am and feudalism]

But the greatness of the Conqueror was seen in more than the order and
peace which he imposed upon the land. Fortune had given him one of the
greatest opportunities ever offered to a king of stamping his own genius
on the destinies of a people; and it is the way in which he seized on
this opportunity which has set William among the foremost statesmen of
the world. The struggle which ended in the fens of Ely had wholly changed
his position. He no longer held the land merely as its national and
elected King. To his elective right he added the right of conquest. It is
the way in which William grasped and employed this double power that
marks the originality of his political genius, for the system of
government which he devised was in fact the result of this double origin
of his rule. It represented neither the purely feudal system of the
Continent nor the system of the older English royalty: more truly perhaps
it may be said to have represented both. As the conqueror of England
William developed the military organization of feudalism so far as was
necessary for the secure possession of his conquests. The ground was
already prepared for such an organization. We have watched the beginnings
of English feudalism in the warriors, the "companions" or "thegns" who
were personally attached to the king's war-band and received estates from
the folk-land in reward for their personal services. In later times this
feudal distribution of estates had greatly increased as the bulk of the
nobles followed the king's example and bound their tenants to themselves
by a similar process of subinfeudation. The pure freeholders on the other
hand, the class which formed the basis of the original English society,
had been gradually reduced in number, partly through imitation of the
class above them, but more through the pressure of the Danish wars and
the social disturbance consequent upon them which forced these freemen to
seek protectors among the thegns at the cost of their independence. Even
before the reign of William therefore feudalism was superseding the older
freedom in England as it had already superseded it in Germany or France.
But the tendency was quickened and intensified by the Conquest. The
desperate and universal resistance of the country forced William to hold
by the sword what the sword had won; and an army strong enough to crush
at any moment a national revolt was needful for the preservation of his
throne. Such