council of the Norman barons, and this council, the curia regis, and the royal household which was its permanent nucleus, became the starting-point of a new constitutional development which produced the House of Lords, the courts of law, and the great departments of the central administration.
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
