In other words, under existing methods of communication, it was easier to transport the king and his household than it was to transport food, and the king literally ‘boarded round’ from farm to farm. Such conditions were typical of the age, and they could only be changed by the development of a revenue in money, enabling the king to buy where he would and to pay whom he would for service, whether personal or political or military. Only by hard cash could the mediæval ruler become independent of the limitations which feudalism placed upon him. Now, while the Norman duke derived much of his income from his farms and forests, his mills and fishing rights and local monopolies and tolls, he had also a considerable revenue in money. Each _vicomté_ was farmed for a fixed amount, and there was probably a regular method of collection and accounting. If the king wished to bestow revenue upon a monastery he would grant so many measures of grain at the mills of Bourges or so many measures of wine in the vineyards of Joui; while in a similar position the Norman duke would give money--twelve pounds in the farm of Argentan, sixty shillings and tenpence in the toll of Exmes, or one hundred shillings in the _prévôté_ of Caen. Nothing could show more clearly the superiority of Normandy in fiscal and hence in political organization, where under the forms of feudalism we can already discern the beginnings of the modern state. To William’s authority in the state we must add his control over the Norman church. Profoundly secularized and almost absorbed into the lay society about it as a result of the Norse invasion, the Norman church had been renewed and refreshed by the wave of monastic reform which swept over western Europe in the first half of the eleventh century, and now occupied both spiritually and intellectually a position of honor and of strength. But it was not supreme. The duke appointed its bishops and most of its abbots, sat in its provincial councils, and revised the judgments of its courts. Liberal in gifts to the church and punctilious in his religious observances, William left no doubt who was master, and his respectful but independent attitude toward the Papacy already foreshadowed the conflict in which he forced even the mighty Hildebrand to yield. * * * * *