defence were all capable of being organized on the feudal principle, and
might have been so had the moral and political results been in harmony
with the legal. But its tendency when applied to governmental machinery
is disruptive. The great feature of the Conqueror's policy is his defeat
of that tendency. Guarding against it he obtained recognition as the
King of the nation and, so far as he could understand them and the
attitude of the nation allowed, he maintained the usages of the nation.
He kept up the popular institutions of the hundred court and the shire
court. He confirmed the laws which had been in use in King Edward's
days, with the additions which he himself made for the benefit, as he
especially tells us, of the English.

We are told, on what seems to be the highest legal authority of the next
century, that he issued in his fourth year a commission of inquiry into
the national customs, and obtained from sworn representatives of each
county a declaration of the laws under which they wished to live. The
compilation that bears his name is very little more than a reissue of
the code of Canute; and this proceeding helped greatly to reconcile the
English people to his rule. Although the oppressions of his later years
were far heavier than the measures taken to secure the immediate success
of the Conquest, all the troubles of the kingdom after 1075, in his
sons' reigns as well as in his own, proceeded from the insubordination
of the Normans, not from the attempts of the English to dethrone the
king. Very early they learned that, if their interest was not the
king's, at least their enemies were his enemies; hence they are
invariably found on the royal side against the feudatories.

This accounts for the maintenance of the national force of defence, over
and above the feudal army. The _fyrd_ of the English, the general
armament of the men of the counties and hundreds, was not abolished at