did the dead Harold."
Whereupon the Conqueror confirmed him in his ownership, and named the
family Bullstrode, instead of Shobington.

Sir Martin Wright, in his "Treatise on Tenures," published in 1730, p.
61, remarks:

"Though it is true that the possessions of the Normans were of a sudden
very great, and that they received most of them from the hands of
William I., yet it does not follow that the king took all the lands of
England out of the hands of their several owners, claiming them as
his spoils of war, or as a parcel of a conquered country; but, on the
contrary, it appears pretty plain from the history of those times that
the king either had or pretended title to the crown, and that his
title, real or pretended, was established by the death of Harold,
which amounted to an unquestionable judgment in his favor. He did not
therefore treat his opposers as enemies, but as traitors, agreeably to
the known laws of the kingdom which subjected traitors not only to the
loss of life but of all their possessions."

He adds (p. 63):

"As William I. did not claim to possess himself of the lands of
England as the spoils of conquest, so neither did he tyrannically and
arbitrarily subject them to feudal dependence; but, as the fedual law
was at that time the prevailing law of Europe, William I., who had
always governed by this policy, might probably recommend it to our
ancestors as the most obvious and ready way to put them upon a footing
with their neighbors, and to secure the nation against any future
attempts from them. We accordingly find among the laws of William I. a
law enacting feudal law itself, not EO NOMINE, but in effect, inasmuch
as it requires from all persons the same engagements to, and introduces
the same dependence upon, the king as supreme lord of all the lands of
England, as were supposed to be due to a supreme lord by the feudal law.
The law I mean is the LII. law of William I."

This view is adopted by Sir William Blackstone, who writes (vol. ii., p.
47):

"From the prodicious slaughter of the English nobility at the battle
of Hastings, and the fruitless insurrection of those who survived, such
numerous forfeitures had accrued that he (William) was able to reward
his Norman followers with very large and extensive possessions, which
gave a handle to monkish historians, and such as have implicitly
followed them to represent him as having by the right of the sword,
seized upon all the lands of England,