The complicated and unintelligible irregularities of the Anglo-Saxon
tenures were exchanged for the simple and uniform feudal theory. The
fifteen hundred tenants-in-chief of _Domesday Book_ take the place of
the countless land-owners of King Edward's time, and the loose,
unsystematic arrangements which had grown up in the confusion of title,
tenure, and jurisdiction were replaced by systematic custom. The change
was effected without any legislative act, simply by the process of
transfer under circumstances in which simplicity and uniformity were an
absolute necessity. It was not the change from allodial to feudal so
much as from confusion to order. 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 mediatized position on their estates; but even
_Domesday_, with all its fulness and accuracy, cannot be supposed to
enumerate all the changes of the twenty eventful years that followed the
battle of Hastings. It is enough for our purpose to ascertain that a
universal assimilation of title followed the general changes of
ownership. The king of _Domesday_ is the supreme landlord; all the land
of the nation, the old folkland, has become the king's; and all private
land is held mediately or immediately of him; all holders are bound to
their lords by homage and fealty, either actually demanded or understood
to be demandable, in every case of transfer by inheritance or otherwise.

The result of this process is partly legal and partly constitutional or
political. The legal result is the introduction of an elaborate system
of customs, tenures, rights, duties, profits, and jurisdictions. The
constitutional result is the creation of several intermediate links
between the body of the nation and the king, in the place of or side by
side with the duty of allegiance.

On the former of these points we have very insufficient data; for we are