Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/310

Rh 294 ENGLAND [HISTORY. Legal character of Wil liam s acts. His dis posal of cilices ; of earl doms ; passed into the hands of Normans and other strangers. But we see also that it id an utter mistake to believe that Englishmen were indiscriminately turned out of hearth and home. A few Englishmen who had, in whatever way, won William s special favour kept great estates. A crowd of Englishmen kept small estates or fragments of great ones. In a vast number of cases the English owner kept his lands aa tenant under a Norman grantee. Altogether the actual occupants of the soil must have been much less disturbed than might have seamed possible in so great a transfer of lands from one set of owners to another. The special feature of this great transfer of land from men of one nation to men of another is that it was done gradually and under legal form. It was not a mere scramble for what every man could get ; nor was it like those cases in the early Teutonic invasions when the lands of the conquered, or a part of them, were systematically divided among the conquering army. Every step in William s great confiscation was done regularly and according to his notion of law. There was no formal or general distinction between. Normans and Englishmen. Every man, Norman or English, was dealt with according to his personal merits. Every man, Norman or English, held his land only by a grant from King William. No general change was made in the tenure of land. The new owner got his land on the same terms on which the old owner had held it. The new owner was clothed with the same rights, and was burthened with the same liabilities, as the old one. William took lands here, and granted them there, according to the circum stances of each case. Most commonly he took from Englishmen and gave to Normans. But he took from Englishmen and gave to Normazis, not by virtue of any legal distinction between Englishmen and Normans, but because it was, as a rule, Englishmen who incurred forfeiture by resisting him, Normans who deserved reward by serving him. As William dealt with lands, so he dealt with offices. The two processes were to some extent the same ; for most ecclesiastical and many temporal offices carried with them land or rights over land. Gradually, and under cover of law, the highest offices in Church and State were taken from Englishmen and bestowed on Normans. At the end of William s reign there was no English earl, but one English bishop, and only a few English abbots. But this change was not made all at once. In the appointment of earls William brought in a new policy which reversed that of Ciait. The great earldoms were broken up. There were no more earls of the West-Saxons or of the Mercians, and the earldom of Northumberland now meant only the modern county. Indeed AYilliam did not appoint earls at all, except in districts which were open to attack by land or sea districts, in short, where the earls would have to play the part of marquesses. Kent, Norfolk, Northumber land, Chester, Shrewsbury, Hereford, were William s only earldoms. Each of these had a special duty of guardian ship against the Briton, the Scot, the Dane, and any possible enemies from Gaul or Germany. At his coming he estab lished Norman earls in such parts of the earldoms of Harold and his brothers as he thought needed defence. Elsewhere he kept the English earls, and even appointed new ones, as the circumstances of the time dictated. At last, ten years after William s coming, the last English earl was removed by the beheading of Waltheof. Other officers, sheriffs, stall ers, and the like, were in the same way gradually changed. But smaller posts largely remained in the hands of Englishmen. It has been noticed, as marking some traits in William s personal habits, that Eadward s English huntsmen kept their places, but that all the new king s cooks were strangers. The same system was carried on with ecclesiastical offices also, though in this case a greater degree of caution was ofbisho needed. The king might by himself, or at all events with ncs aiK the consent of his Witan, remove a sheriff, an earl, or any a e ^ s temporal officer : to remove a bishop or abbot needed, in William s view, full ecclesiastical sanction. Throughout William s reign, when a bishop died, a foreign successor was found for him, and those English bishops against whom any canonical charge could be devised were removed without waiting for their deaths. The same general rule was applied to the abbots, though here the exclusion of English men was not quite so strict. Though the greater number of the newly appointed abbots were strangers, a few Englishmen were appointed to abbeys even down to the end of William s reign. In a series of synods held in 1070 by the papal legates, the new organization of the English Church began. The two metropolitan sees were filled by foreigners. York was vacant in ordinary course by the death of Ealdred ; it was bestowed on the Norman Thomas of Bayeux. Canterbury was vacated by the deposition of Stigand, and was bestowed on a far more famous man, Lanfranc of Pavia, William s right hand man in the settlement of Church and State. Other sees were filled in the same year, and gradually, as bishops died or were deposed, Normans took their places. At William s death, Wulfstan of Worcester was the only bishop of English birth. Of these changes in the possession of landed property Domes Domesday Book is the great record. This unique and day. invaluable document was drawn up in pursuance of a decree passed in the Christmas assembly of 1085-1086, and the necessary survey was made in the course of the first seven months of 10SG. The immediate object of the survey was a fiscal one, to insure that the tax on the land known as Daueyeld 1 might be more regularly paid and mure fairly assessed. But William further took care to have a complete picture of his kingdom drawn up. We are tuid in all cases by whom the land was held at the time of the survey, and by whom it had been held in the time of King Eadward. We are told what was the value of the land at those two dates. This is the essence of the inquiry ; but we also get a mass of statistics and a mass of personal and local detail of every kind. As a mere list of landowners under Eadward and under William, it enables us to trace the exact degree to which land had passed from Englishmen to Normans. And the incidental notices of tenures, customs, personal anecdotes, the local institutions of districts and towns, are at least as valuable as the essential parts of the survey. With tkeir help we can see England as it was in 1086 more clearly than we can see it at any earlier time, more clearly than we can see it at any later time for a long while alter. And not the least instructive thing about the survey is the light which it throws on the general character of William s government, the system of legal fictions, the strict regard to a formal justice. William is assumed throughout as the lawful and immediate successor of Eadward. The reign of Harold is ignored. The grant of AVilliam is assumed as the one lawful source of property; but there is throughout a clear desire to do justice according to that doctrine, to secure every man in his right, as William understood right, without any regard to race or rank. Powerful Normans, William s own brothers among them, are entered as withholding lands wrongfully, sometimes from other Normans, sometimes from Englishmen. Domesday, in short, may be set along side of the English Chronicle as one of the two great and 1 The more correct name is Heregcld, that is, a tax for the support of a paid military force. Danegeld is, in strictness, money paid to the Danes as black mail by /Ethelred and others. But, as both payments were unpopular, the two names got confounded, and Danegeld becaruo the received name of the chief direct tax paid in those, times.