It has long been understood that the institutional and constitutional history of medieval England was shaped by the fiscal demands of war and diplomacy. As in the later Middle Ages so also in the Anglo-Norman era, the development of the royal administration is, in J. O. Prestwich's words, ‘intelligible only in terms of the scale and the pressing needs of war finance'. Thus, the familiar administrative innovations of the Norman kings - exchequer, vice-regency courts, justices in eyre, and much else - served the needs of a royal policy that was directed primarily toward military expansion or defence, a policy that required pensions to allies, diplomatic bribes, and massive outlays for military wages and the construction and expansion of castles. The immense scope of Anglo-Norman castle building has been made clear by Jean Yver, Derek Renn, and R. Allen Brown. And recent studies by Marjorie Chibnall and J. O. Prestwich have disclosed the impressive size and decisive importance of the Anglo-Norman military household or farnilia regis, a rapid-deployment force of many hundreds of paid warriors who accompanied the king or garrisoned his strongholds.

Given that military expenses stimulated the precocious growth of Anglo-Norman government, two related points will be argued in this paper. First, issues of war and peace were of such overriding importance to the Norman kings as to shape royal policy not only in the area of ftscal administration but in a great variety of other areas as well. Second, and I am aware of the anachronism, war and peace in the Anglo-Norman world occurred in a predominantly ‘international’ context, by which I mean that they depended far less on the turbulent barons and feudal rebellions so dear to our older textbooks than on relations among kingdoms and major principalities. Although baronial rebellions were indeed a continual threat,it has not always been fully appreciated that many of them, increasingly as one moves from the eleventh century into the twelfth, occurred in the context of international politics.

The general pattern of political interaction between major power centres is well known. Kate Norgate long ago traced in meticulous detail the prolonged conflicts between Anjou, Blois, Normandy and England, and Walther Kienast provided a masterfui account of political relations between the kings of medieval France and Germanytogether with their major princes.