all-powerful.  He thoroughly enjoyed that system of legal fictions and official euphemisms which marks his reign.  William himself became in some sort an Englishman, and those to whom he granted English lands had in some sort to become Englishmen in order to hold them.  The Norman stepped into the exact place of the Englishman whose land he held; he took his rights and his burthens, and disputes about those rights and burthens were judged according to English law by the witness of Englishmen.  Reigning over two races in one land, William would be lord of both alike, able to use either against the other in case of need.  He would make the most of everything in the feelings and customs of either that tended to strengthen his own hands.  And, in the state of things in which men then found themselves, whatever strengthened William’s hands strengthened law and order in his kingdom.

There was therefore nothing to lead William to make any large changes in the letter of the English law.  The powers of a King of the English, wielded as he knew how to wield them, made him as great as he could wish to be.  Once granting the original wrong of his coming at all and bringing a host of strangers with him, there is singularly little to blame in the acts of the Conqueror.  Of bloodshed, of wanton interference with law and usage, there is wonderfully little.  Englishmen and Normans were held to have settled down in peace under the equal protection of King William.  The two races were drawing together; the process was beginning which, a hundred years later, made it impossible, in any rank but the highest and the lowest, to distinguish Norman from Englishman.  Among the smaller landowners and the townsfolk this intermingling had already begun, while earls and bishops were not yet so exclusively Norman, nor had the free churls of England as yet sunk so low as at a later stage.  Still some legislation was needed to settle the relations of the two races.  King William proclaimed the “renewal of the law of King Edward.”  This phrase has often been misunderstood; it is a common form when peace and good order are restored after a period of disturbance.  The last reign which is looked back to as to a time of good government becomes the standard of good government, and it is agreed between king and people, between contending races or parties, that things shall be as they were in the days of the model ruler.  So we hear in Normandy of the renewal of the law of Rolf, and in England of the renewal of the law of Cnut.  So at an earlier time Danes and Englishmen agreed in the renewal of the law of Edgar.  So now Normans and Englishmen agreed in the renewal of the law of Edward.  There was no code either of Edward’s or of William’s making.  William simply bound himself to rule as Edward had ruled.  But in restoring the law of King Edward, he added, “with the additions which I have decreed for the advantage of the people of the English.”