The History of England by A. E. Pollard
empire. The more efficient a despotism, the sooner it makes itself impossible, and the greater the
problems it stores up for the future, unless it can divest itself of its despotic attributes and make common
cause with the nation it has created.
The provision of this even-handed tyranny was the great contribution of the Normans to the making of
England. They had no written law of their own, but to secure themselves they had to enforce order upon
their schismatic subjects; and they were able to enforce it because, as military experts, they had no equals
in that age. They could not have stood against a nation in arms; but the increasing cost of equipment and
the growth of poor and landless classes among the Anglo-Saxons had transferred the military business of
the nation into the hands of large landowning specialists; and the Anglo-Saxon warrior was no match for
his Norman rival, either individually or collectively. His burh was inferior to the Norman castle, his
shield and battle-axe to the weapons of the mailed and mounted knight; and he had none of the coherence
that was forced upon the conquerors by the iron hand of William and by their situation amid a hostile
people.
The problem for William and his companions was how to organize this military superiority as a means of
orderly government, and this problem wore a twofold aspect. William had to control his barons, and his
barons had to control their vassals. Their methods have been summed up in the phrase, the "feudal
system," which William is still popularly supposed to have introduced into England. On the other hand, it
has been humourously suggested that the feudal system was really introduced into England by Sir Henry
Spelman, a seventeenth-century scholar. Others have maintained that, so far from feudalism being
introduced from Normandy into England, it would be truer to say that feudalism was introduced from
England into Normandy, and thence spread throughout France. These speculations serve, at any rate, to
show that feudalism was a very vague and elusive system, consisting of generalizations from a vast
number of conflicting data. Spelman was the first to attempt to reduce these data to a system, and his
successors tended to forget more and more the exceptions to his rules. It is now clear that much that we
call feudal existed in England before the Norman Conquest; that much of it was not developed until after
the Norman period; and that at no time did feudalism exist as a completely rounded and logical system
outside historical and legal text-books.
The political and social arrangements summed up in the phrase related primarily to the land and the
conditions of service upon which it was held. Commerce and manufactures, and the organization of
towns which grew out of them, were always exceptions to the feudal system; the monarchy saved itself,
its sheriffs, and the shires to some extent from feudal influence; and soon it set to work to redeem the
administration of justice from its clutches. In all parts of the country, moreover, there was land, the
tenure of which was never feudalized. Generally, however, the theory was applied that all land was held
directly or indirectly from the king, who was the sole owner of it, that there was no land without a lord,
and that from every acre of land some sort of service was due to some one or other. A great deal of it was
held by military service; the tenant-in-chief of this land, who might be either a layman or an ecclesiastic,
had to render this military service to the king, while the sub-tenants had to render it to the
tenants-in-chief. When the tenant died his land reverted to the lord, who only granted it to the heir after
the payment of a year's revenue, and on condition of the same service being rendered. If the heir were a
minor, and thus incapable of rendering military service, the land was retained by the lord until the heir
came of age; heiresses could only marry with the lord's leave some one who could perform his services.
The tenant had further to attend the lord's court - whether the lord was his king or not - submit to his
jurisdiction, and pay aids to the lord whenever he was captured and needed ransom, when his eldest son
was made a knight, and when his eldest daughter married.
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