im with
land as a "fief" to descend to him and his heirs for ever. In other
countries such a vassal owed fealty to his lord against all foes, be they
king or no. By the usage however which William enacted in England each
sub-tenant, in addition to his oath of fealty to his lord, swore fealty
directly to the Crown, and loyalty to the King was thus established as
the supreme and universal duty of all Englishmen.

[Sidenote: William and England]

But the Conqueror's skill was shown not so much in these inner checks
upon feudalism as in the counterbalancing forces which he provided
without it. He was not only the head of the great garrison that held
England down, he was legal and elected King of the English people. If as
Conqueror he covered the country with a new military organization, as the
successor of Eadward he maintained the judicial and administrative
organization of the old English realm. At the danger of a severance of
the land between the greater nobles he struck a final blow by the
abolition of the four great earldoms. The shire became the largest unit
of local government, and in each shire the royal nomination of sheriffs
for its administration concentrated the whole executive power in the
King's hands. The old legal constitution of the country gave him the
whole judicial power, and William was jealous to retain and heighten
this. While he preserved the local courts of the hundred and the shire he
strengthened the jurisdiction of the King's Court, which seems even in
the Confessor's day to have become more and more a court of highest
appeal with a right to call up all cases from any lower jurisdiction to
its bar. The control over the national revenue which had rested even in
the most troubled times in the hands of the King was turned into a great
financial power by the Conqueror's system. Over the whole face of the
land a large part of the manors were burthened with special dues to the
Crown: and it was for the purpose of ascertaining and recording these
that William sent into each county the commissioners whose enquiries are
recorded in his Domesday Book. A jury empannelled in each hundred
declared on oath the extent and nature of each estate, the names, number,
and condition of its inhabitants, its value before and after the
Conquest, and the sums due from it to the Crown. These, with the Danegeld
or land-tax levied since the days of AEthelred, formed as yet the main
financial resources of the Crown, and the