any interregnum by having their sons crowned in their lifetime.  So with the great fiefs of the crown.  The notion of kingship as an office conferred by the nation, of a duchy or county as an office held under the king, was still fully alive in England; in Gaul it was forgotten.  Kingdom, duchies, counties, had all become possessions instead of offices, possessions passing by hereditary succession of some kind.  But no rule of hereditary succession was universally or generally accepted.  To this day the kingdoms of Europe differ as to the question of female succession, and it is but slowly that the doctrine of representation has ousted the more obvious doctrine of nearness of kin.  All these points were then utterly unsettled; crowns, save of course that of the Empire, were to pass by hereditary right; only what was hereditary right?  At such a time claims would be pressed which would have seemed absurd either earlier or later.  To Englishmen, if it seemed strange to elect one who was not of the stock of Cerdic, it seemed much more strange to be called on to accept without election, or to elect as a matter of course, one who was not of the stock of Cerdic and who was a stranger into the bargain.  Out of England it would not seem strange when William set forth that Edward, having no direct heirs, had chosen his near kinsman William as his successor.  Put by itself, that statement had a plausible sound.  The transmission of a crown by bequest belongs to the same range of ideas as its transmission by hereditary right; both assume the crown to be a property and not an office.  Edward’s nomination of Harold, the election of Harold, the fact that William’s kindred to Edward lay outside the royal line of England, the fact that there was, in the person of Edgar, a nearer kinsman within that royal line, could all be slurred over or explained away or even turned to William’s profit.  Let it be that Edward on his death-bed had recommended Harold, and that the Witan had elected Harold.  The recommendation was wrung from a dying man in opposition to an earlier act done when he was able to act freely.  The election was brought about by force or fraud; if it was free, it was of no force against William’s earlier claim of kindred and bequest.  As for Edgar, as few people in England thought of him, still fewer out of England would have ever heard of him.  It is more strange that the bastardy of William did not tell against him, as it had once told in his own duchy.  But this fact again marks the transitional age.  Altogether the tale that a man who was no kinsman of the late king had taken to himself the crown which the king had bequeathed to a kinsman, might, even without further aggravation, be easily made to sound like a tale of wrong.