It was these new conditions of the national life which constituted the real problem of government—­a problem far more slow and difficult to work out than the mere suppression of a turbulent baronage.  In the rapid movement towards material prosperity, the energies of the people were in all directions breaking away from the channels and limits in which they had been so long confined.  Rules which had been sufficient for the guidance of a simple society began to break down under the new fullness and complexity of the national life, and the simple decisions by which questions of property and public order had been solved in earlier times were no longer possible.  Moreover, a new confusion and uncertainty had been brought into the law in the last hundred years by the effort to fuse together Norman and English custom.  Norman landlord or Norman sheriff naturally knew little of English law or custom, and his tendency was always to enforce the feudal rules which he practised on his Norman estates.  In course of time it came about that all questions of land-tenure and of the relations of classes were regulated by a kind of double system.  The Englishman as well as the Norman became the “man” of his lord as in Norman law, and was bound by the duties which this involved.  On the other hand, the Norman as well as the Englishman held his land subject to the customary burdens and rights recognized by English law.  Both races were thus made equal before the law, and no legal distinction was recognized between conqueror and conquered.  There was, however, every element of confusion and perplexity in the theory and administration of the law itself, in the variety of systems which were contending for the mastery, and in the inefficiency of the courts in which they were applied.  English law had grown up out of Teutonic custom, into which Roman tradition had been slowly filtering through the Dark Ages Feudal law still bore traces of its double origin in the system of the Teutonic “comitatus” and of the Roman “beneficium.”  Forest law, which governed the vast extent of the king’s domains, was bound neither by Norman forms nor by English traditions, but was framed absolutely at the king’s will.  Canon law had been developed out of customs and precedents which had served to regulate the first Christian communities, and which had been largely formed out of the civil law of Rome.  There was a multitude of local customs which varied in every hundred and in every manor, and which were preserved by the jealousy that prevailed between one village and another, the strong sense of local life and jurisdiction, and the strict adherence to immemorial traditions.