its support he built up his wonderful administrative system.  There no longer existed any constitutional check on the royal authority.  The Great Council still survived as the relic and heir both of the English Witenagemot and the Norman Feudal Court.  But in matters of State its “counsel” was scarcely asked or given; its “consent” was yielded as a mere matter of form; no discussion or hesitation interrupted the formal and pompous display of final submission to the royal will.  The Church under its Norman bishops, foreign officials trained in the King’s chapel, was no longer a united national force, as it had been in the time of the Saxon kings.  The mass of the people was of no account in politics.  The trading class scarcely as yet existed.  The villeins tied to the soil of the manor on which they had been born, and shut out from all courts save those of their lord; inhabitants of the little hamlets that lay along the river-courses in clearings among dense woods, suspicious of strangers, isolated by an intense jealousy of all that lay beyond their own boundaries or by traditional feuds, had no part in the political life of the nation.

But the central government had proved in the long run too weak to check the growth of feudal tendencies.  The land was studded with fortresses—­the homes of lords who exercised criminal jurisdiction without appeal, and who had their private prisons and private gallows.  Their manor courts, whether they were feudal courts established by the new nobility of the Conquest, or whether they represented ancient franchises in which Norman lords succeeded to the jurisdiction of earlier English rulers, were more and more turned into mere feudal courts.  In the Shire courts themselves the English sheriff who used to preside over the court was replaced by a Norman “vicecomes,” who practically did as he chose, or as he was used to do in Normandy, in questions of procedure, proof, and judgment.  The old English hundred courts, where the peasants’ petty crimes had once been judged by the freemen of the district, had now in most cases become part of the fief of the lord, whose newly-built castle towered over the wretched hovels of his tenants, and the peasants came for justice to the baron’s court, and paid their fees to the baron’s treasury.  The right of private coinage added to his wealth, as the multitude of retainers bound to follow them in war added to his power.  The barons were naturally roused to a passion of revolt when the new administrative system threatened to cut them off from all share in the rights of government, which in other feudal countries were held to go along with the possession of land.  They hated the “new men” who were taking their places at the council-board; and they revolted against the new order which cut them off from useful sources of revenue, from unchecked plunder, from fines at will in their courts of hundred and manor, from the possibility of returning fancy accounts, and of profitable “farming” of the shires; they were jealous of the clergy, who played so great a part in the administration, and who threatened to surpass them in the greatness of their wealth, their towns and their castles; and they only waited for a favourable moment to declare open war on the government of the court.