Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/85

Rh independent of the limitations which feudalism placed upon him. Now, while the Norman duke derived much of his income from his farms and forests, his mills and fishing rights and local monopolies and tolls, he had also a considerable revenue in money. Each vicomté was farmed for a fixed amount, and there was probably a regular method of collection and accounting. If the king wished to bestow revenue upon a monastery he would grant so many measures of grain at the mills of Bourges or so many measures of wine in the vineyards of Joui; while in a similar position the Norman duke would give money—twelve pounds in the farm of Argentan, sixty shillings and tenpence in the toll of Exmes, or one hundred shillings in the prévôté of Caen. Nothing could show more clearly the superiority of Normandy in fiscal and hence in political organization, where under the forms of feudalism we can already discern the beginnings of the modern state.

To William's authority in the state we must add his control over the Norman church. Profoundly secularized and almost absorbed into the lay society about it as a result of the Norse invasion, the Norman church had been renewed and refreshed by the wave of monastic reform which swept over western Europe in the first half of the eleventh century, and now occupied both spiritually and intellectually a position of honor and of strength. But it was not supreme. The duke appointed its bishops and most of its abbots, sat in its provincial