court. He confirmed the laws which had been in use in King Edward's
days, with the additions which he himself made for the benefit, as he
especially tells us, of the English.

We are told, on what seems to be the highest legal authority of the next
century, that he issued in his fourth year a commission of inquiry into
the national customs, and obtained from sworn representatives of each
county a declaration of the laws under which they wished to live. The
compilation that bears his name is very little more than a reissue of
the code of Canute; and this proceeding helped greatly to reconcile the
English people to his rule. Although the oppressions of his later years
were far heavier than the measures taken to secure the immediate success
of the Conquest, all the troubles of the kingdom after 1075, in his
sons' reigns as well as in his own, proceeded from the insubordination
of the Normans, not from the attempts of the English to dethrone the
king. Very early they learned that, if their interest was not the
king's, at least their enemies were his enemies; hence they are
invariably found on the royal side against the feudatories.

This accounts for the maintenance of the national force of defence, over
and above the feudal army. The _fyrd_ of the English, the general
armament of the men of the counties and hundreds, was not abolished at
the Conquest, but subsisted even through the reigns of William Rufus and
Henry I, to be reformed and reconstituted under Henry II; and in each
reign it gave proof of its strength and faithfulness. The _witenagemot_
itself retained the ancient form, the bishops and abbots formed a chief
part of it, instead of being, as in Normandy, so insignificant an
element that their very participation in deliberation has been doubted.
The king sat crowned three times in the year in the old royal towns of
Westminster, Winchester, and Gloucester, hearing the complaints of his
people, and executing such justice as his knowledge of their law and
language and his own imperious will allowed. In all this there is no
violent innovation, only such gradual essential changes as twenty
eventful years of new actors and new principles must bring, however
insensibly the people themselves--passing away and being replaced by
their children--may be educated to endurance.

It would be wrong to impute to the Conqueror any intention of deceiving
the nation by maintaining its official forms while introducing new
principle