And the same Restold owes £239 and 15s and 2d for defaults on county payments; namely, for one year’s produce and demesne, for granges and mills, for fisheries, for villeins and borders, ploughs and ploughmen and hay. And in defaults for the land for which there was no grain.

This entry from the only Exchequer record to survive the first half of the twelfth century, along with thousands of others contained in the thirty-membrane manuscript, indicates that the complex and centralized administration of Henry I (1100–1135) was impaired by inefficiency and incompetence. It suggests as well that the obstacles facing the smooth assumption and maintenance of power by Anglo-Norman kings may have extended well beyond the pacification of a native populace and the competition from rival regimes to economic insolvency and noncompliance, for Restold, sheriff of Oxford from 1122–1127, was still in arrears three years later. This is not to disparage the achievements and precedents in record-keeping and law that pertain to Henry I’s reign, which have been recognized for over a century. But I will argue that an idealized view of well-managed Anglo-Norman government and a particularly indomitable king is a flawed one. This paper, based on my own audit of the Pipe Roll of 1130, questions received opinion epitomized in the long-awaited biography of Henry I by the late C.Warren Hollister: