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 centuries shows that, with a few significant exceptions, the materials for early Norman history were little richer then than now, so that the great losses must have occurred before this time, that is to say, during the Middle Ages and in the devastation of the English invasion and of the Protestant wars of the sixteenth century. The cathedral library at Bayeux, for example, possesses three volumes of a huge cartulary charred by the fire into which it was thrown when the town was sacked by the Protestants. On the other hand, it should be noted that the French Revolution accomplished one beneficent result for local records in the secularization of ecclesiastical archives and their collection into the great repositories of the Archives Départementales, whose organization is still the envy of historical scholars across the Channel. One who has enjoyed for many months access to these admirable collections of records will be permitted to express his gratitude to those who created them, as well as to those by whom they are now so courteously administered.