Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/312

Rh 296 ENGLAND [HISTORY. crown, lie refused to do what no king of the English had done before him. So, while the great struggle of investi tures was raging in Germany and Italy, William went on in England and in Normandy investing bishops and abbots with the staff, as the kings and dukes before him had done. Nor did Hildebrand ever blame William for doing what he branded as such deadly sin in his own sovereign the emperor. Under William the old ecclesiastical supremacy of the crown remained untouched; but it is none the less true that two acts of his had a direct tendency to under mine it. The separation of the ecclesiastical and temporal jurisdictions led the way to those claims on the part of churchmen to be exempted from all temporal jurisdiction which were unheeded in his day, but which became matter of such important controversy under his successors. And, though he himself firmly refused all homage for his crown, yet, when he made the pope a judge between himself and Harold, he led the way for the day when his descendant took his crown back again as a fief of the Roman see. Euglish j n O t ner points also we see the way in which the ? &quot;^ Norman Conquest opened a path for increased intercourse crusades, between England and the continent. It was doubtless mainly owing to the Norman settlers that England took the share which she did in the crusades. The crusades were primarily a Gaulish movement. Germany was less stirred than Gaul, and Scandinavia was less stirred than Germany. England, in her old insular state, could hardly have played a greater part than Scandinavia. Again, with the accession of a foreign line of kings, foreign marriages become more common. The settlement of foreigners in England which began with the conquest and confiscations of William was fol lowed by the coming of settlers of a more peaceful kind, of foreign merchants and of foreign scholars. And, if strangers came to make their fortunes in England, the general break ing down of barriers between nation and nation equally opened the way for the advancement of Englishmen in other lands. These were gradual and indirect results of the great Norman revolution. But the Conquest itself, its confisca tions and its outlawries, led directly to an emigration of Englishmen of quite another kind. Englishmen, chafing under the yoke of the stranger, found their way to the ex- tremest bounds of Europe. They took service under the Eastern emperor, and remained the surest bulwarks of his throne against the assaults of Turk and Frank alike. William With regard to the effects of the Conquest on English in landers stitutions, the Norman king stepped into the position of his English predecessors. As king he claimed their rights, and no more. But the circumstances of the Conquest worked in every way to increase his power, and to provide him with new means of influence and new sources of revenue. The notion that William introduced a &quot; feudal system &quot; into England is a delusion which shows utter ignorance both of the position of William and of the general history of Europe. If by a &quot; feudal system &quot; is meant the state of things in Germany and Gaul, a state of things in which every great vassal became a rival to the king, William took direct care that no such &quot; feudal system &quot; should ever be introduced into his kingdom. But if by a &quot; feudal system &quot; 13 meant merely -the holding of land by military tenure, subject to the burthens of reliefs, wardship, marriage, and the like, though William certainly did not introduce such a &quot; system &quot; ready made, yet the circumstances of his reign did much to promote the growth of that kind of tenure, and of the whole class of ideas connected with it. Such tendencies were already growing in England, and his coming strengthened them. Under him the doctrine that all land is a grant from the crown became a fact. And, though he did not directly innovate on the Old-English tenures, yet we can see that the doctrine of military tenure began in his reign, and that it was put into a systematic shape, and carried out to its feudal ism. logical consequences, in the reign of his son. The Norman kings ruled in a twofold character ; they were all that their English predecessors had been, and something more. The Norman king was the chief of the state ; he was also the personal lord of every man in his kingdom. In the one character, he could call out the military force of the state ; in the other, he could call on his tenants for the military service due from their lands. As chief of the state, he levied the ancient taxes due to the state ; as lord he levied the new-fangled profits which, according to the new-fangled ideas, were due to the lord from his tenants. In short, William brought in that side of feudal doctrine which helped to strengthen the crown, and kept out that side which helped to weaken it. The doctrine that a man was bound to follow his immediate lord had destroyed the royal power in other lands. William, by making himself the immediate lord of all his subjects, turned that doctrine into the strongest support of his crown. This union of two sources of power in the Norman kings p owe i made their rule practically despotic. But their very the despotism preserved English freedom. They had no tempta- Norm: tion to uproot institutions which they found means to turn 1D ^ S&amp;gt; into instruments of their power. They had no temptation to abolish the national assemblies, in which they found little check on their will, and in which they both displayed their power and practically exercised it. The coming of William practically changed the character of those assemblies ; it gradually gave them a new constitution and a new name. But there was no sweeping away, no sudden revolution ; all No bn was done gradually and by force of circumstances at parti- in the cular times. Thus the forms of a free constitution went. on ; there is no break between the earliest national assem blies and the latest. At some points of our history, the freedom of England seems sometimes to slumber ; but it never died. The seeming slumber under Norman despotism led to the awakening of the thirteenth century. The seeming slumber under Tudor despotism led to the awaken ing of the seventeenth. The king was thus in possession of two sources of power, Their of two sources of revenue. One source came by inheritance twofol from his English predecessors ; another came from the cir- P osltl( cumstances of William s conquest. He was both king and lord of all men within his realm. To the English he was in the first place king; to the Normans he was in the first place lord. Each race had need of him, and the Norman kings knew how to play off each race against the other. In the first days of the Conquest, the king, if he was not the friend of his English subjects, was at least not their worst enemy. His power was some protection against local oppressors. Both William Rufus and Henry I. were raised to the throne by the English in the teeth of Norman opposition. Gradually, as the two races drew together, as in a word the Normans became Englishmen, neither race needed the support of the king against the other, while both alike felt the heavy yoke of his dominion. Instead of the English people siding with the king against the Norman barons, the Norman barons, changed into Englishmen, now became the leaders of the English people against the king. The greatest effect of the Norman Conquest is really to be Changi looked for, not in any sudden changes, least of all in any in great and immediate legislative changes, but in &*. complete, though gradual, change of the administrative system, and in such changes of the law as followed upon those changes in the administration. And even the administrative, changes seldom took the form of the utter abolition of anything old. They too rather took the form, sometimes of setting up something new by the side of the old, some times only of increasing the importance of one old institu tion at the expense of another. Thus the national, assemblies themselves changed their character, and a variety