Whether he was needed much or little, the Norman drill-master came and did his work, and when he had finished the two countries were in many respects alike. He left his mark on the English language and on English literature, which were submerged for three centuries under the French of the court, the castle, and the town, and in the process were permanently modified into a mixed speech. He left his mark on architecture in the great cathedrals of the Norman bishops and the massive castles with their Norman keeps. He made England a feudal society, however far it may have gone in that direction before, and its law, from that day to this, a feudal law. And he remade the central government under the strong hand of a masterful dynasty which compelled its subjects to will what the king willed. Whatever permanence we may assign to Anglo-Saxon local institutions,--and we cannot help granting them this in considerable measure,--it is not now held that there was any notable Anglo-Saxon influence upon the central administration. At best England before the Conquest was a loose aggregation of tribal commonwealths divided by local feeling and by the jealousies of the great earls, and its kingship did not grow stronger with process of time. The national assembly of wise men, whose persistence Freeman labored in vain to prove, became the feudal council of the Norman barons, and this council, the _curia regis_, and the royal household which was its permanent nucleus, became the starting-point of a new constitutional development which produced the House of Lords, the courts of law, and the great departments of the central administration. * * * * * Yet in a vigorous state central and local are never wholly separable, and it is where they touch that recent study has been able to show some continuity of development between the two periods, namely in the fiscal system which culminated in the exchequer of the English kings. Of all the institutions of the Anglo-Norman state, none is more important and none more characteristic than the exchequer, illustrating as it does at the same time the comparative wealth of the sovereigns and the efficient conduct of their government. Nowhere in western Europe did a king receive so large a revenue as here; nowhere was it collected and administered in so regular and businesslike a fashion; nowhere do the accounts afford so complete a view of “the whole framework of society.” The main features of this system are simple and striking.