NEW STANDARDS IN MANAGERIAL
PRACTICE AND THEORY
The monasteries, whose schools produced the intellectual
leaders of the period, brought resources of formidable ingenuity
to deal with this problem in a superior and exhaustive
manner. This is attested by such milestones in the
history of managerial organization as the Administrative
Directives of Abbot Adalhard of Corbie,[207]
the Constitution of
Abbot Ansegis of St. Wandrille,[208]
and the Polyptique of
Abbot Irminon of St. Germain-des-Prés.[209]
The two former,
full translations of which are given in our last volume, are
a complete analysis of the volume of revenues and labor
required for the sustenance of a settlement of some 350 to
400 people, setting forth when, how, and by whom these
revenues should be rendered and received; the latter is an
exhaustive inventory of the land, people, chattel, and
produce down to the smallest basket of cheese and eggs
from a web of estates so vast as to accommodate in its
totality as estimated 40,000 human beings.
These documents have parallels in certain directives issued
by the crown, such as the Capitulare de villis or the
Brevium exempla,[210]
but there are no equivalents from any
of the lower rungs of the feudal ladder, and even on the
level of the Crown there are no parallels of comparable
complexity until three and a half centuries later, when
William the Conqueror took it upon himself to tighten his
grip over England by instituting that hated survey of people,
chattel and land (1085-1086) to which his Anglo-Saxon
subjects referred derisively as the Domesday Book.
