Norman Institutions. 911-1066 83
bishops, counts, some other great nobles, the household
officers, and some local officials, the wcwntes. A large
number of these would normally be the duke's vassals, but
it is hard to say whether or not it would yet be the truest
characterisation of it to call it the duke's feudal court.1
In general, "the organisation of Norman society is feudal,
with the accompaniments of feudal tenure of land, feudal
military organisation, and private justice, but it is a
feudalism which is held in check by a strong ducal power."2
Of other matters of government there is not much to
be said. The duke's fiscal system was particularly well
organised, distinctly in advance of the surrounding feudal
states. The rents from his lands, court fines, forfeitures,
feudal dues, tolls and other rights in markets and fairs,
salt works, fishing rights, and profits of coinage (to men-
tion the more regular and important) furnished a large
income. In the accounting of this revenue a distinction
was made between what was regular and what was extra-
ordinary or occasional, it was collected with much care
and system from administrative districts, the vicomtes,
and ducal grants of money were charged against receipts
in general from a district and not, as was the more primi-
tive practice of the French kings, against an individual
domain or specific source of revenue. Such signs of
fiscal maturity we are not surprised to find early in the
reign of the man who, just before his death, conceived
and carried out the Domesday Survey.3 Over the vi~
comti, which was an administrative district of considerable
extent and which had largely replaced the earlier hundred
and pagus, was the mcomte, a distinctly public official.
He collected the revenue, lead such military forces and
1 "What we know is that when the time for the conquest of England is
approaching, the duke consults or professes to consult the great men of his
realm, lay and spiritual, the optimates, the proceres of Normandy. He holds
a court; we dare hardly as yet call it a court of his tenants-in-chief; but
it is an assembly of the great men, and the great men are his vassals."—
P. and M. i., 73.
2HasHns, op. cit., p. 60.
3 As to whether the English Exchequer in any sense grew out of this
Norman fiscal system, see ibid., p. 40 ff.