184 EARLY CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY. 



Court. A Norniaii official of! the 1 2 th century was all things. 

 Whether his title was bailiff or vicomte he was the one respon- 

 sible officer for the maintenance of peace, the collection of the 

 Duke's revenue, the exercise of justice, and in case of danger 

 or invasion it was he who commanded the array of the people, 

 the militia, for the defence of their homes. If there was a 

 royal castle in his bailiwick, or vicomte, it was usually under 

 his command, and he was responsible for its safety and repair. 

 The accounts of the bailiffs and vicomtes in the Great Norman 

 Rolls are filled with entries of sums paid by them for the 

 garrisons, munitions and repairs of the castles under their 

 charge. It is the complete absence of any such entries in the 

 accounts for Guernsey and Jersey that makes it evident that 

 no royal castles were as yet in existence in our islands in the 

 12th century. 



Of the judicial powers of our vicomte and the composition 

 of his court we have little definite information, and we can be 

 only guided by what Ave know were those of the Norman 

 vicomtes generally, by piecing together the few scattered facts 

 that have so far come to light. 



There were in the 12th century in Normandy two classes 

 of vicomtes, the great hereditary vicomtes, such as the 

 vicomtes of the Cotentin, of the Bessin, of Avranches, Auge, 

 etc., and the lesser vicomtes, a class of officials of recent 

 creation. The great vicomtes dated back to the earliest days 

 of the duchy, maybe to the time when, as the old chroniclers 

 tell us, Rollo " roped out " his newly-conquered land among 

 his followers.^ The origin of their name is to be sought in 

 the Frankish vicecomes, for when Rollo and his successors 

 reconstructed the government of the devastated province of 

 Neustria, they adopted, with modifications, the same system of 

 administration that had previously existed there. These 

 modifications were notable ones ; the comtes were invariably 

 members of the ducal house, or closely allied to it, while the 

 vicomtes, of whom there was at least one in each county, were 

 ducal officers and not merely, as were the Frankish vicecomes, 

 the deputy of the count, his vice-regent, appointed by him and 

 not by the King.* 2 * In this way the Duke of Normandy 

 retained a closer hold over the administration of the duchy and 

 over his great feudatories than did the King of France. The 

 early vicomtes were chosen from among the chiefs of the 

 Norman host, and at the end of the 10th and early in the 1 1th 



(1) Pollock and Maitland, Hist. English Law, I., 70-71. Dudo, Duchesne, 85, 

 " Illam terrain suis fidelibus funiculo divisit." 



(2) Pollock and Maitland. Hist, of English Law, I., 72. Cf. Powicke,Loss of 

 Normandy, 62. 



