The feudal system

The introduction of feudalism nevertheless made fundamental changes to English life. Up till now ownership, service, legal rights and duties had formed a confused, varied and widely overlapping pattern, reflecting local and regional traditions, obligations and arrangements that went back to the first Anglo-Saxon settlements. One writer refers to the Norman aristocracy as a 'kleptocracy', a ruling class of thieves: twenty years on from the Conquest they had emerged as owners of virtually all the land. The principles of land tenure were made clear and universal. All land was held of the king. Thus from William 1 on, the king was always the King of England, rather than (as the Anglo-Saxon monarchs had in effect been) King of the English. Under him were some six hundred tenants-in-chief. They owed the king specific military service; even if they were bishops or abbots, their own vassals would include a specified number of knights. Under them was a broadening structure of tenants and sub­tenants, bound in a structure of mutual obligation.

It was never a fixed and definitive system, but like all human arrangements, was adapted to individual circumstances and tended through time towards a greater complexity which ultimately began to break up through its own rigidity and the problems caused by rivals claiming the kingship. Although it worked as an economic system, with the manor and the market as the sources of production and exchange, its origin was as a military hierarchy, with a moral element firmly cemented into it.

Maintaining the grip on power

A further consequence of Norman rule was the beginning of the long involvement of England with the dynastic disputes and territorial wars fought out in France, Burgundy and the Low Countries. Later in his reign William I set the pattern of an absentee king, struggling to maintain or extend his holdings in France. After two hundred years of engagement with the Nordic powers, the crucial relationships of the Anglo-Norman state and its successors were now with the shifting power-bases and rich fiefdoms in the lands across the Channel.

The insecurity of a self-imposed monarchy, the distractions of possessions outside England, and the extreme energy and rapacity of some of his barons, like William's own half-brother Odo of Bayeux, were among the pressures that began a centralization of royal power and a series of measures that increased the king's control over events which an Anglo-Saxon king might have left to the shire-reeve or the ealdorman. Only on the outer fringes, to north and west, where they acted as defenders against Welsh and Scots, were the Norman barons set no boundaries for expansion and freed to an extent from royal control, creating the 'Marcher earldoms' and leading to the 'March law' of later centuries. Overruling all other considerations of feudal loyalty was fealty to the king. Through the royally appointed sheriffs, a solemn oath of loyalty to the king was made by the entire adult male population, twice a year.

The Great Seal of William the Conqueror William the Conqueror