_M._ In order that this may be clear to you, we must go back a little further. In the original condition of the realm after the Conquest, as we have learned from our fathers, only victuals were paid to the kings from their lands, and not gold or silver by weight, and from such payments were supplied the necessaries for the daily use of the royal household; and those who had been appointed for this purpose knew certainly how much came from each estate. But for the payments or gifts to the knights and for other necessary things, money by tale[35] accrued from the pleas of the realm and from covenants,[36] and from the cities or castles where agriculture was not pursued. This practice, then, continued during the whole time of king William I., and as late as the times of king Henry his son; in fact, I myself have seen people who saw victuals brought at stated times from the royal estates to the court; and the officials of the royal household knew precisely from which counties wheat, and from which different kinds of meat or fodder for horses or any other necessaries, were due. Upon payment of these supplies according to the established amount of each, the royal officials put them to the sheriff’s account, reducing them to a sum of money; to wit, for a measure of wheat sufficient to make bread for a hundred men, 1_s._; for the carcase of a fattened ox, 1_s._; for a ram or a sheep, 4_d._; and for the fodder of twenty horses, also 4_d._ But as time went on, when the same king was occupied beyond seas and in remote parts, repressing the tumult of war, it came to pass that the sum necessary to meet these operations was paid to him in money by tale. Meanwhile a grumbling multitude of husbandmen used to flock to the king’s court, or, what he thought worse, often used to press about him as he passed by, offering their ploughs as a sign of the decay of agriculture, for they were oppressed by innumerable hardships on account of the victuals, which they brought from their homes through all parts of the realm. The king listened to their complaints, and after taking counsel with the nobles, sent throughout the realm the wisest and most discreet men whom he knew for the purpose. They went about surveying the several estates with their own eyes, and, valuing the victuals paid from them, reduced the same to a sum of money. They decreed, further, that for the sum total of the amounts arising from all the estates in one county the sheriff of that county should be holden at the Exchequer; adding that he should pay by scale, that is, 6_d._ on each pound by tale. For they thought that in course of time it might well happen that the money, then good, might deteriorate. In this opinion they proved right. So they were forced to decree that the farm of manors should be paid not only by scale but by weight, which could only be done by making considerable additions. This rule of payment was observed for many years at the Exchequer, and so in the old