held of the King of the English, according to the law of England.
It may seem strange how such a process of spoliation, veiled under
a legal fiction, could have been carried out without resistance.
It was easier because it was gradual and piecemeal. The whole
country was not touched at once, nor even the whole of any one
district. One man lost his land while his neighbour kept his, and
he who kept his land was not likely to join in the possible plots
of the other. And though the land had never seen so great a
confiscation, or one so largely for the behoof of foreigners, yet
there was nothing new in the thing itself. Danes had settled under
Cnut, and Normans and other Frenchmen under Edward. Confiscation
of land was the everyday punishment for various public and private
crimes. In any change, such as we should call a change of
ministry, as at the fall and the return of Godwine, outlawry and
forfeiture of lands was the usual doom of the weaker party, a
milder doom than the judicial massacres of later ages. Even a
conquest of England was nothing new, and William at this stage
contrasted favourably with Cnut, whose early days were marked by
the death of not a few. William, at any rate since his crowning,
had shed the blood of no man. Men perhaps thought that things
might have been much worse, and that they were not unlikely to
mend. Anyhow, weakened, cowed, isolated, the people of the
conquered shires submitted humbly to the Conqueror's will. It
needed a kind of oppression of which William himself was never
guilty to stir them into actual revolt.


The provocation was not long in coming. Within three months after
his coronation, William paid a visit to his native duchy. The
ruler of two states could not be always in either; he owed it to