The Normans in European history

by Charles Homer Haskins

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Yet in a vigorous state central and local are never wholly separable, and it is where they touch that recent study has been able to show some continuity of development between the two periods, namely in the fiscal system which culminated in the exchequer of the English kings. Of all the institutions of the Anglo-Norman state, none is more important and none more characteristic than the exchequer, illustrating as it does at the same time the comparative wealth of the sovereigns and the efficient conduct of their government. Nowhere in western Europe did a king receive so large a revenue as here; nowhere was it collected and administered in so regular and businesslike a fashion; nowhere do the accounts afford so complete a view of “the whole framework of society.” The main features of this system are simple and striking.

In every administrative district of Normandy and England the king had an agent—in England the sheriff, in Normandy the vicomte or bailli—to collect his revenues, which consisted chiefly of the income from lands and forests, the fees and fines in the royal courts, the proceeds of the various feudal incidents, and the various payments which there were from time to time levied under the name of Danegeld, scutage, aid, or gift. Twice a year, at Easter and Michaelmas, these agents were required to come to the treasury and render their accounts to the king’s officers. At Easter the sheriff was expected to pay in half of his receipts, receiving therefor down to 1826 a receipt in the form of a notched stick or tally, split down the middle so that there was exact agreement between the portion retained at the exchequer and the portion carried off by the sheriff to be produced when the accounts of the year were settled at Michaelmas. The great session of the exchequer at Michaelmas was a very important occasion and is described for us in detail in a most interesting contemporary treatise, the Dialogue on the Exchequer, written by Richard the King’s Treasurer, in 1178–79. There the sheriff met the great officials of the king’s household who were also the great officers of the Anglo-Norman state—the justiciar, chancellor, constable, treasurer, chamberlains, and marshal, reënforced by clerks, tally-cutters, calculators, and other assistants. The place and the institution took their names from a chequered table or chess-board—the Latin name scaccarium means a chess-board—in size and shape not unlike a billiard table, covered with cloth which was ruled off into columns for pence, shillings, pounds, hundreds and thousands of pounds. On one side were set forth in this graphic manner the sums which the sheriff was required to pay, on the other he and his clerk tried to offset these with tallies, receipts, warrants, and counters representing actual cash. Played with skill and care on each side, for the stakes were high, this great match was likened to a game of chess between the sheriff and the king’s officers. Its results were recorded each year, district by district and item by item, on a great roll, called the pipe roll from the pipes, or skins of parchment sewed end to end, of which it was made up. For England we have an unbroken series of these rolls from the second year of Henry II, as well as an odd roll of Henry I, constituting a record of finance and government quite unique in contemporary Europe. The series was doubtless as complete for Normandy, but there survive from Henry’s reign only the roll of 1180 and fragments of that of 1184. For the other Plantagenet lands nothing remains.

This remarkable fiscal system comprised accordingly a regular method of collecting revenue, a central treasury and board of account, and a distinctive and careful mode of auditing the accounts. There was nothing like it north of Sicily, and contemporaries admired it both for its administrative efficiency and for the wealth and resources which it implied. Although something of the sort seems to have existed in all the territories of the Plantagenet empire and the different bodies seem to have maintained a certain amount of coöperation, all our records come from England and Normandy, and there can be no question that it is distinctively an Anglo-Norman institution. Whether, however, it is English or Norman in origin and how it came into existence, are still in many respects obscure questions. The exchequer is not an innovation of Henry II, for the surviving roll of Henry I and certain incidental evidence show that it existed on both sides of the Channel in the reign of his grandfather. In the time of the author of the Dialogue there was a tradition that it had been imported from Normandy by William the Conqueror, but this must be discounted by the fact that certain elements of the system can be traced in Anglo-Saxon England. The truth is that the exchequer is a complicated institution, some parts of which may be quite ancient and the results of parallel development on both sides of the Channel; at least the problem of priority has reached no certain solution. Its most characteristic feature, however, its peculiar method of reckoning, does not seem either of Norman or English origin, but derived from the abacus of the ancient Romans, as used and taught in the continental schools of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

One who tries to perform with Roman numerals a simple problem in addition or subtraction—or better yet, in multiplication or division—will have no difficulty in understanding why people unacquainted with the Arabic system of notation have had recourse to a counting-machine or abacus. The difficulty, of course, lies not so much in the clumsy form of the individual Roman numbers as in the absence of the zero and the reckoning by position which it makes possible. This defect the abacus supplied. By means of a sanded board or a cloth-covered table or a string of counters it provided a row of columns each of which represented a decimal group—units, tens, hundreds, etc.—by which numerical operations could be rapidly and accurately performed. Employed by the ancient Romans, as by the modern Chinese, the arithmetic of the abacus became a regular subject of instruction in the schools of the Middle Ages, whence its reckoning was introduced into the operations of the Anglo-Norman treasury. The most recent student of the subject, Reginald Lane Poole, connects the change with the Englishmen who studied at the cathedral school of Laon early in the twelfth century. To me it seems somewhat earlier, brought by abacists who came to England in the eleventh century from the schools of Lorraine.[36] In either case its introduction was much more than a change of bookkeeping. Convenient as such reckoning was in general, it was the only possible method for men who could neither read nor write, like the Anglo-Norman sheriffs and many of the royal officers, and its use made it possible to carry on the fiscal business of the state on a large scale, in an open and public fashion, with full justice to all parties, and with accuracy, certainty, and dispatch. It was a businesslike system for busy and businesslike men.

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In the history of judicial administration the personal initiative of Henry II is more evident than in finance. The king had an especial fondness for legal questions and often participated in their decision, yet his influence was exerted particularly to develop a system of courts and judges which could work in his absence and without his intervention. Although the institution is found previously both in England and Normandy, it is in Henry’s reign that the system of itinerant justices is fully organized with regular circuits and a rapidly extending jurisdiction which broke down local privileges and exemptions and by its decisions created the common law. Hitherto chiefly a feudal assembly concerned with the causes of the king and his barons, after Henry’s time the king’s court is a permanent body of professional judges and a tribunal for the whole realm. It is no accident that his reign produced in the treatise of Glanvill on The Laws and Customs of England the first of the great series of textbooks which are the landmarks of English legal development. Henry’s reign is also an important period in the growth of Norman law, the earliest formulation of which reaches us ten years after his death in the Très Ancien Coutumier de Normandie, and the reduction of local custom to writing is a process which went on in his other continental possessions; yet, as in finance, England and Normandy plainly took the lead in legal literature and in legal development. Indeed, the distinction between justice and finance is less sharp than we might at first suppose, for the growth of jurisdiction meant increased profit from fees and fines, and heavy payments were necessary to secure the intervention of the royal judges. In this sense Henry has often been called, and rightly, a seller of justice, but his latest biographer has pointed out that “if the commodity was expensive it was at least the best of its kind, and there is a profound gulf between the selling of justice and of injustice. A bribe might be required to set the machine of the law in motion, but it would be unavailing to divert its course when once started.”[37] The wheels of government are turned by self-interest as well as by unselfish statesmanship.

Of the many judicial reforms of Henry’s reign none is more significant than the measures which he took for extending the use of the jury as a method of trial in the royal courts, and none illustrates better the relation of Norman to English institutions. Characteristic as the jury is in the history of English government and of English law, as at once the palladium of personal liberty and the basis of representative institutions in Parliament, it is a striking fact that originally it was “not popular but royal,” not English but Norman, or rather Frankish through the intermediary of Normandy.[38] Although it has a history which can be traced for more than a thousand years, the jury does not definitely make its appearance in England until after the Norman Conquest, and the decisive steps in its further development were taken during the union of England and Normandy and probably as a result of Norman experience. It is now the general opinion of scholars that the modern jury is an outgrowth of the sworn inquests of neighbors held by command of the Norman and Angevin kings, and that the procedure in these inquests is in all essential respects the same as that employed by the Frankish rulers three centuries before. It is also generally agreed that while such inquests appear in England immediately after the Norman Conquest,—the returns of the Domesday survey are a striking example,—their employment in lawsuits remains exceptional until the time of Henry II, when they become in certain cases a matter of right and a part of the settled law of the land. What had been heretofore a special privilege of the king and of those to whom he granted it, became under Henry a right of his subjects and a part of the regular system of justice. Accomplished doubtless gradually, first for one class of cases and then for another, this extension of the king’s prerogative procedure to his subjects seems to have been formulated in a definite royal act or series of acts, probably by royal ordinances or assizes, whence the procedure is often called the assize. In England the earliest of these assizes known to us appears in 1164 in the Constitutions of Clarendon, followed shortly by applications of this mode of trial to other kinds of cases. In Normandy repeated references to similar assizes occur some years earlier, between 1156 and 1159, so that as far as present evidence goes, the priority of Normandy in this respect is clear. Moreover, Normandy offers two pieces of evidence that are still earlier. In the oldest cartulary of Bayeux cathedral, called the Black Book and still preserved high up in one of its ancient towers, are two writs of the duke ordering his justices to have determined by sworn inquest, in accordance with the duke’s assize, the facts in dispute between the bishop of Bayeux and certain of his tenants. The ducal initial was left blank when these writs were copied into the cartulary, in order that it might later be inserted in colors by an illuminator who never came; and those who first studied these documents drew the hasty conclusion that they were issued by Henry as duke of Normandy before he became king. It was not, however, usual for the mediæval scribe to leave the rubricator entirely without guidance when he came to insert his initials, but to mark the proper letter lightly in the place itself or on the margin, and an attentive examination of the well-thumbed margins of the Bayeux Black Book shows that this was no exception to the rule, and that in both the cases in question the initial G had been carefully indicated. G can, of course, stand only for Henry’s father Geoffrey, so that some general use of the assize as a method of trial in the ducal courts can be proved for his reign. As no such documents have reached us for his predecessors, it would be tempting to assume the influence of Angevin precedents; but this runs counter to what we know of the judicial institutions of Anjou in this period, as well as of the policy of Geoffrey in Normandy, which was to follow in all respects the system of Henry I. Although the first general use of the sworn inquest as a mode of trial thus antedates Henry II, it is still a Norman institution.

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It would carry us too far to discuss the many problems connected with the use of the jury in Henry’s reign or to follow the many changes still needed to convert the sworn inquest into the modern jury. It is sufficient for our present purpose to mark its Norman character, first as being carried to England by the Normans in its older form, and then as being developed into its newer form on Norman soil. It should, however, be remembered that its later history belongs to England rather than to Normandy. With the rise of new forms of procedure in the thirteenth century, the jury on the Continent declines and finally disappears; “but for the conquest of England,” says Maitland, “it would have perished and long ago have become a matter for the antiquary.”[39] In England, however, it was early brought into relations with the local courts of the hundred and the county, where it struck root and developed into a popular method of trial which was later to become a defence against the king’s officers who had first introduced it. A bulwark of individual liberty, the jury also holds an important place in the establishment of representative government, for it was through representative juries that the voice of the countryside first asserted itself in the local courts, for the assessment of taxes as well as for the decision of cases, and it was in the negotiations of royal officers with the local juries that we can trace the beginnings of the House of Commons. It is no accident that the first employment of local juries for the assessment of military and fiscal obligations belongs to the later years of Henry II.