An unknown corpse, unless it could be proved that the dead man was English, was assumed to be that of a man who had come with King William, and the fine was levied.  Some other enactments were needed when two nations lived side by side in the same land.  As in earlier times, Roman and barbarian each kept his own law, so now for some purposes the Frenchman—­“Francigena”—­and the Englishman kept their own law.  This is chiefly with regard to the modes of appealing to God’s judgement in doubtful cases.  The English did this by ordeal, the Normans by wager of battle.  When a man of one nation appealed a man of the other, the accused chose the mode of trial.  If an Englishman appealed a Frenchman and declined to prove his charge either way, the Frenchman might clear himself by oath.  But these privileges were strictly confined to Frenchmen who had come with William and after him.  Frenchmen who had in Edward’s time settled in England as the land of their own choice, reckoned as Englishmen.  Other enactments, fresh enactments of older laws, touched both races.  The slave trade was rife in its worst form; men were sold out of the land, chiefly to the Danes of Ireland.  Earlier kings had denounced the crime, and earlier bishops had preached against it.  William denounced it again under the penalty of forfeiture of all lands and goods, and Saint Wulfstan, the Bishop of Worcester, persuaded the chief offenders, Englishmen of Bristol, to give up their darling sin for a season.  Yet in the next reign Anselm and his synod had once more to denounce the crime under spiritual penalties, when they had no longer the strong arm of William to enforce them.

Another law bears more than all the personal impress of William.  In it he at once, on one side, forestalls the most humane theories of modern times, and on the other sins most directly against them.  His remarkable unwillingness to put any man to death, except among the chances of the battle-field, was to some extent the feeling of his age.  With him the feeling takes the shape of a formal law.  He forbids the infliction of death for any crime whatever.  But those who may on this score be disposed to claim the Conqueror as a sympathizer will be shocked at the next enactment.  Those crimes which kings less merciful than William would have punished with death are to be punished with loss of eyes or other foul and cruel mutilations.  Punishments of this kind now seem more revolting than death, though possibly, now as then, the sufferer himself might think otherwise.  But in those days to substitute mutilation for death, in the case of crimes which were held to deserve death, was universally deemed an act of mercy.  Grave men shrank from sending their fellow-creatures out of the world, perhaps without time for repentance; but physical sympathy with physical suffering had little place in their minds.  In the next century a feeling against bodily mutilation gradually comes in; but as yet the mildest and most thoughtful men,