if
milder measures failed. Their hoarded treasure flowed into the land.
They built the first stone houses, and domestic architecture was
created. Jewish gold built Castles and Cathedrals, and awoke the
slumbering sense of beauty. Through their connection with the Jews in
Spain and the East, knowledge of the physical sciences also streamed
into the land, and an intellectual life was created, which bore fruit a
century and a half later in Roger Bacon.

All these things were not done in a day. It was twenty years after the
Conquest that William ordered a survey and valuation of all the land,
which was recorded in what was known as "Domesday Book," that he {37}
might know the precise financial resources of his kingdom, and what was
due him on the confiscated estates. Then he summoned all the nobles
and large landholders to meet him at Salisbury Plain, and those
shapeless blocks at "Stonehenge" witnessed a strange scene when 60,000
men there took solemn oath to support William as King _even against
their own lords_. With this splendid consummation his work was
practically finished. He had, with supreme dexterity and wisdom,
blended two Civilizations, had at the right moment curbed the
destructive element in feudalism, and had secured to the Englishman
free access to the surface for all time. Thus the old English freedom
was in fact restored by the Norman Conquest, by _direct_ act of the
Conqueror.

William typified in his person a transitional time, the old Norse
world, mingling strangely in him with the new. He was the last outcome
of his race. Norse daring and cruelty were side by side with
gentleness and aspiration. No human pity tempered his vengeance. When
hides were hung on the City Walls at Alencon, in insult {38} to his
mother (the daughter of a tanner), he tore out the eyes, cut off the
hands and feet of the prisoners, and threw them over the walls. When
he did this, and when he refused Harold's body a grave, it was the
spirit of the sea-wolves within him. But it was the man of the coming
Civilization, who could not endure death by process of law in his
Kingdom, and who delighted to discourse with the gentle and pious
Anselm, upon the mysteries of life and death.

The _indirect_ benefits of the Conquest, came in enriching streams from
the older civilizations. As Rome had been heir to the accumulations of
experience in the ancient Nations, so England, through France became
the heir to Latin institu