a nation out of Irish septs, and will make another out of the hundred
races and religions of our Indian empire. The more efficient a
despotism, the sooner it makes itself impossible, and the greater the
problems it stores up for the future, unless it can divest itself of
its despotic attributes and make common cause with the nation it has
created.

The provision of this even-handed tyranny was the great contribution of
the Normans to the making of England. They had no written law of their
own, but to secure themselves they had to enforce order upon their
schismatic subjects; and they were able to enforce it because, as
military experts, they had no equals in that age. They could not have
stood against a nation in arms; but the increasing cost of equipment
and the growth of poor and landless classes among the Anglo-Saxons had
transferred the military business of the nation into the hands of large
landowning specialists; and the Anglo-Saxon warrior was no match for
his Norman rival, either individually or collectively. His burh was
inferior to the Norman castle, his shield and battle-axe to the weapons
of the mailed and mounted knight; and he had none of the coherence that
was forced upon the conquerors by the iron hand of William and by their
situation amid a hostile people.

The problem for William and his companions was how to organize this
military superiority as a means of orderly government, and this problem
wore a twofold aspect. William had to control his barons, and his
barons had to control their vassals. Their methods have been summed up
in the phrase, the "feudal system," which William is still popularly
supposed to have introduced into England. On the other hand, it has
been humourously suggested that the feudal system was really introduced
into England by Sir Henry Spelman, a seventeenth-century scholar.