he
most undoubted proofs of guilt against a people thus devoted to
destruction. It was crime sufficient in an Englishman to be opulent,
or noble, or powerful; and the policy of the king, concurring with the
rapacity of foreign adventurers, produced almost a total revolution in
the landed property of the kingdom. Ancient and honourable families
were reduced to beggary; the nobles themselves were every where
treated with ignominy and contempt; they had the mortification of
seeing their castles and manors possessed by Normans of the meanest
birth and lowest stations [z]; and they found themselves carefully
excluded from every road which led either to riches or preferment [a].
[FN [w] W. Malmes. p. 104. [x] H. Hunt p. 370. [y] See note [H], at
the end of the volume. [z] Order. Vitalis, p. 521. M. West. p. 229.
[a] See note [I], at the end of the volume.]

[MN Introduction of the feudal law.]
As power naturally follows property, this revolution alone gave great
security to the foreigners; but William, by the new institutions which
he established, took also care to retain for ever the military
authority in those hands which had enabled him to subdue the kingdom.
He introduced into England the feudal law, which he found established
in France and Normandy, and which, during that age, was the foundation
both of the stability and of the disorders in most of the monarchical
governments of Europe. He divided all the lands of England, with very
few exceptions, beside the royal demesnes, into baronies, and he
conferred these, with the reservation of stated services and payments,
on the most considerable of his adventurers. These great barons, who
held immediately of the crown, shared out a great part of their lands
to other foreigners, who were denominated knights or vassals, and who
paid their lord the same duty and submission in peace and war, which
he himself owed to his sovereign. The whole kingdom contained about
seven hundred chief tenants, and sixty thousand two hundred and
fifteen knights-fees [b]; and as none of the native English were
admitted into the first rank, the few who retained their landed
property were glad to be received into the second, and under the
protection of some powerful Norman, to load themselves and their
posterity with this grievous burden, for estates which they had
received free from their ancestors [c]. The small mixture of English
which entered into this civil or military fabric (for it p