sides apart. There was in the practices and in the vocabulary
of feudalism itself some confusion of the two in the border-
land that lay between them, and the difficulty is made greater
for us by the fact that both sides were primarily concerned
with the holding of land, and especially by the fact that the
same piece of land belonged at once to both sides and was
held at the same time by two different men, by two different
kinds of tenure, and under two different systems of law. The
one side may be called from its ruling purpose ecoriomic and
the other political. The one had for its object the income to
be drawn from the land ; the other regarded chiefly the politi-
cal obligations joined to the land and the political or social
rank and duties of the holders.

The economic side concerned the relations of the cultivators
of the soil with the man who was, in relation to them, the
owner of that soil ; it regulated the tenures by which they
held the little pieces which they cultivated, their rights over
that land and its produce, their obligations to the owner of
service in cultivating for him the lands which he reserved for
his own use, and, in addition, of payments to him in kind and
perhaps in money on a variety of occasions and occurrences
throughout the year ; it defined and practically limited, also,
the owner's right of exaction from these cultivators. These
regulations were purely customary ; they had grown up slowly
out of experience, and they were not written. But this was
true also of almost all the law of that age, and this law of the
cultivators was as valid in its place as the king's law, and was
enforced in its own courts. It is true that most of these men
who cultivated the soil were serfs, at least not entirely free ;
but that fact made no difference in this particular ; they had
their standing, their voice, and their rights in their lord's
"customary" court, and the documents which describe to us
these arrangements call them, as they do the highest barons
of the realm, "peers," — that is, peers of these customary
courts. Not all, indeed, were serfs; m^ny freemen, small



i6 THE CONQUEST 1067

CHAP, farmers, possibly it would not be wrong to say all who had
^ formerly belonged to that class, had been forced by one neces-
sity or another to enter into this system, to surrender the un-
quaUfied ownership of their lands, and to agree to hold them
of some lord, though traces of their original full ownership
may long have lingered about the land. When they did this,
they were brought into very close relations with the unfree
cultivators ; they were parts of the same system and subject to
some of the same regulations and services ; but their land was
usually held on terms that were economically better than the
serfs obtained, and they retained their personal freedom.
They were members of the lords' courts, and there the serfs
were their peers ; but they were also members of the old
national courts of hundred and shire, and there they were
the peers of knights and barons.

This system, this economic side of feudalism, is what we
know as the manorial system. Its unit was the manor, an
estate of land larger or smaller, but large enough to admit of
this characteristic organization, managed as a unit, usually
from some well-defined centre, the manor house, and directed
by a single responsible head, the lord's steward. The land
which constituted the manor was divided into two clearly
distinguished parts, the *' domain " and the ''tenures." The
domain was the part of each manor that was reserved for the
lord's own use, and cultivated for him by the labour of his
tenants under the direction of the steward, as a part of the
services by which they held their lands ; that is, as a part of
the rent paid for them. The returns from these domain
lands formed a very large part, probably the largest part,
of the income of the landlord class in feudal days. The
" tenures " were the holdings of the cultivators, worked for
themselves by their own labour, of varying sizes and held on
terms of varying advantage, and usually scattered about the
manor in small strips, a bit here and another there. Besides
these cultivated lands there were also, in the typical manor,
common pasture lands and common wood lands, in which the
rights of each member of this little community were carefully
regulated by the customary law of the manor. This whole
arrangement was plainly economic in character and purpose ;
it was not in the least political. Its object was to get the



lo67 FEUDALISM 17

soil cultivated, to provide mankind with the necessary food chap.
and clothing, and the more fortunate members of the race ^
with their incomes. This purpose it admirably served in
an age when local protection was an ever present need, when
the labouring man had often to look to the rich and strong
man of the neighbourhood for the security which he could
not get from the state. Whatever may have been the origin
of this system, it was at any rate this need which perpetuated
it for centuries from the fall of Rome to the later Middle
Ages ; and during this long time it was by this system that
the western world was fed and all its activities sustained.

This economic side of feudalism, this manorial system, was
not introduced into England by the Norman Conquest. It
had grown up in the Saxon states, as it had on the conti-
nent, because of the prevalence there of the general social
and economic conditions which favoured its growth. It
was different from the continental system in some details ;
it used different terms for many things; but it was essen-
tially the same system. It had its body of customary law
and its private courts ; and these courts, like their prototypes
in the Prankish state, had in numerous cases usurped or had
been granted the rights and functions of the local courts of
the nation, and so had annexed a minor political function
which did not naturally belong to the system. Indeed, this
process had gone so far that we may believe that the stronger
government of the state established by the Conqueror found
it necessary to check it and to hold the operation of the pri-
vate courts within stricter limits. This economic organization
which the Normans found in England was so clearly parallel
with that which they had always known that they made no
change in it. They introduced their own vocabulary in
many cases in place of the Saxon ; they identified in some
cases practices which looked alike but which were not
strictly identical ; and they had a very decided tendency to
treat the free members of the manorial population, strongly
intrenched as they were in the popular courts, as belonging
at the same time to both sides of feudalism, the economic and
the political : but the confusion of language and custom which
they introduced in consequence is not sufficient to disguise
from us the real relationships which existed. Nor should it
VOL. II. 2



i8 THE CONQUEST 1067

CHAP, be in the opposite process, which was equally easy, as when
^ the Saxon chronicler, led by the superficial resemblance and
overlooking the great institutional difference, called the curia
of William by the Saxon name of witenagemot.

With the other side of feudalism, the political, the case
was different. That had never grown up in the Saxon world.
The starting-points in certain minor Roman institutions from
which it had grown, seem to have disappeared with the
Saxon occupation of Britain. The general conditions which
favoured its development — the almost complete breakdown
of the central government and the difficult and interrupted
means of communication — existed in far less degree in the
Saxon states than in the more extensive Frankish territories.
Such rudimentary practices as seem parallel to early stages
of feudal growth were more so in appearance than in reality,
and we can hardly affirm with any confidence that political
f eudaHsm was even in process of formation in England before
the Conquest, though it would undoubtedly have been intro-
duced there by some process before very long.

The political feudal organization was as intimately bound
up with the possession of land as the economic, but its
primary object was different. It may be described as that
form of organization in which the duties of the citizen to the
state had been changed into a species of land rent. A set of
legal arrangements and personal relationships which had
grown up wholly in the field of private affairs, for the serv-
ing of private ends, had usurped the place of public law in
the state. Duties of the citizen and functions of the govern-
ment were translated into its terms and performed as inci-
dents of a private obligation. The individual no longer
served in the army because this service was a part of his
obligation as a citizen, but because he had agreed by private
contract to do so as a part of the rent he was to pay for the
land he held of another man. The judicial organization was
transformed in the same way. The national courts dis-
appeared, and their place was taken by private courts made
up of tenants. The king summoned at intervals the great
men of Church and State to gather round him in his council,
law court, and legislature, in so far as there was a legislature
in that age, the curia regis y the mother institution of a numer-



i



io67 FEUDALISM ig

ous progeny ; but he did not summon them, and they came no chap.
longer, because they were the great men of Church and State, ^
the wise men of the land, but because they had entered into
a private obligation with him to attend when called upon, as
a return for lands which he had given them ; or, in other
words, as Henry II told the bishops in the Constitutions of
Clarendon, because they were his vassals. Public taxation
underwent the same change, and the money revenue of the
feudal state which corresponds most nearly to the income
of taxation, was made up of irregular payments due on the
occurrence of specified events from those who held land of
the king, and these in turn collected like payments of their
tenants ; the reHef, for instance, on the succession of the heir
to his father's holding, or the aids in three cases, on the
knighting of the lord's eldest son, the marrying of his eldest
daughter, and the ransom of his own person from imprison-
ment. The contact of the central government with the mass
of the men of the state was broken off by the intervening
series of lords who were political rulers each of the territory
or group of lands immediately subject to himself, and exer-
cised within those limits the functions which the general
government should normally exercise for the whole state.
The payments and services which the lord's vassals made
to him, while they were of the nature of rent, were not
rent in the economic sense ; they were important to the suze-
rain less as matters of income than as defining his poHtical
power and marking his rank in this hierarchical organization.
The state as a whole might retain its geographical outlines
and the form of a common government, but it was really
broken up into fragments of varying size, whose lords pos-
sessed in varying degrees of completeness the attributes of
sovereignty.

This organization, however, never usurped the place of the
state so completely as might be inferred. It had grown up
within the limits of a state which was, during the whole
period of its formation, nominally ruled over by a king who
was served by a more or less centralized administrative
system. This royal power never entirely disappeared. It
survived as the conception of government, it survived in the
exercise of some rights everywhere, and of many rights in



20 THE CONQUEST 1067

CHAP, some places, even in the most feudal of countries. Some
^ feeling of public law and public duty still lingered. In the
king's court, the atria regis, whether in England or in France,
there was often present a small group of members, at first in
a minor and subordinate capacity, who were there, not because
they were the vassals of the king, but because they were the
working members of a government machine. The military
necessity of the state in all countries occasionally called out
something like the old general levy. In the judicial depart-
ment, in England at least, one important class of courts, the
popular county courts, was never seriously affected by feudal-
ism, either in their organization or in the law which they
interpreted. Any complete description of the feudal organi-
zation must be understood to be a description of tendencies
rather than of a realized system. It was the tendency of
feudalism to transform the state into a series of principal-
ities rising in tiers one above the other, and to get the
business of the state done, not through a central constitu-
tional machine, but through a series of graded duties corre-
sponding to these successive stages and secured by private
agreements between the landholders and by a customary law
which was the outgrowth of such agreements.

At the date of the Norman Conquest of England, this ten-
dency was more nearly realized in France than anywhere
else. Within the limits of that state a number of great
feudal principalities had been formed, duchies and counties,
round the administrative divisions of an earlier time as their
starting-point, in many of which the sovereign of the state
could exercise no powers of government. The extensive
powers which the earlier system had intrusted to the duke
or count as an administrative officer of the state he now
exercised as a practically independent sovereign, and the
state could expect from this portion of its territory only the
feudal services of its ruler, perhaps ill-defined and difficult
to enforce. In some cases, however, this process of breaking
up the state into smaller units went no further. Normandy,
with which we are particularly concerned, was an instance of
this fact. The duke was practically the sole sovereign of that
province. The king of France was entirely shut out. Even
the Church was under the unlimited control of the duke. And



1



1 06; FEUDALISM



21



with respect to his subjects his power was as great as with re- chap.
spect to his nominal sovereign. Very few great baronies ex- ^
isted in Normandy formed of contiguous territory and capable
of development into independent principalities, and those that
did exist were kept constantly in the hands of relatives of the
ducal house and under strong control. Political feudaHsm
existed in Normandy in even greater perfection and in a more
logical completeness, if we regard the forms alone, its prac-
tices and customs, than was usual in the feudal world of that
age ; but it existed not as the means by which the state was
broken into fragments, but as the machinery by which it was
governed by the duke. It formed the bond of connexion
between him and the great men of the state. It defined the
services which he had the right to demand of them, and which
they in turn might demand of their vassals. It formed the
foundation of the army and of the judicial system. Every
department of the state was influenced by its forms and prin-
ciples. At the same time the Duke of Normandy was more
than a feudal suzerain. He had saved on the whole, from
the feudal deluge, more of the prerogatives of sovereignty
than had the king of France. He had a considerable non-
feudal administrative system, though it might not reach all
parts of the duchy. The supreme judicial power had never
been parted with, and the Norman barons were unable to ex-
ercise in its full extent the right of high justice. The oath of
allegiance from all freemen, whosesoever vassals they might
be, traces of which are to be found in many feudal lands
and even under the Capetian kings, was retained in the
duchy. Private war, baronial coinage, engagements with for-
eign princes to the injury of the duke, — these might occur
in exceptional cases during a minority or under a weak duke,
or in time of rebellion ; but the strong dukes repressed them
with an iron hand, and no Norman baron could claim any of
them as a prescriptive right. Feudalism existed in Normandy
as the organization of the state, and as the system which regu-
lated the relations between the duke and the knights and the
nobles of the land, but it did not exist at the expense of the
sovereign rights of the duke.

This was the system which was introduced fully formed
into England with the grants of land which the Conqueror



22 THE CONQUEST 1067

made to his barons. It was the only system known to him
by which to regulate their relations to himself and their
duties to the state. To suppose a gradual introduction of
feudalism into England, except in a geographical sense, as
the confiscation spread over the land, is to misunderstand
both feudaUsm itself and its history. This system gave to
the baron opportunities which might be dangerous under a
ruler who could not make himself obeyed, but there was
nothing in it inconsistent with the practical absolutism exer-
cised by the first of the Norman kings and by the more part
of his immediate successors. Feudalism brought in with
itself two ideas which exercised decisive influence on later
English history. I do not mean to assert that these ideas
were consciously held, or that they could have been formu-
lated in words, though of the first at least this was very nearly
true, but that they unconsciously controlled the facts of the
time and their future development. One was the idea that
all holders of land in the kingdom, except the king, were,
strictly speaking, tenants rather than owners, which pro-
foundly influenced the history of English law ; the other
was the idea that important public duties were really private
obHgations, created by a business contract, which as pro-
foundly influenced the growth of the constitution. Taken
together, the introduction of the feudal system was as mo-
mentous a change as any which followed the Norman Con-
quest, as decisive in its influence upon the future as the
enrichment of race or of language ; more decisive in one
respect, since without the consequences in government and
constitution, which were destined to follow from the feudali-
zation of the English state, neither race nor language could
have done the work in the world which they have already
accomplished and are yet destined to perform in still larger
measure.

But, however profound this change may have been, it
affected but a small class, comparatively speaking. The
whole number of military units, of knights due the king in
service, seems to have been something less than five thou-
sand.^ For the great mass of the population, the working
substratum, whose labours sustained the life of the nation,

1 Round, Feudal England, p. 292.



io67 SPOILS SENT TO NORMANDY 23

the Norman Conquest made but little change. The interior chap.
organization of the manor was not affected by it. Its work ^
went on in the same way as before. There was a change of
masters ; there was a new set of ideas to interpret the old
relationship ; the upper grades of the manorial population
suffered in some parts of England a serious depression.
But in the main, as concerned the great mass of facts, there
was no change of importance. Nor was there any, at first at
least, which affected the position of the towns. The new
system allowed as readily as the old the rights which they
already possessed. In the end, the new ideas might be a
serious matter for the towns in some particulars, but at pres-
ent the conditions did not exist which were to raise these
difficulties. At the time, to the mass of the nation, to every-
body indeed, the Norman Conquest might easily seem but a
change of sovereigns, a change of masters. It is because we
can see the results of the changes which it really introduced
that we are able to estimate their profound significance.

The spoiling of England for the benefit of the foreigner
did not consist in the confiscation of lands alone. Besides
the forced redemption of their lands, WilUam seems to have
laid a heavy tax on the nation, and the churches and monas-
teries whose lands were free from confiscation seem to have
suffered heavy losses of their gold and silver and precious
stuffs. The royal treasure and Harold's possessions would
pass into William's hands, and much confiscated and plun-
dered wealth besides. These things he distributed with a
free hand, especially to the churches of the continent whose
prayers and blessings he unquestionably regarded as a strong
reinforcement of his arms. Harold's rich banner of the
fighting man went to Rome, and valuable gifts besides, and
the Norman ecclesiastical world had abundant cause to return
thanks to heaven for the successes which had attended the
efforts of the Norman military arm. If William despatched
these gifts to the continent before his own return to Nor-
mandy, they did not exhaust his booty, for the wonder and
admiration of the duchy is plainly expressed at the richness
and beauty of the spoils which he brought home with him.

Having settled the matters which demanded immediate
attention, the king proceeded to make a progress through



24 THE CONQUEST 1067

those parts of his kingdom which were under his control.
Just where he went we are not told, but he can hardly have
gone far outside the counties of southern and eastern England
which were directly influenced by his march on London. In
such a progress he probably had chiefly in mind to take pos-
session for himself and his men of confiscated estates and of
strategic points. No opposition showed itself anywhere, but
women with their children appeared along the way to beseech
his mercy, and the favour which he showed to these suppUants
was thought worthy of special remark. Winchester seems to
have been visited, and secured by the beginning of a Norman
castle within the walls, and the journey ended at Pevensey,
where he had landed so short a time before in pursuit of the
crown. William had decided that he could return to Nor-
mandy, and the decision that this could be safely done with
so small a part of the kingdom actually in hand, with so few
castles already built or garrisons established, is the clearest
possible evidence of William's opinion of the situation. He
would have been the last man to venture such a step if he had
believed the risk to be great. And the event justified his
judgment. The insurrectionary movements which called him
back clearly appear to have been, not so much efforts of the
nation to throw off a foreign yoke, as revolts excited by the
oppression and bad government of those whom he had left in
charge of the kingdom.

On the eve of his departure he confided the care of his
new kingdom to two of his followers whom he believed the
most devoted to himself, the south-east to his half brother
Odo, and the north to William Fitz Osbern. Odo, Bishop of
Bayeux, but less an ecclesiastic, according to the ideals of
the Church, than a typically feudal bishop, was assigned the
responsibility for the fortress of Dover, was given large
estates in Kent and to the west of it, and was probably made
earl of that county at this time. William Fitz Osbern was the
son of the duke's guardian, who had been murdered for his
fidelity during William's minority, and they had been boys
together, as we are expressly told. He was appointed to be
responsible for Winchester and to hold what might be called
the marches, towards the unoccupied north and west. Very
probably at this time also he was made Earl of Hereford.



io67 WILLIAM IN NORMANDY 25

Some other of the leading nobles of the Conquest had been chap.
established in their possessions by this date, as we know on ^
good evidence, like Hugh of Grantmesnil in Hampshire, but
the chief dependence of the king was apparently upon these
two, who are spoken of as having under their care the minor
holders of the castles which had been already established.

No disorders in Normandy demanded the duke's return.
Everything had been quiet there, under the control of Matilda
and those who had been appointed to assist her. William's
visit at this time looks less like a necessity than a parade to
make an exhibition of the results of his venture. He took
with him a splendid assortment of plunder and a long train of
English nobles, among whom the young atheling Edgar,
Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury, Earls Edwin and Morcar,
Waltheof, son of Siward, the Abbot of Glastonbury, and a
thane of Kent, are mentioned by name. The favour and
honour with which William treated these men did not dis-