Instead of abolishing the English tongue, William took care that his English-born son should learn it, and he even began to learn it himself.A king of those days held it for his duty to hear and redress his subjects' complaints; he had to go through the land and see for himself that those who acted in his name did right among his people.This earlier kings had done; this William wished to do; but he found his ignorance of English a hindrance.Cares of other kinds checked his English studies, but he may have learned enough to understand the meaning of his own English charters.Nor did William try, as he is often imagined to have done, to root out the ancient institutions of England, and to set up in their stead either the existing institutions of Normandy or some new institutions of his own devising.The truth is that with William began a gradual change in the laws and customs of England, undoubtedly great, but far less than is commonly thought.French names have often supplanted English, and have made the amount of change seem greater than it really was.Still much change did follow on the Norman Conquest, and the Norman Conquest was so completely William's own act that all that came of it was in some sort his act also.But these changes were mainly the gradual results of the state of things which followed William's coming; they were but very slightly the results of any formal acts of his.With a foreign king and foreigners in all high places, much practical change could not fail to follow, even where the letter of the law was unchanged.Still the practical change was less than if the letter of the law had been changed as well.English law was administered by foreign judges; the foreign grantees of William held English land according to English law.The Norman had no special position as a Norman; in every rank except perhaps the very highest and the very lowest, he had Englishmen to his fellows.All this helped to give the Norman Conquest of England its peculiar character, to give it an air of having swept away everything English, while its real work was to turn strangers into Englishmen.And that character was impressed on William's work by William himself.The king claiming by legal right, but driven to assert his right by the sword, was unlike both the foreign king who comes in by peaceful succession and the foreign king who comes in without even the pretext of law.The Normans too, if born soldiers, were also born lawyers, and no man was more deeply impressed with the legal spirit than William himself.He loved neither to change the law nor to transgress the law, and he had little need to do either.He knew how to make the law his instrument, and, without either changing or transgressing it, to use it to make himself 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.
