The sources for an economic history of England between the death of the first Norman king in 1087, and the accession of his great-grandson, the first Angevin king, in 1154, are not considerable. They are the byproducts of government, royal, lay and ecclesiastical. They have provided the material for some distinguished studies of various aspects of government, of politics and of law. They are not at first sight promising for those of economic interests. Yet there are in the acta of kings and magnates, in the narrative passages that connect the charters in such sources as the Abingdon cartulary and the Liber Eliensis, and in the records of the royal exchequer and of local estate management, indications of the assumptions which governed men's attitudes to land and wealth. It might seem a little ambitious to broaden the discussion to consider economic policy at this time, but we have in Edward Miller's work clear evidence of the benefits to be gained from this approach, and important clues as to how best to proceed. We may start with some necessary caveats. ‘The study of government policies can be based on no straightforward progression through time; and it is also difficult to lay down hard and fast criteria defining what was and what was not a “state”.’ The Anglo-Norman territorial state may seem advanced in ambition and achievement by the standards of the eleventh century, but still this is a period in which ‘government’ can be difficult to distinguish from ‘estate management’.