LANDS TRANSFERRED, NOT CONFISCATED.

271

and the natives described withal as only caring for their farms and good feeding,' it is impossible not to suppose that the rule of William and his barons, though harsh and exacting, was yet on the whole wise and beneficial to the country.

Much of the misconception that has prevailed on this point has arisen from a false theory of the character of William's dominion. He was not the national candidate, but he did not rule altogether by the sword. It was praised as part of his policy, that he employed Englishmen to fight for him. The estates he took from the natives were taken under colour of law. Among his tenants-in-chief, some, like Raoul de Gael and William Mallet,3 were at least connected with the country, and perhaps resumed property of which Harold had dispossessed them. Some, like Sweyn of Essex, have English names, and others, we know not how large a proportion, were Normanized Englishmen. But the nobility were a small fraction of the nation. Only half the sub-tenants, if so many, were of Norman extraction. In the towns the foreign settlers seem to have

5

Modo appretiatur xc. lib.-Cestre: "Quando Hugo comes recepit ducentæ et quinque domus minus ibi erant quam T.R.E fuerunt; modo totidem sunt ibi quot invenit."-Gale, vol. iii., p. 759-777. Similarly, in Sandwich, under Edward, 307 mansions had been tenanted; under William there were 383.Domesday, 3, a. i. Generally, the English cities had fought well for their freedom, and had suffered more than the country in consequence. But they were exposed to other calamities besides war: "This year wild fire ✶ ✶ burned many towns; and also many cities were ruined thereby."-A. S. Chron., A., 1077.

1 "Angli sua solummodo rura colunt; conviviis et potationibus non præliis intendunt."-Orderic, vol. ii., p. 260.

2 Malmesbury, lib. iii., pp. 428, 439.

3 See p. 238, note 1. The fact that William Mallet's life was spared by the English when they stormed York, is some proof that they considered him a countryman.

Sweyn had fifty-five lordships in Essex alone. He "was settled in England before the conquest, and, readily joining with William the Conqueror, was either confirmed in the possession of his lands or had them restored to him." -Kelham's Domesday Book, pp. 128, 129. "A reference to the Norfolk list will afford many instances of Anglo-Saxon families permitted to retain their estates.”—Munford's Domesday of Norfolk, p. 62. Mr. Worsaae gives twentytwo names in Lincolnshire alone among the tenants-in-chief, which he regards as more or less certainly Dano-English.-Danes in England, p. 150.

5 Hallam's Middle Ages, vol. ii., p. 305.

272

SMALL NUMBER OF NORMAN IMMIGRANTS.

been few; in York, which had been destroyed and re-peopled, they were as three in eleven; but in Norwich, a great commercial town, they were only as one in thirty-three. It has been shown that the sixty thousand knights' fees were a purely arbitrary division that only existed on paper. There is no reason to suppose that any such number of foreigners ever settled in England during the whole reign of the conqueror. Of those who first came over, a fourth fell at Hastings alone, and many thousands more must have been slain in the later wars. A large proportion of those who survived or came over afterwards, were probably attached as body-guards to the persons of their employers, and died without acquiring land or founding families. The English complaints of ill-usage are in all likelihood well founded. But they may easily be explained, on the supposition that in every county there were a few lawless or careless lords, and three or four hundred brutal men-at-arms. Insult and oppression on one side, were met by private murders and revolts on the other. Between the two was the central power, depending for its safety on the soldiers, and for its continuance on the tax-payers. The problem was to balance the army against the people, but also never to let the Norman soldiery be far a-head of the English militia. In the reigns of William and his sons, the equipoise was successfully maintained; with a weak king like Stephen, it broke down.

It was consistent with the legal course which the conquest took, that estates were generally not broken up and portioned out anew, but transferred directly from one possessor to another. The Norman occupant was supposed to inherit the rights of his predecessor. There was probably little change in the number of tenants-in-chief; and the peculiar relations of classes remained unaltered in the districts where they had grown up. The privileged soc-men are chiefly found in the Anglian counties, where the Danish invasions had favoured their growth; the purely Saxon counties are less honourably distinguished by the presence of a large servile population; and three hundred of the tenants-in-chief are found in Kent alone, where the law of gavel-kind was still in force. William has been praised for

his policy in scattering the possessions of his barons over different counties, so that they never formed principalities. This dispersion was the natural result of a conquest not made at a blow, but irregularly and by unconnected efforts. The crown was well cared for in the distribution; it inherited the lands of king Edward and of his three great earls, Harold, Edwin, and Morcar; altogether it possessed more than fourteen hundred manors. It is curious that only four of these were in Middlesex, but the king farmed a third of Wiltshire and of Norfolk. None of his sons received any land in his life-time, but his two half-brothers, the sluggish Robert of Montaigne and the turbu lent Eudes, bishop of Bayeux, were among the largest proprietors in England. Robert is said, perhaps falsely, to have received nearly eight hundred manors; Eudes, who often acted as William's viceroy, had acquired four hundred and thirty-nine by the time Domesday was compiled, although Lanfranc, acting for the church of Canterbury, had forced him in 1072 A.D. to disgorge twenty-five, which had been unjustly taken at a blow. These enormous estates do not of course represent corresponding wealth. The owner enjoyed only the full profits of the demesne which he kept in his own hands; the rest was extensively sublet, and paid a tribute or acknowledgement, rather than a rent, to its nominal possessor. Influence, prestige, and a large military following, were the real appurtenances of broad acres. While the Domesday survey was going on, it occasioned many bloody feuds between rival claimants of land, who were anxious to have their titles established by a decision which it was felt would be final. A few of the Norman barons, indignant at their treatment by the commissioners, who had probably reversed many injustices, refused to renew their homage to William, and emigrated with their followers

'Lyson's Magna Britannia, Cornwall, p. 51. Until the genealogies of William's barons are fully worked out, there will always be a danger of confounding different men with the same rank and Christian name, as surnames were not fully in use, and titles constantly changed.

2 "Vexata est terra multis cladibus inde procedentibus."-Flor. Wig., vol. ii.,

p. 19.

T

274

CHANGES IN THE CHURCH.

into Scotland. Englishmen and Normans were thus mixed in the Lowlands as in England. The remaining tenants-in-chief appeared in the king's court at Sarum, 1086 A.D., and took a fresh oath of fealty upon this new settlement of property. English feudalism was thus systematized, and became the law of the land. It had been the growth of several centuries, but had never before been universal; before long men's minds were so penetrated with the legal customs of their country, that heaven itself was regarded as a feudal sovereignty.

While the state was being re-modelled, the church could not expect to remain untouched, and the English clergy had done their best to cherish the national feeling and rouse rebellion. But it was not easy to meddle with a corporation whose chief was the head of Christendom; and had the English church been more loyal to the pope, or more canonical, it would probably have escaped with comparative impunity. As it was, it gained in property by the changes made around it; the devotion of the conquerors frequently sought to expiate the violences of a soldier's life by the endowment or foundation of monasteries. But these were slight compensation for the loss of office and for changes in the liturgical habits, so to speak, of English churchmen. On the final deprivation of Stigand, who had shown himself incapable of trust, and was doomed to honourable but life-long imprisonment, the illustrious Lanfranc, prior of Caen, was appointed his successor. Lanfranc is one of those great Italians, who have moulded the character of the times in which they lived. As teacher in the little monastery of Bec, he had established a school of European reputation; pope Alexander, and the profound thinker, Anselm, had studied there. As an ecclesiastic, Lanfranc was neither time-serving nor seditious; he had braved William's anger, which was seldom known to relent, by denouncing his un

1 Conquête d'Angleterre, tom. ii., p. 195-196. "It is clear from the survey itself, that the inquisitions in many cases caused the restoration of property."-Ellis, Introduction to Domesday, p. x.

2 Under William I., 45 monasteries were founded; under William II., 29; and under Henry I., 143.-Raumer's Pol. Hist. of England, vol. i., p. 110.

CHARACTER OF LANFRANC.

275

canonical marriage with a cousin; while he did his best to reconcile the duke to the church by procuring a dispensation from Rome. Lanfrane was not eminent as an abstract thinker; his dispute on the Real Presence, which he defended against Berengar, shows much blunt good sense, but is wanting in metaphysical subtlety. But he had high organizing powers, and his letters and specches display a vigour and audacity which the habit of monastic humility never weakened or disguised; he is like Thor in the woman's dress, with the hammer under the folds of his garment, and revealed by the lightning of his eyes. Lanfranc had the contempt of a civilized Italian and a Norman conqueror for "the barbarous people" among whom he was made primate. He stood manfully by the privileges of his see, maintaining the rights of Canterbury over York, and reclaiming the manors taken from his diocese. But his hand was heavy upon the English. He brought the native bishops to account for the irregular habits which prescription had established and excused; one by one, as their delinquen'cies were proved, they were dispossessed of their preferment, not without fair trial, but mercilessly. An attempt of the anti-reformers to substitute canons for monks in Winchester was put down; and Lanfranc revived the glories of Dunstan's rule, though without emulating his austerity. But the changes that caused most heart-burning among the English, were the introduction of a new version of the Scriptures, and the expul

1

Pope Alexander's letter to William (Lanfranc, Op., vol. i., p. 30, 31), commissions Lanfranc to try Ebric, bishop of Chichester, again. As Lanfranc was then at Rome, and in the highest favour, he probably did not oppose the new trial. It must be remembered that a bishop might be deposed for many reasons if he were married, like the bishops of Elmham and Lichfield; if he had been consecrated irregularly, like Stigand; if he were a bastard, or had any personal deformity. After all, omitting the vacancies caused by the deposition of Stigand and Egelwine of Durham, who were both deprived as rebels, and the case of York, whose primate died a natural death, there are only three vacancies in the list of bishops between 1067 and 1074 A.D. Two are Elmham and Lichfield, where the bishops had married; the other, Chichester. It cannot be said, therefore, that either William or Lanfranc carried out their policy violently.