s, the process of confiscation and redistribution of
lands under the new title began from the moment of the coronation. The
next few years, occupied in the reduction of Western and Northern
England, added largely to the stock of divisible estates. The tyranny of
Odo of Bayeux and William Fitzosbern, which provoked attempts at
rebellion in 1067; the stand made by the house of Godwin in Devonshire
in 1068; the attempts of Mercia and Northumbria to shake off the Normans
in 1069 and 1070; the last struggle for independence in 1071, in which
Edwin and Morcar finally fell; the conspiracy of the Norman earls in
1074, in consequence of which Waltheof perished--all tended to the same
result.

After each effort the royal hand was laid on more heavily; more and more
land changed owners, and with the change of owners the title changed.
The complicated and unintelligible irregularities of the Anglo-Saxon
tenures were exchanged for the simple and uniform feudal theory. The
fifteen hundred tenants-in-chief of _Domesday Book_ take the place of
the countless land-owners of King Edward's time, and the loose,
unsystematic arrangements which had grown up in the confusion of title,
tenure, and jurisdiction were replaced by systematic custom. The change
was effected without any legislative act, simply by the process of
transfer under circumstances in which simplicity and uniformity were an
absolute necessity. It was not the change from allodial to feudal so
much as from confusion to order. The actual amount of dispossession was
no doubt greatest in the higher ranks; the smaller owners may to a large
extent have remained in a mediatized position on their estates; but even
_Domesday_, with all its fulness and accuracy, cannot be supposed to
enumerate all the changes of the twenty eventful years that followed the
battle of Hastings. It is enough for our purpose to ascertain that a
universal assimilation of title followed the general changes of
ownership. The king of _Domesday_ is the supreme landlord; all the land
of the nation, the old folkland, has become the king's; and all private
land is held mediately or immediately of him; all holders are bound to
their lords by homage and fealty, either actually demanded or understood
to be demandable, in every case of transfer by inheritance or otherwise.

The result of this process is partly legal and partly constitutional or
political. The legal result is the introduction of an elaborate system
of c