do not destroy the old, and old rights remain, although changed in title
and forced into symmetry with a new legal and pseudo-historical theory.
The changes may not seem at first sight very oppressive, but they opened
the way for oppression; the forms they had introduced tended, under the
spirit of Norman legality and feudal selfishness, to become hard
realities, and in the profound miseries of Stephen's reign the people
learned how completely the new theory left them at the mercy of their
lords; nor were all the reforms of his successor more stringent or the
struggles of the century that followed a whit more impassioned than were
necessary to protect the English yeoman from the men who lived upon his
strength.

In attempting thus to estimate the real amount of change introduced by
the feudalism of the Conquest, many points of further interest have been
touched upon, to which it is necessary to recur only so far as to give
them their proper place in a more general view of the reformed
organization. The Norman king is still the king of the nation. He has
become the supreme landlord; all estates are held of him mediately or
immediately, but he still demands the allegiance of all his subjects.
The oath which he exacted at Salisbury in 1086, and which is embodied in
the semi-legal form already quoted, was a modification of the oath taken
to Edmund, and was intended to set the general obligation of obedience
to the king in its proper relation to the new tie of homage and fealty
by which the tenant was bound to his lord.

All men continued to be primarily the king's men, and the public peace
to be his peace. Their lords might demand their service to fulfil their
own obligations, but the king could call them to the _fyrd_, summon them
to his courts, and tax them without the intervention of their lords; and
to the king they could look for protection against all foes. Accordingly