as early as 1034 by a certain Ralph, whose son Ralph of Tancarville was William's chamberlain both before and after 1066, passing on the office after his death in 1079 to the great family he founded.10 Now, Ralph of Tancarville does not appear ever to have come to England, so that some distinction between the two households might here be suspected. On the other hand, no master chamberlain appears to have been appointed in England during William's reign, and it is therefore probable that Ralph's duties in England were discharged by deputy.11 At all events, his case was in some respects exceptional, and in general it would appear that these household officials of the Conqueror served the king wherever he went. Whether there was as yet any settled order of precedence among them is hard to determine. The steward, the butler, the chamberlain, and the constable seem to have retained in varying degrees the prominence which they had enjoyed before 1066, and among these offices there were distinctions, which, likewise, appear to have derived from earlier Norman traditions. Thus, between 1070 and 1087, as in pre-Conquest Normandy, there normally existed simultaneously in the household two or more stewards, and two or more constables, but the offices of butler and chamberlain were not so divided, so that the titles of master butler and master chamberlain were employed to distinguish their holders from their subordinates.12
Alike in its organization, in its personnel, and in the titles of its chief officers, the royal household of King William at the close of his reign resembled in most respects the earlier ducal household. Nevertheless, one important development within the household at this time derived from English precedent. No man in Normandy between 1035 and 1066 bore the title of chancellor, though the office was between 1060 and 1067 becoming fully established in the court of Philip I.13 Nor did the ducal chaplains during these years form a highly organized scriptorium. In England, however, the case had been very different. The short sealed writs, uniform in character, which were issued with great frequency by Edward the Confessor,14 presuppose a body of royal clerks who had developed settled traditions of administrative practice. Nor is there much reason to doubt that from time to time one of these chaplains obtained within the royal scriptorium a position of control, and he may have been entrusted with the great seal which the Confessor is known to have possessed.15 That any of Edward's chaplains was ever styled chancellor is, however, extremely doubtful, though a certain Regenbald, who survived the Conquest and received grants from King William, was subsequently referred to under this title and may have discharged some at least of the duties which were to be associated with the chancellor's office during the Conqueror's reign.16
The first man certainly to be styled chancellor in England was Herfast, whose career as one of Duke William's chaplains has already been noted, and who in 1069 is described as chancellor in a charter for Exeter.17 There was, however, at first little change in thescriptorium over which he presided, for between 1066 and 1070 there continued to be issued in England writs in the vernacular, which are indistinguishable in form from those of Edward the Confessor, and which are unlike any documents produced then, or at any previous time, in Normandy.18 Nor was this continuity of practice substantially broken even in 1070 when Herfast was promoted to the see of Elmham. Nevertheless, under his successor, Osmund, likewise styled chancellor,19 certain significant changes began to appear.20 Henceforward, the Conqueror's writs were, generally speaking, couched not in the vernacular but in Latin, and they were progressively employed to transact a wider variety of business. The writs of the Confessor normally recorded a grant of land or rights: the later writs of the Conqueror were increasingly used to announce commands or prohibitions. They became, in short, the most characteristic expression of the king's administrative will; and the office of chancellor, now firmly established, was filled in a continuous succession through the reign.21 Thus Herfast who became bishop of Elmham in 1070 was succeeded by Osmund who received the see of Salisbury in 1078; he in turn was replaced by Maurice who was made bishop of London in 1085, and Maurice was followed by Gerard who was still chancellor at the end of the reign. These chancellors remained, however, simply officials of the king's household, whose services after a few years were normally rewarded with a bishopric. The separation of the chancery from the household, and its development as a great judicial office, only took place at a later date.
Under the Conqueror, the king's household officials directed the royal administration in all its aspects, but the application of that administration to the kingdom at large was in other hands, and the most crucial point in the blending of Norman and English traditions took place in the sphere of local government. Here the Conqueror found at his disposal not only the great feudal families he had established in England, but also operative units of local administration – the shires and the hundreds – which had pursued a vigorous life before ever he came to this island. It was in harmonizing these elements of social life under the control of a monarchy which had direct relations with both, that some of the greatest achievements of the Anglo-Norman dynasty were later to be made. But the process which was to entail such lasting results was begun under the Conqueror, and its later successes owed much to his initiative.
The character of the transformation of aristocratic power in England, and its effects upon English local government under the direction of the first Norman king, could not be better illustrated than by reference to the curious history of the English earldoms and of the English shrievalties in his time. England before 1066 had been familiar with earls and sheriffs: Normandy with counts and vicomtes. By the end of William's reign these offices were all possessed by men of the same aristocracy, and they were, moreover, in the Latin documents of the age described in identical terms. Both the earl in England and the count in Normandy were designated comes: both the sheriff and the vicomte appear in the texts as vicecomes. The fact deserves some emphasis. King William was never indifferent to English traditions, nor were the clerks who drafted his official acts lacking either in knowledge or a desire for precision. That they found no difficulty in describing offices, whose earlier history had been different, by identical names, tempts speculation how far, owing to the Norman settlement, the earls and sheriffs in England were made to approximate as to status and function, to the counts and the vicomtes of Normandy.
The question is made more interesting when reference is made to the personalities most directly concerned with the transition. Norman counts took a large part in the the conquest of England, and received a large share of the spoils. But with one doubtful exception, no Norman count (comes) became during the Conqueror's reign at any time an earl (comes) in England. Neither Robert, count of Eu, nor Richard, count of Évreux, received an English earldom, and it is unlikely (though not impossible) that Robert, count of Mortain, was ever earl of Cornwall.22 By contrast it was a bishop of Bayeux who in 1067 became earl of Kent; and William fitz Osbern who at about the same time was made earl of Hereford was never a count in Normandy. An equally striking situation is revealed in connexion with the shrievalty. The Norman aristocracy was to take possession of this office. But no Norman vicomte (vicecomes) became a sheriff (likewise vicecomes), whereas two members of notable vice-comital dynasties – to wit, Hugh of Avranches and Roger II of Montgomery – became earls in England.23
During the reign of the Conqueror, the position of the earl within the English polity was so transformed that it came to approximate more closely to that of the pre-Conquest Norman count than to that of the pre-Conquest English earl. In the time of Edward the Confessor almost the whole of England had been divided into earldoms, and although the notion that the earl was a royal official had never been allowed to die, in practice the politics of the reign had been dominated by the quasi-independent rivalries of the great comital houses. The events of 1066 were, however, fatal to these powerful families. After the battle of Hastings no member of the house of Godwine remained with authority, and there were to be no more earls of Wessex. Edwin and Morcar, earls at that time of Mercia and Northumbria, were likewise disinherited, and after a few years of political insignificance they passed finally from the scene, the one by death and the other through perpetual imprisonment. In the far north, Gospatric was only briefly titular earl of a truncated Northumbrian earldom, and Waltheof son of Earl Siward was to survive but for a short time. His execution for treason in 1076 brought to an end the tradition of the Old English earldoms.
William had no intention of allowing them to revive. He had no desire to see his kingdom parcelled out afresh into semi-independent princedoms, and instead, while exercising great caution, he reverted in his English policy to notions consonant with his experience of the Norman comté The Norman counts before the Norman conquest had all been closely connected with the ducal dynasty, and their comtés, smaller in size than the English earldoms, had been situated in regions specially important to the defence of the duchy. Similar conditions were now to be reproduced in England. Thus the bestowal in 1067 of the earldom of Kent upon his half-brother Odo, and, in the same year, of the earldom of Hereford on William fitz Osbern were clearly defensive measures, and the early establishment of the earldom of Norfolk was certainly inspired by the need of protection against the Danes. Similarly, the earldoms of Chester and Shrewsbury which before 1077 had passed into the hands of Hugh of Avranches and Roger II of Montgomery24were constructed to guard the Welsh frontier. These special creations, important as they were, covered, moreover, only a fraction of the territory which had been held by the great earls of the Confessor's reign, and they were soon to be yet further diminished. After the forfeiture of Ralph Gael in 1075 the earldom of Norfolk was not to be revived during the Conqueror's reign, and after the disgrace of Odo in 1082 the earldom of Kent was allowed to lapse. By the end of the Conqueror's reign, therefore, a remarkable transformation had here been effected. Whereas in 1065 almost the whole of England had been subjected to the rule of earls drawn from three dominant familes, in 1087 the only earldoms in being were a small region in the extreme north which in 1080 or 1081 had been entrusted to Robert of Montbrai, and the three palatine earldoms of Chester, Shrewsbury, and Hereford, one of whose holders, Roger of Breteuil, had languished in prison since 1075.25 The earldom which in 1065 had been in England the normal unit of provincial government had by 1087 become an exceptional jurisdiction created like the Norman comtés on certain frontiers for special purposes of security and defence.
If the approximation of English to Norman usage thus resulted in a diminution of the importance of the earl within the English polity, a similar approximation in the case of the sheriff entailed a directly opposite result.26 No English sheriff in pre-Conquest England had the standing or power of the great hereditary Norman vicomtes such as those of the Cotentin, the Avranchin, or the Bessin. The sheriff under Edward the Confessor was a landowner of the second rank whose status depended upon his being the agent of the king. By the end of William's reign his place had been taken by men who, like the earlier Norman vicomtes, were among the most powerful members of the aristocracy. Moreover, just as the Norman vicomte had been subordinate not to a local count but to the duke, who was also count of Rouen, so also did these men, as sheriffs, enter into a transformed political structure where, unlike their English predecessors, they normally found no earl as their immediate superior. It is small wonder, therefore, that there came to be ‘a strong likeness between the English sheriff and the Norman vicomte’, and indeed contemporaries found little difficulty in describing English shires as vicomtés27 The earlier history of the two offices had of course been different, but the functions, and status, of their holders in the Anglo-Norman state were made to some degree to correspond, and when all proper qualifications are made it remains true to say that ‘the sheriffs of the half century succeeding the Conquest resemble their French contemporaries much more than either their English successors, or the shire-reeves of the Anglo-Saxon period’.28
The assimilation of the two offices (which was never to be complete) was none the less gradual. In the opening years of his English reign, William turned naturally to the existing sheriffs as primary agents of the royal power, and some of his earliest writs were addressed (in the vernacular) to sheriffs such as Edric of Wiltshire or Tofi of Somerset, who had been in office during the old régime.29 Not until after 1070 was there any consistent attempt to replace sheriffs of native ancestry by men of a different type recruited from the duchy. Then, however, the process was rapid, and it became an essential part of William's policy to place prominent men from the new aristocracy in an office which provided so powerful a means of giving effect to the royal will. Such, for instance, were Haimo, sheriff of Kent, the son of Haimo dentatus who fought at Val-ès-Dunes, or Baldwin of Meules, sheriff of Devon, the son of Gilbert of Brionne, the count.30 Such, too, were Hugh of Port-en-Bessin, sheriff of Hampshire, Urse of Abetôt, sheriff of Worcester, and Robert Malet, sheriff of Suffolk, who in Normandy was lord of the honour of Graville-Sainte-Honorine.31 And the importance of Geoffrey of Manneville, sheriff of Middlesex, Roger Bigot, sheriff of Norfolk, Edward ‘of Salisbury’, sheriff of Wiltshire, and Durand, sheriff of Gloucestershire, is indicated by the fact that the heirs of all of them became, within two generations, earls in England.32
The acquisition of the office of sheriff by men of this importance could only be made of service to the king if they were themselves subjected to his control and made to serve, like their humbler Saxon predecessors, as royal agents. To achieve this object was not, however, easy. The office provided great opportunities for the enrichment of its holders, and many of the Norman sheriffs of this period became notorious for their depredations. Churches and monasteries were particularly loud in their complaints: Urse of Abetôt had robbed the churches of Worcestershire, Pershore, and Evesham, whilst Ely had suffered heavy losses at the hands of Picot, sheriff of Cambridgeshire.33 Such protests could, however, only be made by the strong and influential. It was, therefore, of high importance that the king himself should strive to check abuse by his sheriffs of the great powers they wielded. In 1076 or 1077 he set up a commission which included Lanfranc, Robert, count of Eu, and Richard fitz Gilbert to inquire into the conduct of sheriffs throughout England, ordering them in particular to make restitution of any lands which had been seized from the church. Surviving writs show the attempt to give effect to this decision,34 and in many of the great trials of the reign sheriffs came up for judgment. In its turn the Domesday inquisition was to entail the restitution of many estates which had been wrongfully acquired by the sheriffs.35 The essential part played by the Conqueror's sheriffs in the Norman settlement of England depended, however, less upon such specific control than on the loyalty which they normally displayed towards the king. The acquisition of the English shrievalty by the Norman aristocracy thus in its turn contributed substantially to the Conqueror's policy of establishing that aristocracy in his kingdom without too great a disruption of existing institutions of local government.
For the Anglo-Norman sheriffs took over all the duties of their Anglo-Saxon predecessors.36 They were responsible for the collection of the royal revenue; they were the executants of royal justice; they controlled the local courts of shire and hundred. In addition, they performed as in the keeping of castles, some of the functions associated in the duchy with the vicomte; and like the Norman vicomtes, many of them became specially connected with the royal court. They brought to their position in England the prestige of great feudal magnates, and this, added to the royal authority which they represented, gave them the power to enforce the king's orders, even when these might affect the greatest man in the land. It was through them that the Norman king was able to give new vitality to an ancient English office, and to bring the strength latent in Anglo-Saxon local institutions to the service of the feudal polity he founded.
Nowhere was this to prove more important than in the essential matter of finance, and here too it was William's policy to take over what was best in the traditions of the duchy and the kingdom. The development of the fiscal system of Normandy before the Norman conquest has already been noted, and, as has been seen, its organization had been sufficient to provide the duke before 1066 with a revenue superior to that of most of his neighbours in Gaul.37 Its most characteristic feature was the assessment of taxes on administrative areas rather than on individual estates, and the farming of the vicomtés by the vicomtes. At the same time the utilization of the ducal revenues had become the responsibility of the ducal camera whose existence can be traced back to Duke Richard II, and which during the Norman reign of Duke William was under the control of the chamberlain. Many of the details of the fiscal arrangements of pre-Conquest Normandy are obscure, but they had certainly provided Duke William before 1066 with the exceptionally large resources which had been necessary to enable him to make his great adventure overseas in that year. Now, they might be expected to offer the Conqueror indispensable financial support in the tasks which confronted him as king.
In England, William inherited a distinct financial system and one which was in many respects unique. Like the Norman duke, the English king had drawn his revenue from many sources. He had his customary dues; he had the profits of coinage and of justice; and he had the revenues from his own estates which were frequently farmed by his sheriffs. But in addition the king in England had for long exercised the right to levy a general tax over the whole country, which was described as a ‘geld’, and this geld was based upon an assessment which, while it varied in detail from region to region, was everywhere organized upon similar principles.38 Each shire was assessed a round number of geldable units, which in Wessex and the southern Midlands were called ‘hides’; the assessment was then subdivided within each shire among the hundreds; and the quota of the hundred was then repartitioned once more among the villages usually in blocks of five or ten hides. The system was undoubtedly cumbrous, but it enabled the king to impose a roughly uniform tax over the whole realm, and it has been described as ‘the first system of national taxation known to western Europe’.39
William was quick to take advantage of it. The vernacular Northamptonshire Geld Roll, drawn up as it seems between 1072 and 1078,40 shows that the Conqueror was already utilizing the Old English geld arrangements for his own purpose; and there has also survived a group of Latin records, collectively known as the Inquisitio Geldi, which describes the manner in which a levy was made over the five western shires.41 The Conqueror, in fact, imposed these gelds at fairly regular intervals during his reign, and the importance he attached to them is strikingly illustrated in the great survey which marked its close. Domesday Book is not simply a geld book, but one of its chief purposes was to record the liability to geld throughout England, and it is from this survey, drawn up by the first Norman king, that most of our knowledge of the geld system of Anglo-Saxon England is derived.42
William, in fact, brought under a single political domination two countries whose individual fiscal arrangements were relatively well developed, and it is therefore of interest to consider how far, under his direction, these were made to influence each other. There is no evidence that the English methods of geld assessment were ever in his time transported to Normandy. On the other hand, the central control of all the royal and ducal revenues continued to be in the camera, which after the Conquest, as before, remained under the supervision of master chamberlains of the house of Tancarville. It is not, however, certain whether during the Conqueror's reign the process had begun whereby the treasury, under an independent treasurer, was to be established as an office separate from thecamera, or how far this development had been foreshadowed before 1066 in either Normandy or England.43 A certain Henry, holding lands in Hampshire, was in Domesday Book (1086) styled ‘the treasurer’ and this Henry (though without the title) is independently recorded as having held land in Winchester, where from the time of Cnut the royal treasure, or part of it, was stored.44 Again, the family of Mauduit, which, at a later date, held one of the chamberlainships of the exchequer, can likewise be traced to Winchester in 1086.45 It would, none the less, be rash to draw too precise conclusions from such testimony. There is a distinction between a treasury which is a mere storehouse, and a treasury which is an office concerned, also, with dealing with the king's creditors, and with adjudicating on financial disputes.46 The most that can be said is that, within twenty-five years of the Conqueror's death, some progress had been made towards the latter conception. Domesday Book was kept in the treasury from an early date, and between 1108 and 1113 an important plea was held ‘in the treasury at Winchester’.47
It would be irrelevant, therefore, in this context to attempt any precise answer to the controversial question how far, if at all, the origins of the later exchequer can be traced to the Conqueror's reign. As is well known, the twelfth-century exchequer consisted of two related bodies: the upper exchequer which was a court controlling financial policy, and the lower exchequer which was concerned with the receipt and payment of money. It is the lower exchequer that has been derived from the treasury, which in some form or another as distinct from the camera has been detected in the time of the Conqueror, and even perhaps in that of the Confessor. Some of the later practices of the exchequer, such, for instance, as the blanching or assaying of money, were apparently used under the Confessor and extended under the Conqueror. Again, the importance of treasuries as recognized royal storehouses – particularly those of Winchester and Rouen – was much enhanced under William. Finally, the methods of accounting later used in the exchequer – the abacus and the careful accounts recorded on rolls – were probably of foreign origin, and may have owed something to Norman practices and officials introduced into England by the Conqueror.48
Whatever conclusions may be drawn about the origins of the twelfth-century exchequers of Normandy and England, the general character of William's fiscal policy is clear, and the manner in which he here blended the distinct traditions of his duchy and his kingdom, combining them efficiently into a single operative system. So far as England is concerned, this result depended directly on the fact that, as has been seen, the shrievalty during his reign was taken over so completely by the Norman aristocracy. For the sheriff remained, after 1066 as before, the chief royal finance officer.49 He collected the royal dues; he collected fines such as the murdrum; and each Michaelmas he helped to supervise the payment of ‘Peter's Pence’. He collected the profits of justice for the king, and was probably responsible for seeing that the feudal obligations of the king's tenants were properly discharged. He exploited the royal manors within his shire, and took into his keeping any estates that had been forfeited to the king. Under William, moreover, it was the sheriff who was ultimately responsible for the collection of the geld. How far the later practice whereby the sheriff farmed his shire was developed by William is uncertain. There is at least one case of a farm of a shire by a sheriff before 1066, but it would be rash to assert that the practice was then general in England, or even to conclude that the system had been fully established by 1087.50 Before the death of William, however, the practice had certainly been widely extended, and here the example of the farming of the Norman vicomtés by the vicomtes may perhaps have been influential.
Of the efficiency of William's financial administration, and of its success, there can be no doubt. The revenues which as duke he had drawn from his duchy were exceptionally large for a province of Gaul, and after 1066 these were vastly increased. Together with his half-brothers he owned directly nearly half the land in England, and he drew a very large annual revenue therefrom through his sheriffs. Again, the circumstances in which the new honours had been established not only gave him very lucrative rights in respect of the feudal incidents in England, but enabled him to enforce a stricter payment of these dues in connexion with the Norman honours which were held by the same men. Profits of justice in their turn had always been a source of wealth to the duke, and now these profits were also drawn from all over England. More important still was the English geld which he must have regarded as one of the most valuable legacies which he inherited from his royal Anglo-Saxon predecessors. Four times at least he is known to have raised this tax from all over England, and the imposition was very heavy. To judge from later practice it was normally levied at the rate of two shillings for every hide of land, but on rare occasions the rate was even higher, and in the notorious geld of 1083 the assessment was at six shillings a hide.51 It is true that many estates, particularly those of the church, were exempted from this savage tax, but even so the amount collected must have been enormous.
Nor were these the only sources from which William drew his revenue. Before the Conquest he had acquired an extensive income from taxes on Norman trade, and when he became king he could vastly increase this by similar taxation in England. By the Conquest he acquired a kingdom which was rich not only in its landed wealth but also in respect of its trade.52 London especially was a trading centre of high importance. To it in the time of the Confessor there came merchants from Normandy and northern France, from the Low Countries, and the Rhineland. A trade with Sweden was conducted from York, Lincoln, and Winchester, and perhaps to a lesser degree from Stamford, Thetford, Leicester, and Norwich. Chester was a centre of a trade in furs; English cheese was exported to Flanders; and both Droitwich and Norwich were important salt markets. All this activity now came under the control of the Norman king and could be taxed for his profit. It is true that the Conquest to some extent disrupted the flow of English overseas trade, but even so William's revenue from this source must have been very large. And from the towns themselves, in which it was centred, he derived great wealth. The boroughs of Anglo-Saxon England were too diverse in character to allow easy generalization to be made about them. But a greater borough normally belonged to the king in respect of two-thirds of the profit to be extracted from it, and such revenue, deriving perhaps from a mint, and more certainly from burgage tenements and from market tolls, might be very extensive.53 It undoubtedly contributed substantially to the Conqueror's wealth and power.
It must be remembered also that such economic losses as England sustained as an immediate result of the Conquest were often made for the benefit of Normandy, and thus in turn added to William's resources. The treasure brought back to Normandy from England in 1067 attracted attention,54 and much of the development of Normandy during the next decades was undoubtedly financed out of wealth taken from England. There was much direct spoliation of England for the sake of the duchy, but in general it was in a more indirect way that after 1066 the wealth of Normandy was increased. Norman abbeys and Norman lords had become possessed of English lands, and as these were exploited, a financial basis was supplied for the extension of Norman commerce. The material prosperity of the abbey of Fécamp under the wise rule of Abbot John is well attested,55 and elsewhere there is testimony of a great expansion of Norman trade. The tolls levied by Geoffrey, bishop of Coutances, increased fourteen times between 1049 and 1093, and it has been estimated that a similar increase took place in the tolls of Caen and perhaps of Bayeux.56 As for Rouen, the development was even more striking. The prosperity of the city as a trading port was now further enhanced, with the result that the wealth of its merchants became notorious, and a mercantile aristocracy was in process of formation.57 By 1091 a certain Conan, who was a member of the powerful civic family of the Pilatins, was famed for his riches, and these were in fact so great that out of his own resources he could hire a considerable force of mercenaries in support of William Rufus.58
All this activity on both sides of the Channel was to the king's advantage, and particularly in respect of the increased flow of money which it stimulated. William had claimed as duke, and he was to retain as king, a monopoly of coinage. In the duchy there were but two mints, those of Bayeux and Rouen, but the importance of these was now naturally much increased. And in England, William found here a more notable source of revenue. In England it had been characteristic of a borough to have its mint, and coins are known to have been struck for King Harold during his short reign at no less than forty-four minting places.59 The exclusive right of William to mint money thus became after the Conquest of the first importance, and the Norman moneyers of the king were men of substance whose management of the royal finance enabled them to amass their own considerable fortunes. The activities of Rannulf, the minter, in Normandy, before the Conquest have already been noted. His sons inherited and increased their father's wealth, and one of them, Waleran, himself a moneyer, extended his operations to England with such effect that he acquired lands in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Essex, and Hertfordshire, and also a house in Wood Street, London.60
It is impossible to estimate with any accuracy the precise amount of the annual revenue which William collected from Normandy and England. Figures are difficult to obtain, and when available it is hazardous to express them in terms of modern money. But the total sum by contemporary standards was extremely large. William was known as a wealthy prince, and when he died his financial position was perhaps stronger than that of any other ruler in western Europe. Moreover, though he left treasure to his successors, he himself never needed to be parsimonious.61 The splendour of his court and the lavishness of his alms were notorious. His son-in-law rated his largess as second only to that of the emperor of Byzantium, and, according to William of Malmes-bury, the crown-wearings which he instituted were so costly that Henry I effected a considerable economy by discontinuing them.62 More particularly, the constant wars waged in defence of his kingdom could only have been financed out of a large revenue. Inheriting financial organizations of considerable efficiency in both parts of his realm, he developed these to such purpose that the resources of Normandy and England could be exploited to subserve the political needs of the Anglo-Norman kingdom. Indeed, the survival of that kingdom was to depend in large measure on the wealth he came to control.
The ultimate test of the government of any medieval king must, however, always be sought in connexion with the administration of justice, and here the quality of the Conqueror's statesmanship was displayed with especial clarity in both parts of his realm. As has been seen, the curia regis of William as king was, like the curia ducis over which he had earlier presided as duke, essentially a feudal court endorsing feudal law and custom; and some account of its operation between 1066 and 1087 has already been given.63 But just as in Normandy, William had used his vicomtés as units of local justice, so also in England did he find, in the shires and hundreds, local courts of ancient origin, and these too he at once began to use in an attempt to make his justice pervade the kingdom he had conquered. Nowhere, indeed, in the Conqueror's England was the blend of Norman feudal ideas with pre-feudal English traditions to be more apparent than in his utilization of local courts to supplement the jurisdiction of his central curia.
The chief agent in forging this link which was so essential to the Conqueror's policy was undoubtedly the sheriff. Before the end of his reign the sheriff had become a great feudal magnate, and as such he was personally vested with judicial rights. But he was also by virtue of his office placed in a special relation to the courts of shire and hundred, and it was natural that he should, as his Saxon predecessors had done, hear pleas concerning the king and the kingdom in those courts.64 He may, it is true, have shared these duties with others. The office of local justiciar65 was established in England before the end of the reign of William Rufus, and it is not impossible that it existed sporadically, and at intervals of time, in England during the reign of the Conqueror. Æthelwig, abbot of Evesham, clearly had some official judicial position in the western shires in 1072, and so also did other men elsewhere at later times in his reign, though these were seldom specifically named as justiciars of particular shires. Nevertheless, whatever other expedients William may have used to introduce his justice into the shire courts of England, it was the sheriff who in this matter remained the natural executant of the king's will, and it was to the sheriff that the king's writ ordering some particular plea to be held was normally addressed. At the same time William exercised a more direct intervention in local justice by the dispatch of members of his own court to conduct local trials of particular importance. As will be seen, many of the chief members of the Norman aristocracy, both ecclesiastical and lay, were employed in this way by the Conqueror as itinerant justices, and among them Geoffrey, bishop of Coutances, was to be the most active in this work.
The success with which the ancient local courts of England were brought to the service of the first Norman king, and the extent to which they were made to uphold tradition at a time of change deserve to be reckoned as among the greatest of the Conqueror's achievements, and in no other matter was his statesmanship to be more influential on his English posterity. His policy in this respect thus deserves some illustration, and it could not be better exemplified than by reference to some of the great trials which were so marked a feature of his English rule.66 Thus in his time a series of pleas were held respecting certain estates which were alleged to have been wrongfully taken from the abbey of Ely.67 Between 1071 and 1074, for instance, a great inquiry, held before the united courts of the neighbouring shires, was conducted by the bishops of Coutances and Lincoln, Earl Waltheof, and the sheriffs Picot and Ilbert. Judgment was given for the abbey, but at least one, and probably two, more trials concerning the Ely lands occurred during the Conqueror's reign. Some time between 1080 and 1084, for instance, a great plea was conducted at Kentford by Geoffrey, bishop of Coutances, in the presence of many of the king's tenants-in-chief, and before a combined session of the courts of the three adjacent shires, and once again judgment was given in favour of the monastery. These Ely pleas were, indeed, notable occasions, but even more spectacular, perhaps, was the trial held, either in 1072 or between 1075 and 1076, at Pinnenden Heath in Kent to adjudicate between Archbishop Lanfranc and Bishop Odo of Bayeux respecting lands which the bishop was said to have taken from the see of Canterbury.68 This trial, also, was held under the presidency of Geoffrey, bishop of Coutances, before an assembly of the king's tenants-in-chief, meeting this time within the shire court of the county of Kent. Lanfranc obtained judgment in his favour, but the execution of the verdict seems to have been delayed, since many of the disputed estates were still in Odo's possession in 1086.69Finally may be mentioned the plea relating to a dispute between Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester, and Walter, abbot of Evesham, over their respective rights in the manors of Bengeworth and Great Hampton.70 Once again the presiding judge was Geoffrey of Coutances, and the trial was held at a session of neighbouring shire courts.
These are the best reported trials of the reign, but they were certainly representative of many others, and they may fairly be taken to illustrate the general principles of the Conqueror's administration of justice. The king's direct interest in them is evident. They were instituted by royal writ, and the presiding judge was in every case the king's deputy.71 At Pinnenden Heath, Geoffrey of Coutances is described as representing the king, whilst in the Worcestershire plea he was bidden by the king to act in meo loco.72 Odo of Bayeux conducted a later Evesham plea in the same capacity, and he likewise presided for the king at a trial between Bishop Gundulf of Rochester and Picot the sheriff concerning land at Freckenham in Norfolk.73 The presence of these men as royal missi – or commissioners – marks these occasions as trials before the king's court, and to that court there came, as in feudal duty bound, tenants-in-chief of the lord king, men who might sometimes be drawn from outside the shires which were more particularly affected.74Nevertheless, in these trials use was also made of specifically English institutions. The pleas were held in full sessions of the shire courts, and to these meetings there came not only the francigenae of the shire but also Englishmen. And the shire courts, as such, together with the sheriffs, played a vital part in the trials themselves. The Worcestershire plea was tried by the barons with the witness of the whole county, and at Kentford the verdict was formally recorded as being also the judgment of the shires.75 Just as the Ely plea was ordered to be held ‘by several shire courts before my barons!, so also was the Freckenham suit heard by the king's command ‘in a combined session of four shire courts in the presence of the Bishop of Bayeux and others of my barons’.76 By holding his feudal courts in assemblies of the English shires William was grafting the royal rights of a Norman king of England on to the ancient institutions of the land he had conquered.
Nor was this merely a matter of expediency. Nothing is more remarkable in these trials than the king's desire that the traditional legal customs of England should be maintained. The bishop of Worcester was allowed to produce witnesses of native origin to testify to his established rights, and at Kentford the English took a significant part in the inquiry.77 At Pinnenden Heath there were assembled together ‘not only all the Frenchmen in the shire but also, and more especially those English who were well acquainted with the laws and customs of the land’.78 In particular there came to this trial Æthelric, a former bishop of Selsey, ‘a man of great age, and very wise in the law of the land, who by the king's command was brought to the trial in a waggon in order that he might declare and expound the ancient practice of the laws’.79 Such acts possess more than merely antiquarian interest. Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury, was the king's principal adviser, whilst Odo, bishop of Bayeux, was the king's half-brother and one of the most powerful of his subjects. A dispute between them might well threaten the whole fabric of the newly established Anglo-Norman state. It is therefore noteworthy that such a controversy at such a time could, by the king's order, have been adjudicated by reference to traditional English customs. Few conquerors, medieval or modern, have shown more statesmanlike concern for the traditions of countries recently won by the sword.
The procedure adopted in these trials also calls for comment. The method of the ordeal, which was still employed, had long been used on both sides of the Channel, as also had been the inquiries by means of witnesses or by the production of charters.80 On the other hand, the Conqueror's practice of sending commissioners to hold his local courts was substantially an innovation in England and it was to prove, under William's successors, a powerful agency for developing the royal power. Not only, moreover, did these men bring the king's authority more directly than ever before into the shire courts of England, but in their conduct of the pleas over which they presided they made use of a method of proof which was to have the most extensive influence upon English judicial practice at a later date. For it was in these trials that use was, for the first time, consistently made of the jury as ‘a group of men appointed by a court to give a collective verdict upon oath’.81
The origin of this institution has been much debated. Traces of it have been found in the Danish districts of England before the Norman conquest,82 but, according to many scholars, it was introduced into England by the Normans, who developed it out of the sworn inquests which had been used by the Carolingian kings.83 The matter may, therefore, here be left in suspense. What is certain, however, is that William employed such juries more consistently, and to greater effect, than had ever before been the case in England, and between 1066 and 1087 their use became a characteristic feature of his judicial administration. Such a jury can, for instance, probably be seen at Kentford, whilst in the Freckenham plea Odo, bishop of Bayeux, used two juries in an attempt to ascertain the facts under dispute.84 Similarly, in Normandy, at a trial held before the king between 1072 and 1079, the rights of the priory of Bellême were vindicated by what appears to have been a collective verdict delivered by a jury composed of men of great age.85 The practice was evidently becoming more general, and soon it was to be spectacularly extended. The Domesday inquest, which was not wholly unconnected with the earlier litigation, was itself in 1086 to be conducted largely by means of sworn verdicts given by juries up and down the land.86 All England was thus to be made familiar with this institution which the Conqueror had established as a regular part of the royal administration. It was not the least of his contributions to the future development of English justice.
The royal administration conducted by King William entailed many consequences which were not to be fulfilled until long after his death, and it would be hard to assess what were its immediate effects upon the daily lives of the people over whom he ruled. The establishment of the Anglo-Norman kingdom wrought no such changes on peasant life as it produced in the higher ranks of society. The rural conditions prevailing in Normandy do not appear to have been substantially modified during the third quarter of the eleventh century,87 and though the Conquest, and the disturbances which followed it, brought havoc and destruction to many English villages, the agrarian structure of England was not essentially different at the end of the Conqueror's reign from what it had been in 1066.88 The new rulers of England seem to have been unwilling, or unable, to modify the varieties of peasant organization which existed in pre-Conquest England, and nothing is more remarkable than the persistence during these decades of diverse provincial traditions. The village customs of Kent and Northumbria were, for example, to remain distinct, and there is ample evidence that the peasantry of East Anglia and the North Mercian Danelaw still possessed after twenty years of Norman rule an exceptional degree of personal freedom.
The rural organization of eleventh-century England has been exhaustively discussed by a long succession of scholars,89 and it needs notice in this place only so far as it was affected by the personal administration of William as king. In this connexion it is significant that the bulk of our knowledge of English peasant life in the time of Edward the Confessor derives from the great survey that was compiled by his Norman successor, and it is likewise significant that the men who drew up that survey applied to England the same terms that they used in describing the peasantry of Normandy. The Latin terms used in Domesday Book undoubtedly lack precision, but they reveal a rural society which is not essentially different from that which is described in pre-Conquest texts in the vernacular, such as the treatise on estate management known as the Rights and Ranks of People.90 The categories of peasants which appear in Domesday Book are not strictly defined or mutually exclusive, but, as in the earlier record, they range from men whose obligations, though manifold, were not incompatible with personal freedom, to heavily burdened cottagers, and to slaves who might be regarded as human chattels. Intermediate among them was the villein – the central figure of peasant society. He was the peasant with a share in the open fields of the village, who despite elements of freedom in his condition was subjected to heavy services. He performed forced labour on several days each week on his lord's land, was liable to forced payments in money or in kind, and, when he died, his possessions were legally forfeit to his lord.
The essential continuity of English rural life during the latter half of the eleventh century has long been recognized, and all that has been noted of William's administration suggests that his influence was directed to maintain it. Such changes as here took place during his reign might perhaps be briefly summarized as having occurred in two main directions. The first is the rapid decline between 1066 and 1086 in the number of slaves in England. In the time of Edward the Confessor slavery had been a characteristic feature of English village life, and it has been calculated, though with some uncertainty, that on the eve of the Norman conquest about one in every eleven persons in England was a slave.91 By 1086 this proportion (whatever its accuracy) had been so drastically reduced that a modern commentator has found here ‘the most vivid feature of change revealed in Domesday Book’.92 It is not altogether easy to explain. Doubtless, economic factors played their part, and the new landlords, rapacious and avaricious, may have found it more profitable to exploit their estates by means of the forced labour of a dependent peasantry than by the work of slaves whose food they might have to provide. Again, the influence of a vigorously reformed church should not be ignored. But when all is said, some credit in this matter may reasonably be assigned to William's own administration. A very strong tradition, which probably at least partially reflects the truth, asserts that there was little in pre-Conquest Normandy to correspond to the widespread prevalence of slavery – and of the slave trade – in pre-Conquest England.93 And William may perhaps have been influenced by this. He is known, for example, to have striven – albeit without much success – to suppress the Bristol slave trade,94 and one of the laws later attributed to him specifically forbids the sale of one man by another outside the country.95 At all events, it deserves note that, for whatever reasons, slavery in England rapidly declined during the reign of William the Conqueror, and within half a century of his death it had virtually disappeared from the English countryside.96
The other broad change in English peasant life which was characteristic of these years was in the opposite direction. The more independent of the English peasantry, normally described in Domesday Book as ‘freemen’, or ‘sokemen’, sank rapidly in the social scale. The consequences of such organized devastations as took place in the north in 1069 and 1070 may easily be imagined, and even in areas which were not so tragically affected it is not uncommon to find villages where the whole population had deteriorated in economic status between 1066 and 1086. It would, doubtless, be rash to generalize too freely from isolated examples, for every village was a flux of rising and falling fortunes. But the changes which, during these years, took place among the landowners of England must often have afflicted the peasantry. The new aristocracy, possessed of large and scattered estates, which they were concerned to exploit, were harsh landlords, and their stewards, moving from region to region, tended to enforce a uniformity of subjection which operated to the disadvantage of the more favoured villagers.97 Inheriting the rights of their Saxon predecessors, these men possessed also the feudal superiorities they had acquired from the Norman king. And at the same time the Norman legal theory that peasant status should be determined not by inherited political right but in relation to services performed, cut at the root of such traditional claims to personal freedom as were still precariously asserted by the more independent peasants. For these reasons, while slavery began to disappear from England under Norman rule, predial servitude increased.
The reign of William the Conqueror undoubtedly witnessed very great distress among the English peasantry who comprised some ninetenths of the population of England. Their existence was at best precarious, for they had few reserves. The failure of a crop could produce immediate scarcity, and two successive bad harvests might bring on one of those terrible famine pestilences which were so marked a feature of the age.98 Yet such distressful conditions, in which life and health might be preserved only with difficulty, were not the product of the Norman conquest, and it is doubtful whether they were much aggravated by it. When all allowance has been made for the inevitable hardships falling on the less fortunate during a period of political change, it remains true that there was no fundamental break in the continuity of English peasant life under the administration of William the Conqueror.
Nor was the impact of his rule markedly different on the inhabitants of the English towns.99 The king's interest in English trade and the boroughs in which it was concentrated, has already been noted, but for the men who lived in these places the period was full of hazard. Sometimes sheer disasters occurred. The successive sackings of York, for instance, must have entailed terrible distress, and the practice of erecting castles in the chief cities of England often provoked something like a catastrophe, as at Lincoln where no less than one hundred and sixty houses were destroyed to make way for the new stronghold.100 For these and other causes, the urban proletariat was increased during these years by men who had recently been impoverished. None the less, the growth of English municipal life was not in its essentials disrupted. During the Conqueror's reign it continued to suffer from the shock and disturbance of the Conquest, and its recovery was not complete in 1086.101 Yet within sixty years of the Conqueror's death the towns of England were enjoying a more flourishing life than ever before, and this development probably owed something to Norman direction, and to William's policy of conservation.102 Much of the municipal organization characteristic of twelfth-century England had existed in embryo in the time of Edward the Confessor, and William preserved and developed it. It is noteworthy how many of the Anglo-Norman charters to English towns are retrospective in character.
The composition of the English urban population does not appear to have been substantially modified as an immediate result of the Norman conquest. But the beginnings of one development which was to entail wide future consequences can perhaps be traced to the Conqueror's acts.103 It is doubtful whether before the Conquest there had been any permanent Jewish settlements in England, but the existence of a Jewish community in Rouen during the central decades of the eleventh century is certain. Nor is there much doubt that a colony of these Rouen Jews came to England in the wake of the Conqueror, and was there established at his instigation.104 It was rapidly to increase in importance, and by 1130 it was evidently a settled and prosperous community.105 On the other hand, it would be erroneous to postulate for the eleventh century anything corresponding to the widespread Jewish activity characteristic of Angevin England. The consequences of William's acts in this respect were thus to lie in the future. He facilitated the advent of Jews into England, and Jewry in England was throughout the twelfth century to retain not only a predominantly French character, but also special connexions with the Anglo-Norman monarchy.106 But if this process began in the Conqueror's reign, and under his administration, it was not far advanced during his life, and it is doubtful whether in his time there was a settled Jewish colony in any English town except London.107
The daily life of the people of England depended in the eleventh century very directly upon customs and traditions which William was consistently concerned to maintain. For this reason his administration, harsh and brutal as it was, probably did something to mitigate the distress which fell on the humbler of his subjects at a time of upheaval. The English peasantry had reason to be thankful that the new aristocracy was established without wholesale disturbance, and the litigation which is recorded in Domesday Book shows many cases when some restitution was made to native tenants who had been dispossessed by the new landowners or by rapacious sheriffs. The peasantry on their part were to gain in the long run from the king's rigorous supervision of local policing.108Here again he followed his normal practice of adapting existing institutions to his purpose. Thus by a famous ordinance he made the hundred corporately responsible for the murder of any of his followers, commanding that if the murderer was not apprehended by his lord within five days the hundred in which the crime was committed should collectively contribute such part of the very heavy murdrum fine of forty-six marks of silver as the lord might be unable to discharge.109 Order, thus maintained, was, in truth, bought at a heavy price, but its benefits were recorded by William's contemporaries on both sides of the Channel. An Englishman gratefully noted the good order he established,110 and Norman chroniclers are unanimous in lamenting the disintegration of public security which occurred in the duchy after his death.111
The administration of his conjoint realm by William the Conqueror was in every way remarkable. Harsh and brutal, it was never blindly tyrannical. Frequently repulsive in its cruder applications, it was adapted to Norman and English conditions, and, particularly in the spheres of justice and finance, it was to entail enduring consequences. Nor should it be forgotten that its operations stretched uniformly over his whole dominion. His court moved with the king wherever he went, and the development of royal justice was to follow much the same course in Normandy and England. Again, William's chancellors were concerned with business in both parts of his realm, and often accompanied the king to and fro across the Channel. Herfast was connected with charters relating both to Normandy and England,112 Osmund was frequently in the duchy in his official capacity,113 and so also was Maurice.114 While, therefore, between 1066 and 1087 every department of English administration was affected by Norman influence, English administrative practices were in their turn often transported across the Channel. And certainly the disorders which began in Normandy immediately after William's death serve to demonstrate that the more stable conditions which prevailed in the duchy between 1066 and 1087 were due in large measure to the efficiency of his rule.
It was inevitable that the advent into England of a Norman king should have produced greater administrative changes in the land he conquered than in the duchy from which he came. But it is the quality of these changes that challenges attention, for in England the Conqueror's genius was displayed as much in adaptation as in innovation, and it was his personal achievement that in the midst of the confusions attendant upon conquest he never disrupted the administrative framework of the kingdom he acquired. This in turn may partly explain why the administrative developments which he sponsored proceeded without substantial interruption despite the king's own long absences from England. Between 1066 and 1087 William spent more time in France than in England, and it is a measure of his prestige that he could trust others to carry on the highly individual policy he inaugurated. As has been seen in 1066 he confidently entrusted the government of Normandy to Matilda, Roger of Montgomery, and Roger of Beaumont, and in 1067 Odo of Bayeux, William fitz Osbern, and Hugh II of Montfort-sur-Risle were left in charge of England.115 Later, in England, it was most frequently Archbishop Lanfranc who was commissioned to act for the king, but Odo,116 and also many laymen from the great Norman houses, such as William of Warenne and Richard fitz Gilbert, likewise served in this capacity, and with success.117
Here again the unity of the Anglo-Norman feudal polity created by the Conqueror was displayed, and the extent to which this fostered the influence of Normandy and England upon each other. When, after William's death, Normandy and England were divided, the administrative consequences to both were to be unfortunate. And when, after 1106, they were once more united, the administrative conditions established by the Conqueror were to be restored, and in consequence the reign of Henry I was to witness important developments in the spheres of justice and finance on both sides of the Channel.
1 ‘Constitutio Domus Regis’: for text, see C. Johnson, Dialogus de Scaccario (1956). A commentary is given by G. H. White in R. Hist. Soc., Transactions, series 4, vol. XXX (1948), pp. 127–155.
2 L. M. Larson, King's Household (1904); Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 632.
3 Regesta, vol. I, nos. 7, 18, 23, 29; Round, Feudal England, pp. 330, 331.
4 Regesta, vol. I, nos. 26, 63, and p. xxiv.
5 Douglas, Eng. Hist. Rev., vol. LIX, pp. 77–79.
6 White, op. cit., p. 141.
7 White, Genealogist, New Series, vol. XXXVIII (1922), pp. 113–127; Stenton, loc. cit.
8 Douglas, Domesday Monachorum, pp. 65–70.
9 White, R. Hist. Soc., Transactions, series 4, vol. XXX, p. 127.
10 Complete Peerage, vol. X, Appendix F.
11 Complete Peerage, vol. X, Appendix F.
12 White, op. cit., p. 128.
13 Prou, Rec. – Actes Philippe I, p. lxvii.
14 On all that concerns the Anglo-Saxon Writ, see M. E. Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs (1952), which may be supplemented by T. A. M. Bishop and P. Chaplais, Facsimiles of English Royal Writs to 1100 (1957).
15 Harmer, op. cit., pp. 101–105.
16 Ibid., pp. 29, 60; R. L. Poole, Exchequer in the Twelfth Century, p. 25, no. 2.
17 Mon. Aug., vol. II, p. 531; Regesta, vol. I, no. 28.
18 Bishop and Chaplais, op. cit., p. xiii.
19 Cart. S. Vincent du Mans, no. 177.
20 Bishop and Chaplais, op. cit., pp. xiii, xiv.
21 Stenton, op. cit., p. 634.
22 Complete Peerage, vol. III, p. 428.
23 Ibid., vol. III, p. 165; vol. XI, p. 685.
24 Chester before 1077; Shrewsbury between 1 and 4 November 1074 (Complete Peerage vol. XI, Appendix K – by L. C. Loyd).
25 Complete Peerage, vol. IX, p. 568.
26 On everything connected with the Anglo-Norman sheriff, see W. A. Morris, The Medieval English Sheriff (1927), chap. III.
27 Ibid., p. 41; Miracula S. Eadmundi (Liebermann, Ungedruckte, p. 248).
28 Stenton, William the Conqueror, p. 422.
29 Round, Feudal England p. 422; Hunt, Two Cartularies of Bath, p. 36.
30 Douglas, Rise of Normandy, p. 19.
31 Douglas, Domesday Monachorum, p. 54; Loyd, Anglo-Norman Families, p. 56.
32 Morris, op. cit., p. 49.
33 ‘Heming's Cartulary’ (ed. Hearne), vol. I, pp. 253, 257, 261, 267–269; M. M. Bigelow, Placita Anglo-Normannica, p. 22; E. Miller in Eng. Hist. Rev., vol. LXII (1947), pp. 441 et sqq.
34 E.H.D., vol. II, nos. 38, 39, 40.
35 e.g. D.B., vol. I, fob. 208, 375–377.
36 Morris, op. cit., pp. 54 et sqq.
37 Above, pp. 133–135.
38 Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 635–639.
39 Ibid., p. 636.
40 A. Robertson, Anglo-Saxon Charters, pp. 230–235 (E.H.D., vol. II, no. 61).
41 These records have been assigned to 1084 (Stenton, op. cit., p. 636, note 2) and connected with the levy of the previous year. V. H. Galbraith (Eng. Hist. Rev., vol. LXV (1950), pp. 7–15) places them in 1086 and connects them with the Domesday Inquest.
42 Below, pp. 347–355.
43 T. F. Tout, Chapters in Administrative History, vol. I, p. 86.
44 R. L. Poole, Exchequer in the Twelfth Century, p. 35.
45 Round, Commune of London, pp. 81, 82.
46 Tout, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 74, 75.
47 Round, Feudal England, p. 143; Chron. Mon. Abingdon, vol. II.
48 All these questions have, however, recently been ventilated afresh in Richardson and Sayles, Governance of Medieval England (1963), pp. 216–251.
49 Morris, op. cit., pp. 62–69.
50 Morris, op. cit., p. 29.
51 AS. Chron., ‘E’, s.a. 1083.
52 Darlington, in History, vol. XXIII (1938), pp. 141–150; H. R. Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, esp. chaps. II, III, and IX.
53 Loyn, op. cit., p. 383.
54 Will. Poit., pp. 256–258.
55 L. Musset, Fécamp – XIIIe centenaire, p. 79.
56 Musset, Annales de Normandie (1959), p. 297.
57 S. Dek, Annales de Normandie (1956), pp. 345–354.
58 Ibid. Cf. Prestwich, R. Hist. Soc., Transactions, series 5, vol. IV, p. 27.
59 Stenton, op. cit., p. 573.
60 Musset, op. cit., pp. 293, 294; Actes – Henri II, vol. I, nos. CLII, CLIV.
61 Ord. Vit., vol. IV, pp. 87, 88.
62 Runciman, Crusades, vol. I, p. 168; Will. Malms., Gesta Regum, p. 488.
63 Above, pp. 284–288.
64 Morris, op. cit., pp. 54–56.
65 On all that concerns the local justiciar, see H. A. Cronne, in University of Birmingham Historical Journal, vol. VI (1958), pp. 18–38.
66 These have attracted much attention. Much of the evidence is in Bigelow, Placita Anglo-Normannica (1879). For a commentary, see G. B. Adams, Councils and Courts in Anglo–Mormon England (1926), pp. 70–98.
67 E. Miller, ‘The Ely Land Pleas in the Reign of William I’ (Eng. Hist. Rev., vol. LXII (1947), PP. 441 et sqq.).
68 J. H. Le Patourel, in Studies – F.M. Powicke, pp. 15–26; E.H.D., vol. II, no. 50.
69 Douglas, Essays – James Tait, pp. 54, 55.
70 ‘Heming's Cartulary’ (ed. Hearne), vol. I, pp. 77–83.
71 Adams, op. cit, p. 71; Miller, op. cit., pp. 446–448.
72 Le Patourel, op. cit., p. 23; ‘Heming's Cartulary’, vol. I, p. 77.
73 Bigelow, op. cit., pp. 34–36.
74 Adams, op. cit., p. 75.
75 D.B., vol. I, fol. 175b; Bigelow, op. cit., p. 22.
76 Bigelow, loc. cit.
77 Bigelow, op. cit., p. 22; E.H.D., vol. II, no. 52.
78 Le Patourel, op. cit., p. 22.
79 Ibid.
80 Adams, op. cit., pp. 77, 78, 97, 98; Haskins, Norman Institutions, p. 35.
81 Stenton, op. cit., p. 642.
82 Ibid., p. 649.
83 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law (2nd ed.), vol. I, pp. 141–142.
84 Stenton, op. cit., p. 642; Bigelow, op. cit., pp. 34–36.
85 Lechaudé d'Anisy, Grands Rôles, pp. 196, 197.
86 Douglas, Essays – James Tait, pp. 56, 57.
87 L. Delisle, Classe agricole, pp. 1–26.
88 Stenton, op. cit., p. 473.
89 For the latest work, see R. Lennard, Rural England (1959); and Loyn, op. cit. (1962).
90 Liebermann, Gesetze der Angelsachsen, vol. I, p. 442; and see the translation by S. I. Tucker, in E.H.D., vol. II, no. 172. It is usually referred to by the title of the early Latin translation: Rectitudines Singularum Personarum.
91 Loyn, op. cit., pp. 350–352.
92 Ibid., p. 328.
93 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law (2nd ed.), vol. I, p. 77: ‘Such evidence as we have tends to show that the Conqueror left a land where there were few slaves for one in which there were many, for one in which the slave was still treated as a vendible chattel, and the slave trade was flagrant.’
94 Vita Wulfstani (ed. Darlington), pp. 43, 91.
95 Stubbs, Select Charters (ed. 1913), p. 99; E.H.D., vol. II, no. 18.
96 Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, p. 337.
97 Lennard, Rural England, p. 33.
98 C. Creighton, History of Epidemics in Britain (1891), vol. I, chap. I.
99 Darlington, in History, vol. XXIII (1938), pp. 141–150; J. Tait, Medieval English Borough (1936); Carl Stephenson, Borough and Town (1933). I prescind the controversy between Tait and Stephenson on English municipal development.
100 J. W. F. Hill, Medieval Lincoln, p. 54.
101 Loyn, op. cit., p. 377.
102 Loyn, op. cit., p. 324. ‘Trade did not flourish immediately as a result of the Conquest, though increased regular contact with the Continent and an infusion of new blood were both characteristics that promised well for the future.’ This seems to accord with the conclusion of Tait (Medieval English Borough, p. 36) ‘that the Norman Conquest ultimately gave a great impulse to English trade and urban development is not in dispute’.
103 On all that follows in this paragraph, see H. G. Richardson, The English Jewry under Angevin Kings (1960), and particularly pp. 1–5, 23–25.
104 Ibid., pp. 1–2: ‘That the London community was an offshoot of the community at Rouen is hardly open to dispute: in any case the Jews of England were so closely allied to those of Normandy that there can be no doubt of their country of origin.’
105 Ibid., p. 25.
106 Ibid., p. 3.
107 Ibid., p. 8.
108 William is known, for instance, to have developed the system of the tithing already existing in certain parts of England, whereby men were organized in groups of ten which could be made collectively responsible for their good behaviour. The part he played in making this institution more effective, and wider spread, is a matter of some dispute, but all the evidence points to the Conqueror's reign as having been a critical period in the development of what afterwards became the institution of frankpledge (W. A. Morris, The Frankpledge System, chap. I).
109 Stenton, op. cit., p. 676.
110 AS. Chron., ‘E’, s.a. 1086 (equals 1087).
111 Haskins, Norman Institutions, pp. 62–64.
112 Regesta, vol. I, nos. 22, 28.
113 Cart. S. Vincent du Mans, no. 177; Cart. Bayeux, no. III.
114 Gall. Christ., vol. XI; Instrumenta, col. 266.
115 Will. Poit., p. 226.
116 Regesta, vol. I, nos. 78–85; Ord. Vit., vol. III, p. 244; Macdonald, Lanfranc, p. 73.
117 Will. Malms., Gesta Regum, p. 334; Sir Christopher Hatton's Book of Seals (ed. L. C. Loyd), plate VIII.