ABSTRACT
The Norman kings inherited a sophisticated and powerful system of royal administration from their Anglo-Saxon predecessors. Not surprisingly, therefore, they left much of it intact. Royal rule was as energetically personal a business after 1066 as it had been before. The king’s relations with his lay and ecclesiastical nobility remained fundamental in determining the course of political events. The basic structure of government stayed largely the same, too: the royal household was still at the heart of affairs and, in the localities, sheriffs in their shires and reeves in their hundreds continued to bear their Old English responsibilities. There were changes to this system after 1066, however. Modification and experimentation were necessary for various reasons. For at least several decades after Hastings, the Norman kings remained unwelcome military occupiers of a foreign and unfamiliar land. Conquest, pacification and assimilation were slow, difficult and often painful processes. Moreover, for the first time since Cnut’s reign, the king of England had more to think about than England alone: for most of the first century after 1066, he was Duke of Normandy, too, and this meant that he had to divide his time between his two different principalities. The defence of their crossChannel lands against internal opponents and external enemies was therefore the central preoccupation of William I, his sons and Stephen; and in order to defend them effectively they needed money. Indeed, it was the king’s need for cash with which to fight his wars which resulted in the most profound changes to the system of English royal government after 1066. Or, in the famous words of a great medieval historian, ‘The whole history of the development of Anglo-Norman administration is intelligible only in terms of the scale and pressing needs of war finance.’1
