10 - Accounting for Power: Ducal Finance

Summary

THE demesne vills and towns, the people living in them, those travelling through them, or along public highways more generally, and those selling and buying in the markets and fairs established in them, all produced revenues for the dukes’ coffers. Those revenues were spent on the castles and palaces that provided the backdrop for the dukes’ display of majesty and power, which has been discussed in Chapter 7. Wealth, then, was essential to all civilian aspects of ducal rule. But contemporaries associated wealth in particular with power and military might. Thus the dukes’ income was also used to purchase the munitions that allowed their castles to stand against their enemies, and the arms and horses necessary to equip their knights, and to pay the salaries of the members of their household knights and the wages of their mercenaries.

The mechanisms that developed to allow the dukes to collect their revenues were no doubt imperfect, but they were certainly adequate, for the dukes of the Normans were renowned for their wealth – even more so after they became kings of the English. William of Jumièges wrote that Richard II ‘kept the count (Geoffrey of the Bretons) with him for a while through his enormous wealth revealing to the count the greatness of his might as he choose’, while Orderic, writing of William Clito, noted that ‘his uncle's arm was long and powerful and formidable to him, for Henry's might and reputation for wealth and power were known far and wide from the west to the east. And even if not all of that wealth was liquid, they had access to as much coin as they needed. Normandy had a money economy, and it is likely that even the lowest orders of society used coins to some extent. As David Bates noted, this is particularly evident in the multifarious grants of tolls or disbursements of money found in ducal and seigniorial acta, as well as by the discovery of the Fécamp hoard with its 8,000 or so coins. Indeed, as Lucien Musset discussed, the diversity of coins circulating within the borders of the duchy reveals how important money was. A hoard found at Sébécourt, for example, contained coins from Rouen, Dreux, Vendôme, Le Mans, and Angers.