ght to suit and service from small land-owners passed from the king to
the receiver of the fief as a matter of course; but it is certain that
even before the Conquest such a proceeding was not uncommon; Edward the
Confessor had transferred to St. Augustine's monastery a number of
allodiaries in Kent, and every such measure in the case of a church must
have had its parallel in similar grants to laymen. The manorial system
brought in a number of new names; and perhaps a duplication of offices.
The _gerefa_ of the old thegn, or of the ancient township, was replaced,
as president of the courts, by a Norman steward or seneschal; and the
_bydel_ of the old system by the bailiff of the new; but the gerefa and
bydel still continued to exist in a subordinate capacity as the _grave_
or reeve and the _bedell_; and when the lord's steward takes his place
in the county court, the reeve and four men of the township are there
also. The common of the township may be treated as the lord's waste, but
the townsmen do not lose their customary share.

The changes that take place in the state have their resulting analogies
in every village, but no new England is created; new forms displace but
do not destroy the old, and old rights remain, although changed in title
and forced into symmetry with a new legal and pseudo-historical theory.
The changes may not seem at first sight very oppressive, but they opened
the way for oppression; the forms they had introduced tended, under the
spirit of Norman legality and feudal selfishness, to become hard
realities, and in the profound miseries of Stephen's reign the people
learned how completely the new theory left them at the mercy of their
lords; nor were all the reforms of his successor more stringent or the
struggles of the century that followed a whit more impassioned than were
necessary to protect the English yeoman from the men who lived upon his
strength.

In attempting thus to estimate the real amount of change introduced by
the feudalism of the Conquest, many points of further interest have been
touched upon, to which it is necessary to recur only so far as to give
them their proper place in a more general view of the reformed
organization. The Norman king is still the king of the nation. He has
become the supreme landlord; all estates are held of him mediately or
immediately, but he still demands the allegiance of all his subjects.
The oath which he exacted at Salisbury in 1086, and which is e