Thus, from the beginning of his reign, William began to make himself richer than any king that had been before him in England or than any other Western king of his day.He could both punish his enemies and reward his friends.Much of what he took he kept; much he granted away, mainly to his foreign followers, but sometimes also to Englishmen who had in any way won his favour.Wiggod of Wallingford was one of the very few Englishmen who kept and received estates which put them alongside of the great Norman landowners.The doctrine that all land was held of the King was now put into a practical shape.All, Englishmen and strangers, not only became William's subjects, but his men and his grantees.Thus he went on during his whole reign.There was no sudden change from the old state of things to the new.After the general redemption of lands, gradually carried out as William's power advanced, no general blow was dealt at Englishmen as such.They were not, like some conquered nations, formally degraded or put under any legal incapacities in their own land.William simply distinguished between his loyal and his disloyal subjects, and used his opportunities for punishing the disloyal and rewarding the loyal.Such punishments and rewards naturally took the shape of confiscations and grants of land.If punishment was commonly the lot of the Englishman, and reward was the lot of the stranger, that was only because King William treated all men as they deserved.Most Englishmen were disloyal; most strangers were loyal.But disloyal strangers and loyal Englishmen fared according to their deserts.The final result of this process, begun now and steadily carried on, was that, by the end of William's reign, the foreign king was surrounded by a body of foreign landowners and office-bearers of foreign birth.When, in the early days of his conquest, he gathered round him the great men of his realm, it was still an English assembly with a sprinkling of strangers.By the end of his reign it had changed, step by step, into an assembly of strangers with a sprinkling of Englishmen.
This revolution, which practically transferred the greater part of the soil of England to the hands of strangers, was great indeed.
But it must not be mistaken for a sudden blow, for an irregular scramble, for a formal proscription of Englishmen as such.William, according to his character and practice, was able to do all this gradually, according to legal forms, and without drawing any formal distinction between natives and strangers.All land was held of the King of the English, according to the law of England.It may seem strange how such a process of spoliation, veiled under a legal fiction, could have been carried out without resistance.It was easier because it was gradual and piecemeal.The whole country was not touched at once, nor even the whole of any one district.One man lost his land while his neighbour kept his, and he who kept his land was not likely to join in the possible plots of the other.And though the land had never seen so great a confiscation, or one so largely for the behoof of foreigners, yet there was nothing new in the thing itself.Danes had settled under Cnut, and Normans and other Frenchmen under Edward.Confiscation of land was the everyday punishment for various public and private crimes.In any change, such as we should call a change of ministry, as at the fall and the return of Godwine, outlawry and forfeiture of lands was the usual doom of the weaker party, a milder doom than the judicial massacres of later ages.Even a conquest of England was nothing new, and William at this stage contrasted favourably with Cnut, whose early days were marked by the death of not a few.William, at any rate since his crowning, had shed the blood of no man.Men perhaps thought that things might have been much worse, and that they were not unlikely to mend.Anyhow, weakened, cowed, isolated, the people of the conquered shires submitted humbly to the Conqueror's will.
It needed a kind of oppression of which William himself was never guilty to stir them into actual revolt.
The provocation was not long in coming.Within three months after his coronation, William paid a visit to his native duchy.The ruler of two states could not be always in either; he owed it to his old subjects to show himself among them in his new character; and his absence might pass as a sign of the trust he put in his new subjects.But the means which he took to secure their obedience brought out his one weak point.We cannot believe that he really wished to goad the people into rebellion; yet the choice of his lieutenants might seem almost like it.He was led astray by partiality for his brother and for his dearest friend.To Bishop Ode of Bayeux, and to William Fitz-Osbern, the son of his early guardian, he gave earldoms, that of Kent to Odo, that of Hereford to William.The Conqueror was determined before all things that his kingdom should be united and obedient; England should not be split up like Gaul and Germany; he would have no man in England whose formal homage should carry with it as little of practical obedience as his own homage to the King of the French.A Norman earl of all Wessex or all Mercia might strive after such a position.William therefore forsook the old practice of dividing the whole kingdom into earldoms.In the peaceful central shires he would himself rule through his sheriffs and other immediate officers; he would appoint earls only in dangerous border districts where they were needed as military commanders.All William's earls were in fact MARQUESSES, guardians of a march or frontier.Ode had to keep Kent against attacks from the continent; William Fitz-Osbern had to keep Herefordshire against the Welsh and the independent English.This last shire had its own local warfare.William's authority did not yet reach over all the shires beyond London and Hereford; but Harold had allowed some of Edward's Norman favourites to keep power there.
