days held it for his duty to hear and redress his subjects'
complaints; he had to go through the land and see for himself that
those who acted in his name did right among his people. This
earlier kings had done; this William wished to do; but he found his
ignorance of English a hindrance. Cares of other kinds checked his
English studies, but he may have learned enough to understand the
meaning of his own English charters. Nor did William try, as he is
often imagined to have done, to root out the ancient institutions
of England, and to set up in their stead either the existing
institutions of Normandy or some new institutions of his own
devising. The truth is that with William began a gradual change in
the laws and customs of England, undoubtedly great, but far less
than is commonly thought. French names have often supplanted
English, and have made the amount of change seem greater than it
really was. Still much change did follow on the Norman Conquest,
and the Norman Conquest was so completely William's own act that
all that came of it was in some sort his act also. But these
changes were mainly the gradual results of the state of things
which followed William's coming; they were but very slightly the
results of any formal acts of his. With a foreign king and
foreigners in all high places, much practical change could not fail
to follow, even where the letter of the law was unchanged. Still
the practical change was less than if the letter of the law had
been changed as well. English law was administered by foreign
judges; the foreign grantees of William held English land according
to English law. The Norman had no special position as a Norman; in
every rank except perhaps the very highest and the very lowest, he
had Englishmen to his fellows. All this helped to give the Norman
Conquest of England its peculiar character, to give it an air of
having swept away everything English, while its real work was to