[Sidenote:  William and feudalism]

But the greatness of the Conqueror was seen in more than the order and peace which he imposed upon the land.  Fortune had given him one of the greatest opportunities ever offered to a king of stamping his own genius on the destinies of a people; and it is the way in which he seized on this opportunity which has set William among the foremost statesmen of the world.  The struggle which ended in the fens of Ely had wholly changed his position.  He no longer held the land merely as its national and elected King.  To his elective right he added the right of conquest.  It is the way in which William grasped and employed this double power that marks the originality of his political genius, for the system of government which he devised was in fact the result of this double origin of his rule.  It represented neither the purely feudal system of the Continent nor the system of the older English royalty:  more truly perhaps it may be said to have represented both.  As the conqueror of England William developed the military organization of feudalism so far as was necessary for the secure possession of his conquests.  The ground was already prepared for such an organization.  We have watched the beginnings of English feudalism in the warriors, the “companions” or “thegns” who were personally attached to the king’s war-band and received estates from the folk-land in reward for their personal services.  In later times this feudal distribution of estates had greatly increased as the bulk of the nobles followed the king’s example and bound their tenants to themselves by a similar process of subinfeudation.  The pure freeholders on the other hand, the class which formed the basis of the original English society, had been gradually reduced in number, partly through imitation of the class above them, but more through the pressure of the Danish wars and the social disturbance consequent upon them which forced these freemen to seek protectors among the thegns at the cost of their independence.  Even before the reign of William therefore feudalism was superseding the older freedom in England as it had already superseded it in Germany or France.  But the tendency was quickened and intensified by the Conquest.  The desperate and universal resistance of the country forced William to hold by the sword what the sword had won; and an army strong enough to crush at any moment a national revolt was needful for the preservation of his throne.  Such an army could only be maintained by a vast confiscation of the soil, and the failure of the English risings cleared the ground for its establishment.  The greater part of the higher nobility fell in battle or fled into exile, while the lower thegnhood either forfeited the whole of their lands or redeemed a portion by the surrender of the rest.  We see the completeness of the confiscation in the vast estates which William was enabled to grant to his more powerful followers.  Two hundred manors in Kent with more than an equal