Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/403

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weaken the royal power, and carefully fostered the side which tended to strengthen it. Both sides of this process were busily at work during the reign of Rufus. The great law of the Conqueror, the law of Salisbury, which decreed that duty to the king should come before all other duties, was practically tried and practically confirmed in the struggle which showed that no man in England was strong enough to stand against the king. England was not to become feudal in the sense in which Germany and France became feudal. But in all those points where the doctrines of feudal tenure could be turned to the king's enrichment, England became of all lands the most feudal. Enactor of no statute, author of no code or law-book, Randolf Flambard was in effect the lawgiver of feudalism, so far as that misleading word has any meaning at all on English soil.

All this exactly falls in with those phrases in our authorities which speak of Flambard as the spoiler of the rich, the plunderer of the inheritances of other men. It also bears out what I have said already, that there is no evidence to show that Rufus was a direct oppressor of the native English as such. The subtle devices of tyranny of which we have just spoken directly concerned those only who were the King's tenants-in-chief. That is to say, they touched a class of estates which were far more largely in Norman than in English hands. Most likely, even in that reign, a numerical majority of the King's tenants-in-chief would have been found to be of English blood. But such a majority would have been chiefly made up of the very smallest members of the class; the greater landowners, those whose wrongs, under such a system, would be, if not heavier, at least more conspicuous, were mainly the