payment if they showed loyalty to the
Conquerer. Well-born women crowded into nunneries to escape Norman
violence. The people were deprived of their most popular leaders,
who were excluded from all positions of trust and profit,
especially all the clergy. The earldoms became fiefs instead of
magistracies.

The Conquerer was a stern and fierce man and ruled as an autocrat
by terror. Whenever the people revolted or resisted his mandates,
he seized their lands or destroyed the crops and laid waste the
countryside and so that they starved to death. His rule was
strong, resolute, wise, and wary because he had learned to command
himself as well as other men. He was not arbitrary or oppressive.
The Conquerer had a strict system of policing the nation. Instead
of the Anglo-Saxon self-government throughout the districts and
hundreds of resident authorities in local courts, he aimed at
substituting for it the absolute rule of the barons under military
rule so favorable to the centralizing power of the Crown. He used
secret police and spies and the terrorism this system involved.
This especially curbed the minor barons and preserved the public
peace.

The English people, who outnumbered the Normans by 300 to 1, were
disarmed. Curfew bells were rung at 7:00 PM when everyone had to
remain in their own dwellings on pain of death and all fires and
candles were to be put out. This prevented any nightly gatherings,
assassinations, or seditions. Order was brought to the kingdom so
that no man dare kill another, no matter how great the injury he
had received. The Conquerer extended the King's peace on the
highways, i.e. roads on high ground, to include the whole nation.
Any individual of any rank could travel from end to end of the
land unharmed. Before, prudent travelers would travel only in
groups of twenty.

The barons subjugated the English who were on their newly acquired
land. There began a hierarchy of seisin [rightful occupation] of
land so that there could be no land without its lord. Also, every
lord had a superior lord with the king as the overlord or supreme
landlord. One piece of land may be held by several tenures. For
instance, A, holding by barons' service of the King, may enfeoff
B, a church, to hold of him on the terms of praying for the souls
of his ancestors, and B may enfeoff a freeman C to hold of the
church by giving it a certain percentage of his crops every year.
There were about 200 barons who held land dir