The History of England | Page 7

the days of Harold to those of Edward I. The English language went
underground, and became the patois of peasants; the thin trickle of
Anglo-Saxon literature dried up, for there was no demand for Anglo-
Saxon among an upper class which wrote Latin and spoke French.

Foreigners ruled and owned the land, and "native" became synonymous
with "serf."
Their common lot, however, gave birth to a common feeling. The
Norman was more alien to the Mercian than had been Northumbrian or
West-Saxon, and rival tribes at last discovered a bond of unity in the
impartial rigour of their masters. The Norman, coming from outside
and exempt from local prejudice, applied the same methods of
government and exploitation to all parts of England, just as Englishmen
bring the same ideas to bear upon all parts of India; and in both cases
the steady pressure of a superimposed civilization tended to obliterate
local and class divisions. Unwittingly Norman and Angevin despotism
made an English nation out of Anglo-Saxon tribes, as English
despotism has made a nation out of Irish septs, and will make another
out of the hundred races and religions of our Indian empire. The more
efficient a despotism, the sooner it makes itself impossible, and the
greater the problems it stores up for the future, unless it can divest itself
of its despotic attributes and make common cause with the nation it has
created.
The provision of this even-handed tyranny was the great contribution of
the Normans to the making of England. They had no written law of
their own, but to secure themselves they had to enforce order upon their
schismatic subjects; and they were able to enforce it because, as
military experts, they had no equals in that age. They could not have
stood against a nation in arms; but the increasing cost of equipment and
the growth of poor and landless classes among the Anglo-Saxons had
transferred the military business of the nation into the hands of large
landowning specialists; and the Anglo-Saxon warrior was no match for
his Norman rival, either individually or collectively. His burh was
inferior to the Norman castle, his shield and battle-axe to the weapons
of the mailed and mounted knight; and he had none of the coherence
that was forced upon the conquerors by the iron hand of William and
by their situation amid a hostile people.
The problem for William and his companions was how to organize this
military superiority as a means of orderly government, and this

problem wore a twofold aspect. William had to control his barons, and
his barons had to control their vassals. Their methods have been
summed up in the phrase, the "feudal system," which William is still
popularly supposed to have introduced into England. On the other hand,
it has been humourously suggested that the feudal system was really
introduced into England by Sir Henry Spelman, a seventeenth-century
scholar. Others have maintained that, so far from feudalism being
introduced from Normandy into England, it would be truer to say that
feudalism was introduced from England into Normandy, and thence
spread throughout France. These speculations serve, at any rate, to
show that feudalism was a very vague and elusive system, consisting of
generalizations from a vast number of conflicting data. Spelman was
the first to attempt to reduce these data to a system, and his successors
tended to forget more and more the exceptions to his rules. It is now
clear that much that we call feudal existed in England before the
Norman Conquest; that much of it was not developed until after the
Norman period; and that at no time did feudalism exist as a completely
rounded and logical system outside historical and legal text-books.
The political and social arrangements summed up in the phrase related
primarily to the land and the conditions of service upon which it was
held. Commerce and manufactures, and the organization of towns
which grew out of them, were always exceptions to the feudal system;
the monarchy saved itself, its sheriffs, and the shires to some extent
from feudal influence; and soon it set to work to redeem the
administration of justice from its clutches. In all parts of the country,
moreover, there was land, the tenure of which was never feudalized.
Generally, however, the theory was applied that all land was held
directly or indirectly from the king, who was the sole owner of it, that
there was no land without a lord, and that from every acre of land some
sort of service was due to some one or other. A great deal of it was held
by military service; the tenant-in-chief of this land, who might be either
a layman or an ecclesiastic, had to render this military service to the
king, while the sub-tenants had to render