economic organization based upon payment in produce and labor rather than in money. "Less powerful than certain of his great vassals," as he is described by his principal historian, Luchaire,[1] "the king lives like them from the income from his farms and tolls, the payments of his peasants, the labor of his serfs, the taxes disguised as gifts which he levies from the bishops and abbots of the neighborhood. His granaries of Gonesse, Janville, Mantes, Étampes, furnish his grain; his cellars of Orleans and Argenteuil, his wine; his forests of Rouvrai (now the Bois de Boulogne), Saint-Germain, Fontainebleau, Iveline, Compiègne, his game. He passes his time in hunting, for amusement or to supply his table, and travels constantly from estate to estate, from abbey to abbey, obliged to make full use of his rights of entertainment and to move frequently from place to place in order not to exhaust the resources of his subjects."
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 mediaeval ruler become
- ↑ Luchaire, Les quatre premiers Capétiens, in Lavisse, Histoire de France (Paris, 1901), ii, 2, p. 176.
