Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/80

Before we can leave the purely Norman period of William's reign and turn to the conquest of England, it is important to examine the internal condition of Normandy under his rule. Even the most thorough study possible of this subject would need to be brief, for lack of available evidence. Time has not dealt kindly with Norman records, and over against the large body of Anglo-Saxon charters and the unique account of Anglo-Saxon England preserved in the Domesday survey, contemporary Normandy can set only a few scattered documents and a curious statement of the duke's rights and privileges under William, drawn up four years after his death and only recently recovered as an authority for his reign. The sources of Norman history were probably never so abundant as those of England ; certainly there is now nothing on the Continent, outside of the Vatican, that can compare with the extraordinarily full and continuous series of the English public records. The great gaps in the Norman records, often supposed to be due to the Revolution, really appear much earlier. Undoubtedly there was in many places wanton destruction of documents in the revolutionary uprisings, and there were many losses under the primitive organization of local archives in this period, as there undoubtedly were during the carelessness and corruption of the Restoration. Nevertheless, an examination of the copies and extracts made from monastic and cathedral archives by the scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-