The fiscal system was especially characteristic. Roger’s biographer tells us that the king spent his spare time in close supervision of the receipts and expenditures of his government, and that everything relating to the accounts was carefully kept in writing. Beginning with his reign we have documentary evidence of a branch of the _curia_, called in Arabic _diwan_, in Greek σέκρετον, and in Latin either _duana_ or _secretum_, and acting as a central financial body for the whole kingdom. It kept voluminous registers, called in Arabic _defêtir_, and as its officers and clerks were largely Saracens, it seems plainly to go back to Saracenic antecedents. There are, however, some traces on the mainland of careful descriptions of lands and serfs like those which it extracted from its records in Sicily under the name of _plateæ_, so that Byzantine survivals should also be taken into account in studying the origin of the institution. Indeed this whole system presupposes elaborate surveys and registers of the land and its inhabitants such as were made in the Egypt of the Ptolemies and, less completely, in the Roman empire, and such as meet us, in a ruder and simpler form, in that unique northern record, the Domesday survey of 1086, itself perhaps suggested by some knowledge of the older system in Italy. No one can fail to note the striking analogies between the Sicilian _duana_ and the Anglo-Norman exchequer, but the disappearance of all records of the southern bureau precludes any comparison of their actual organization and procedure. The only parallel records which have reached us are the registers of feudal holdings, which exhibit noteworthy similarities in the tenures of the two kingdoms. Such feudal institutions were evidently a matter of common inheritance, but any connections indicated by similar administrative arrangements were doubtless due to later imitation from one side or the other. Roger II in Sicily and Henry I and Henry II in England were at work upon much the same sort of governmental problem, and Roger was not alone in looking to other lands for suggestions. Among the foreigners whom Roger drew into his service we find Englishmen such as his chancellor, Robert of Selby, and one of his chaplains and fiscal officers, Thomas Brown, who later returned to his native land to fill an honored place in the exchequer of Henry II. There was constant intercourse between the two kingdoms in the twelfth century, and abundant opportunity to keep one government informed of the administrative experiments of the other.