Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/311

Rh EFFECTS OP THE CONQUEST.] E N G I, A N D 295 unique sources of English history. They are possessions which have no parallel elsewhere, ijsem- In the constitution of England William made no formal 163 change, and the particular laws of his enacting were few. illiam The direct changes of his reign had some analogy to the direct changes which followed on the introduction of Christianity. No old institutions were abolished ; but some new institutions were set up by the side of the old ones. The old national assemblies went on, without any change in their formal constitution. The real change in their character was not a formal, but a practical one. The assembly which, at the beginning of William s reign, was an assembly of Englishmen with here and there a Norman had, before the end of his reign, changed into an assembly of Normans with here and there an Englishman. The assemblies, as before, were in ordinary times mere gather ings of the great men of the realm ; but, as before, on special occasions, a vast multitude was brought together. Thus, when Domesday was finished in 1086, William small, whether his tenants-in-chief or the tenants of an intermediate lord, and made them all become his men. No one act in English history is more important than this. By it William secured his realm against the growth of feudal doctrines and their abuses. It established the principle that, whatever duty a man might owe to any inferior lord, his duty to his sovereign lord the king came first. When this rule was once established, the mightiest earl in England could never be to William what William himself was to his own lord the King of the French. This one act of the wisdom of the Conqueror secured the unity of England for ever. es Of the few actual changes in the law which William made, the most part were mere ordinances enacted to meet the immediate needs of the time. Thus, for instance, in ( the appeal to the judgment of God, the English ordeal and the Norman wager of battle were alike legalized and regulated. Provisions were made for the safety of William s foreign followers, especially by the singular law of Murder and J?nr/?ishry, according to which, if an unknown man was found dead, he was held to be a Norman, unless he could be proved to be English. In legislating against the slave-trade, William only fol lowed in the steps of former kings ; but in wholly for bidding the punishment of death, he acted on a personal theory of his own. But it must be remembered that, in William s jurisprudence, the substitutes for death were mutilations which in modern ideas would be deemed worse than death. Most of these provisions were in their own nature temporary. The chief permanent change in our law which was due to an actual ordinance of William was a part of his ecclesiastical reformation, the separation of the temporal and spiritual jurisdictions. Hitherto the bishop and the earl had sat together in the Sciryemof, and had heard both ecclesiastical and temporal causes. This was now forbidden, and separate ecclesiastical courts began. The strict forest law of William s reign must also have been an innovation ; but it does not exist in the shape of a code ; we know it only by the complaints of the con temporary chronicles, and by the practice of later times. In all legal matters the ancient assemblies and the ancient forms went on ; nor was there any direct change in the language of the law. English remained, as before, an alter native language with Latin. But from this time the use of Latin gradually encroaches on the use of English. French is not used till a much later time. But the immediate and formal changes which followed on William s coming were of small account when compared with the indirect, and far more important, changes which came as it were of themselves as the natural result of his coming. A revolution was gradually wrought in everything Effect of that touched the relations of the kingdom within and with- the ^on- out. But it was a revolution of a strange kind. It was a l uest revolution which seemed, if not to root up our ancient institutions, at least practically so to transform them that they might be deemed to have in truth passed away. It was a revolution which seemed to have broken down the spirit of Englishmen for ever under the yoke of strangers. But what that revolution really did was to call forth the spirit of Englishmen in a stronger and more abiding shape, and to enable us to win back under new forms the substance of the institutions which seemed for a moment to have passed away. This will then be the best place to go through the chief lasting results of the Conquest, and to show how deeply, and in what ways, that event has influenced our institutions and the general course of our history down to our own day. First of all, the Norman Conquest altogether changed the cn foreign European position of England. As soon as England was relationB ruled by a continental prince who kept his dominions on the continent, Britain ceased to be that separate world which it had hitherto been And, though after events brought us back in no small degree to our older insular character, yet Britain has never again become so completely another world as it was in the older day. We have already seen that it was through her connexion with Normandy that England was first led into that rivalry with France which has had so great an influence on our later history. England took up the quarrel of Normandy, and she carried it on on her own account after Normandy had gone over to the other side. And, besides this special side of ouroneccle- history which is formed by the relations between England siastical and France, the Norman Conquest brought England in every way into closer connexion with continental nations generally. In ecclesiastical matters this took the form of a far closer connexion with the see of Rome than had been known before. The insular position of Britain had hitherto made the English Church far more independent of the see of Rome than the western churches generally. If the king of the English was looked on as the emperor of another world, the primate of all England was also looked on, and was sometimes directly spoken of, as the pope of another world. And it may be that the very fact that the English Church was more directly the child of the Roman Church than any other of the western churches may really have helped to strengthen the independence of the island church. It was pre-eminently a child. It was not a subject or a servant, nor could it pass for a part of the Roman Church itself. It was a child, but a child of full age, who owed reverence indeed, but who no longer owed servile obedi ence. One great effect of the Conquest was to weaken this insular independence, and to bring the insular Church more nearly into the same position as the churches of the mainland. In this, as in many other things, the Con quest did but confirm and hasten tendencies which were already at work. The reforms of Dunstan s day marked one step Romewards. Another, we may say, was marked by the pilgrimage of Cnut, The zeal of a new convert naturally filled the Danish king with a special reverence for the chief seat of the religion which he had embraced. The reign of Eadward, a special devotee of the Roman Church, wrought still more strongly in the same direction. In his day the interference of the Roman see in the affairs of England becomes more marked and constant than ever. But the great step of all was taken by William himself. When he sought for a papal confirmation of his claim to the crown of England, he went very far towards clothing the pope with a power to dispose of that crown. In William s own hands the rights of his crown were safe. When Hildebrand himself called on him to do homage for his
 * J~** gathered all the landowners of his kingdom, great and