These few words are indeed weighty.  The little legislation of William’s reign takes throughout the shape of additions.  Nothing old is repealed; a few new enactments are set up by the side of the old ones.  And these words describe, not only William’s actual legislation, but the widest general effect of his coming.  The Norman Conquest did little towards any direct abolition of the older English laws or institutions.  But it set up some new institutions alongside of old ones; and it brought in not a few names, habits, and ways of looking at things, which gradually did their work.  In England no man has pulled down; many have added and modified.  Our law is still the law of King Edward with the additions of King William.  Some old institutions took new names; some new institutions with new names sprang up by the side of old ones.  Sometimes the old has lasted, sometimes the new.  We still have a king and not a roy; but he gathers round him a parliament and not a vitenagemot.  We have a sheriff and not a viscount; but his district is more commonly called a county than a shire.  But county and shire are French and English for the same thing, and “parliament” is simply French for the “deep speech” which King William had with his Witan.  The National Assembly of England has changed its name and its constitution more than once; but it has never been changed by any sudden revolution, never till later times by any formal enactment.  There was no moment when one kind of assembly supplanted another.  And this has come because our Conqueror was, both by his disposition and his circumstances, led to act as a preserver and not as a destroyer.

The greatest recorded acts of William, administrative and legislative, come in the last days of his reign.  But there are several enactments of William belonging to various periods of his reign, and some of them to this first moment of peace.  Here we distinctly see William as an English statesman, as a statesman who knew how to work a radical change under conservative forms.  One enactment, perhaps the earliest of all, provided for the safety of the strangers who had come with him to subdue and to settle in the land.  The murder of a Norman by an Englishman, especially of a Norman intruder by a dispossessed Englishman, was a thing that doubtless often happened.  William therefore provides for the safety of those whom he calls “the men whom I brought with me or who have come after me;” that is, the warriors of Senlac, Exeter, and York.  These men are put within his own peace; wrong done to them is wrong done to the King, his crown and dignity.  If the murderer cannot be found, the lord and, failing him, the hundred, must make payment to the King.  Of this grew the presentment of Englishry, one of the few formal badges of distinction between the conquering and the conquered race.  Its practical need could not have lasted beyond a generation or two, but it went on as a form ages after it had lost all meaning.