but his men and his grantees. Thus he went on during his whole
reign. There was no sudden change from the old state of things to
the new. After the general redemption of lands, gradually carried
out as William's power advanced, no general blow was dealt at
Englishmen as such. They were not, like some conquered nations,
formally degraded or put under any legal incapacities in their own
land. William simply distinguished between his loyal and his
disloyal subjects, and used his opportunities for punishing the
disloyal and rewarding the loyal. Such punishments and rewards
naturally took the shape of confiscations and grants of land. If
punishment was commonly the lot of the Englishman, and reward was
the lot of the stranger, that was only because King William treated
all men as they deserved. Most Englishmen were disloyal; most
strangers were loyal. But disloyal strangers and loyal Englishmen
fared according to their deserts. The final result of this
process, begun now and steadily carried on, was that, by the end of
William's reign, the foreign king was surrounded by a body of
foreign landowners and office-bearers of foreign birth. When, in
the early days of his conquest, he gathered round him the great men
of his realm, it was still an English assembly with a sprinkling of
strangers. By the end of his reign it had changed, step by step,
into an assembly of strangers with a sprinkling of Englishmen.

This revolution, which practically transferred the greater part of
the soil of England to the hands of strangers, was great indeed.
But it must not be mistaken for a sudden blow, for an irregular
scramble, for a formal proscription of Englishmen as such.
William, according to his character and practice, was able to do
all this gradually, according to legal forms, and without drawing
any formal distinction between natives and strangers. All land was