and dealt them out again to his
own favorites--a supposition grounded upon a mistaken sense of the
word conquest, which in its feudal acceptation signifies no more
than acquisition, and this has led many hasty writers into a strange
historical mistake, and one which, upon the slightest examination, will
be found to be most untrue.

"We learn from a Saxon chronicle (A.D. 1085), that in the nineteenth
year of King William's reign, an invasion was apprehended from Denmark;
and the military constitution of the Saxons being then laid aside, and
no other introduced in its stead, the kingdom was wholly defenceless;
which occasioned the king to bring over a large army of Normans and
Britons who were quartered upon, and greatly oppressed, the people. This
apparent weakness, together with the grievances occasioned by a foreign
force, might co-operate with the king's remonstrance, and better incline
the nobility to listen to his proposals for putting them in a position
of defence. For, as soon as the danger was over, the king held a
great council to inquire into the state of the nation, the immediate
consequence of which was the compiling of the great survey called the
Doomsday Book, which was finished the next year; and in the end of that
very year (1086) the king was attended by all his nobility at Sarum,
where the principal landholders submitted their lands to the yoke of
military tenure, and became the king's vassals, and did homage and
fealty to his person."

Mr. Henry Hallam writes:

"One innovation made by William upon the feudal law is very deserving of
attention. By the leading principle of feuds, an oath of fealty was due
from the vassal to the lord of whom he immediately held the land, and
no other. The King of France long after this period had no feudal, and
scarcely any royal, authority over the tenants of his own vassals; but
William received at Salisbury, in 1085, the fealty of all landholders in
England, both those who held in chief and their tenants, thus breaking
in upon the feudal compact in its most essential attribute--the
exclusive dependence of a VASSAL upon his lord; and this may be reckoned
among the several causes which prevented the continental notions of
independence upon the Crown from ever taking root among the English
aristocracy."

A more recent writer, Mr. FREEMAN ("History of the Norman Conquest,"
published in 1871, vol. iv., p. 695), repeats the same idea, though
not exactly in the same word