lowest, and
irresponsible tyranny the highest grade, and private war, private
coinage, private prisons, took the place of the imperial institutions of
government.

This was the social system which William the Conqueror and his barons
had been accustomed to see at work in France. One part of it--the feudal
tenure of land--was perhaps the only kind of tenure which they could
understand; the king was the original lord, and every title issued
mediately or immediately from him. The other part, the governmental
system of feudalism, was the point on which sooner or later the duke and
his barons were sure to differ. Already the incompatibility of the
system with the existence of the strong central power had been
exemplified in Normandy, where the strength of the dukes had been tasked
to maintain their hold on the castles and to enforce their own high
justice. Much more difficult would England be to retain in Norman hands
if the new king allowed himself to be fettered by the French system.

On the other hand the Norman barons would fain rise a step in the social
scale answering to that by which their duke had become a king; and they
aspired to the same independence which they had seen enjoyed by the
counts of Southern and Eastern France. Nor was the aspiration on their
part altogether unreasonable; they had joined in the Conquest rather as
sharers in the great adventure than as mere vassals of the duke, whose
birth they despised as much as they feared his strength. William,
however, was wise and wary as well as strong. While, by the insensible
process of custom, or rather by the mere assumption that feudal tenure
of land was the only lawful and reasonable one, the Frankish system of
tenure was substituted for the Anglo-Saxon, the organization of
government on the same basis was not equally a matter of course.

The Conqueror himself was too strong to suffer that organization to
become formidable in his reign, but neither the brutal force of William
Rufus nor the heavy and equal pressure of the government of Henry I
could extinguish the tendency toward it. It was only after it had, under
Stephen, broken out into anarchy and plunged the whole nation in misery;
when the great houses founded by the barons of the Conquest had suffered
forfeiture or extinction; when the Normans had become Englishmen under
the legal and constitutional reforms of Henry II--that the royal
authority, in close alliance with the nation, was enabled to put