The double origin of William's kingship: CHAPTER II. THE NORMAN KINGS OF ENGLAND, I. THE great outward show of legality under which Wil liam endeavored to conceal the fact that he was a foreign conqueror, "a king only by the edge of the sword," was but a part of a deliberate policy which has marked him as one of the foremost statesmen of the world. By claiming to be the heir of Eadward, he connected himself directly with the line of national kings that had gone before him; by insisting upon his elevation to the royal office by the choice of the witan he obtained the highest confirmation of his title which could be drawn from the ancient constitution; by seeking consecration at the hands of an English prelate, and by taking the usual coronation oaths, he complied at once with every prerequisite to full kingship prescribed by ancient custom and by the national church. By means of these outward forms William clearly proclaimed the fact, not only to the conquered English but to his Norman followers, that he Its national would rule in his new realm, not as a mere feudal conqueror but as a national king.1 It was no part of William's plan to remain simply a military chieftain, wholly dependent upon the jealous and exacting host by whose aid the Conquest had been accomplished. With the prescience of a statesman, he claimed to be the ruler of a nation in which Normans and Englishmen were alike his subjects; and as such a ruler he claimed the possession of every royal right which had ever belonged to any of the kings who had gone before him. The sum of royal power which thus accrued to William as a naits feudal tional king was augmented by the addition of every feudal right which tended to increase the royal revenue and to strengthen the royal authority, while every principle was aspect; aspect. 1 "In that claim he saw not only the justification of the Conquest in the eyes of the church, but his great safeguard against the jealous and aggressive host by whose aid he had realized it. Accordingly, immediately after the battle of Hastings he proceeded to seek the national recognition." Stubbs, vol. i. p. 258. 2 "To his elective right he added national carefully eliminated which tended to promote the disruptive tendencies of feudal institutions. As king of the English, William was careful to preserve the law of the land as it stood in the days of King Eadward,1 and along with it those ancient assemblies of the shire and the hundred in which that law had been immemorially administered. Under the The authority of the old system, thus carefully preserved, the new revenue. king rigorously exacted every kind of revenue, ordinary and extraordinary, which had ever belonged to any of his English predecessors. As feudal lord, William firmly established the doctrine that the king was the supreme landowner, and that all land was held by grant from him. In his time the folkland became terra regis. All landowners thus became ten- The feudal ants of the king, and under William's successors the feudal revenue which accrued to the crown from this source was enormous. It was the policy of William to introduce but one side of feudalism, to accept it as a system of tenure, 'but not as a system of government. And in thus drawing William's to the crown all the available benefits of the system, he was policy; careful to guard against its disruptive tendencies, first, by preventing the accumulation in the hands of any of the great feudatories of any considerable number of contiguous estates; second, by requiring from all freeholders an oath which bound them directly to the king by the double tie of homage and allegiance. To every landowner the Conqueror the right of conquest. It is the way in which William grasped and employed this double power that marks the originality of his political genius, for the system of government which he devised was in fact the result of this double origin of his rule. It repre. sented neither the purely feudal system of the Continent nor the system of the older English royalty: more truly perhaps it may be said to have represented both. As the conqueror of Eng. land, William developed the military organization of feudalism so far as was necessary for the secure possession of his conquests." Green, Hist. Eng. People, vol. i. p. 127. With such additions as he himself made for the benefit of the English. Statutes of William, § 7. 266 Requiratur hundredus et comitatus, sicut antecessores nostri statuerunt." — Ibid., § 8. 8 "The reign of the Conqueror 4 Ibid., vol. v. pp. 255-257. In the gemót of Salisbury all the revenue. anti-feudal stood in the double relation of landlord and sovereign. "After the coming of William, a king of the English remained all that he was before, and he became something else as well. He kept all his old powers, and he gained some new ones. He became universal landlord, but in so doing he did not cease to be universal ruler. At once king and lord, he had two strings to his bow at every critical moment; if one character failed him, he had the other to fall back he strength- upon." 1 During William's reign the royal power was greatly strengthened and consolidated; the tendency to provincial thority and isolation was crushed out; the four great earldoms were abolished; and the whole realm at last united in one consolidated kingdom which was never afterwards to be divided. ens the royal au consoli dates the kingdom. Gradual advance of the Conquest. of south eastern 2 2. It is a mistake to suppose that William's great victory near Hastings, crushing as it was, put him at once in possession of the whole realm of England. As the immediate result of the battle he only gained the actual possession of a few of the southern shires; but, during the month and a half that intervened between his victory and his crowning at Submission Westminster, he received the submission of all southeastern England east of a line roughly extended from the Wash to England. the Southampton Water. Although William was not now opposed by any rival king, the greater part of the realm held quietly aloof from him, and not until several campaigns had been fought and won was the conquest of northern and westof the west ern England finally accomplished. The conquest of the west, and north. which was first undertaken, practically ended with the fall of Exeter in 1068; and the first conquest of the north, which was provoked by the risings of Eadwine and Morkere, ended with the submission of York before the end of the same year. But the final and terrible conquest of the north, which has left an indelible stain upon the name of William, did not begin until 1069. The signal for the final struggle was the invasion of Swegen, king of Denmark, whose arrival in the Humber was followed by a general uprising not only in northern but in all western and southwestern England. After this revolt had been put down piecemeal, William, Conquest 1 Freeman, Norm. Conq., vol. v. p. 262. 2 Green, Hist. of the English People, vol. i. p. 116. "He had indeed direct military possession only of certain of the southern and eastern shires." Norm. Conq., vol. iv. p. 1. tion of the recorded in Domesday. who had sworn vengeance against the north, entered upon Devastathe deliberate and systematic harrying of the whole terri- north as tory between the Tyne and the Humber. Seventeen years afterwards, when the great Survey was taken, the record of the devastation was made by entries of " waste," "waste," "waste," which are attached through page after page to the Yorkshire lordships; and sixty years afterwards William of Malmesbury wrote that the country was still lying waste, and "if any ancient inhabitant remains he knows it no longer."1 When this terrible work of policy and vengeance had been fully carried out William marched westward upon Chester, whose submission early in 1070 practically ended the Nor- Conquest man conquest. William was now full king over all of Eng-plete until | land in fact as well as in name. 1070. of confiscation and - 3. When the fact is borne in mind that the advance of The work the Conquest was gradual, it becomes more easy to understand the manner in which William dealt with the land which, regrant. district by district, became subject to his authority. The theory upon which the Conqueror claimed title to the lands of the conquered was, that he, the heir of Eadward, upon coming to take possession of his kingdom, had been opposed either actively or passively by the whole nation, who, by the customary laws of both England and Normandy, had thus become involved in the guilt of treason.2 Under the strict Theory letter of the law, the lands of all were forfeited to the king, which Engbut the application of this principle William undertook to lish lands regulate according to the circumstances of individual cases. feited. While there can be no doubt that through the enforcement of this principle the bulk of all the great estates passed during William's reign into Norman hands, it seems to be equally clear that the main body of the people, the actual occupants Main body of the soil, remained, as a general rule, undisturbed in their of the peo possessions. The work of confiscation seems to have begun their posimmediately after the great fight at Hastings, and the evi- sessions. 3 1 For a full and graphic account of "The Conquest of Western and Northern England," see Freeman, Norm. Cong., vol. iv. ch. xviii. See, also, Green, Hist. Eng. People, vol. i. pp. 116-118. 2 Freeman, Norm. Cong., vol. iv. p. 14, vol. v. p. 12; Digby, Law of Real Property, pp. 34, 35. 8 "The actual amount of dispossession was no doubt greatest in the higher ranks; the smaller owners may to a large extent have remained in a mediatised position on their estates," etc. Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 260. under were for peᏅ ple undisturbed in Folkland becomes Estates of great men generally forfeited. dence tends to show that the lands of all who actually took part in the battle were held to be forfeited. In this way a great fund was at once placed at the Conqueror's disposal out of which to enrich his followers. William was himself en riched by becoming the possessor of the private estates of his royal predecessors, and by all of the folkland becoming terra regis. terra regis.1 In some instances express mention is made of men's buying back their lands from the king, and from the joint witness of the Chronicle and Domesday it appears that at some time soon after the coronation of William the English as a body redeemed their lands from him.2 Thus as the Conquest advanced William persistently enforced with greater or less strictness his scheme of confiscation. In dealing with the estates of the great men, living or dead, who had actually opposed him, or who held out against him, the rule seems to have been to strictly enforce the forfeiture; but in the case of those who were willing to acknowledge him the rule seems to have been for the king to receive a surrender, and then to make a regrant upon the payment of a moneyed compensation. There is no evidence, however, going to show that ure syste- William directly or systematically introduced any new kind matically of tenure; the grantee of William, whether an old owner or a new one, held his land as it had been held in the days of King Eadward.3 There is nothing in Domesday which establishes the existence of military tenures as they were afterwards understood. The powerful followers of the Conqueror who received grants of large estates received them no doubt as his tenants, bound to render military service to him. And other landholders who received their lands back from the king probably stood to him in substantially the same relation. It is not likely, however, that William's grants were made upon a definite pledge to provide a certain contingent of knights No new kind of ten introduced. 1 Digby, Law of Real Property, p. 2 "And he came 8 Freeman, Norm. Conq., vol. v. p. 249. "Domesday bears abundant traces of the growth of the idea of tenure, though we still hear of the men (homines) of a lord rather than of his tenants. The land is everywhere spoken of as having been held of King Edward or some other lord." - Digby, Law of Real Property, p. 38. This fact is clearly pointed out by Sir Francis Palgrave in his Normandy and England, vol. iii. p. 609 et seq. |