system of tenure was in disorder, in the sense that the local
lord of the village was not accustomed to the interference of a
superior, and that no groups of lords had come into existence by which
the territorial system could be bound in sheaves, as it were, and the
whole of it attached to one central point at the royal Court.

Such a system of groups _had_ arisen in Gaul, and to that difference
ultimately we owe the French territorial system of the present day,
but William the Norman's new subjects had no comprehension of it.

It was upon this account that even those manors which he handed over
to his French kindred and dependants were scattered, and that, though
he framed a vigorous feudal rule centring in his own hands, the
ancient customs of the populace, coupled with the lack of any bond
between scattered and locally independent units, forbade that rule to
endure.

William's order was not a century old when the recrudescence of the
former manorial independence was felt in the reign of Henry II. Under
the personal unpopularity of his son, John, it blazed out into
successful revolt, and, in spite of the veil thrown over underlying
and permanent customs by such strong feudal kings as the first and the
third Edwards, the independence and power of the village landlord
remained the chief and growing character of English life. It expressed
itself in the quality of the local English Parliament, in the support
of the usurping Lancastrian dynasty--in twenty ways that converge and
mingle towards the close of the Middle Ages.

But after the Dissolution of the monasteries this power of the squires
takes on quite a different complexion: the land-owning class, from a
foundation for the National Government, became, within two generations
of the Dissolution, the master of that Government.

For many centuries previous to the sixteenth the old funded wealth of
the Crown had been gradually wasting, at the expense of the Central
National Government and to the profit of the squires. But the
alienation was never complete. There are plenty of cases in which the
Crown is found resuming the proprietorship of a manor to which it had
never abandoned the theoretical title. With the Tudors such cases
become rarer and rarer, with the Stuarts they cease.

The cause of this rapid enfeeblement of the Crown lay largely in the
changed proportion of wealth. The King, until the middle of the
sixteenth century, had been far wealthier than any one