ple restless under what was after all a foreign yoke, and one which the royal expenditure pressed heavily upon their shoulders, these factors insensibly but none the less thoroughly altered the fabric of the English law. The chief clue to the changes during the two centuries following the Conquest is to be found in the effort of the kings to make their hold on the kingdom first secure and then profitable.

34. The feudal system. His position as conqueror of England by force of arms gave to William I. an unexampled opportunity of elaborating for his own advantage the system of feudalism. Already not unfamiliar to the England of his day, it received in his hands and those of his sons such extended development that practically all the land of England came to be held by a feudal tenure, and the whole English people was organized on a feudal basis. As lord of all the land William granted to his followers and supporters rights of lordship over it on condition of their rendering him service, paying to his treasury an assessment proportioned to their holdings, and pledging their loyalty to him in war and peace. Those men who received their lands directly from the king subdivided them among their own followers, exacting similar duties from them, and this partition was repeated until the lowest in rank among the free tenants was lord of but a few acres. But, since all free tenants, besides the duty of homage or loyalty to their immediate overlord, were bound in fealty to the king, the rules of their tenancy came in the course of time to be settled by the decisions of the royal courts, and so were rules

which prevailed throughout the whole kingdom and constituted an early element of a common law. At the bottom of the social structure were the peasantry, who worked the farms for the lords and could not sell the land they tilled or escape from their duty of service. This unfree class lay outside the protection of the king's courts, safeguarded only by the local custom of the manor or Hundred. As the incidents of the free and unfree tenures were gradually elaborated in the royal and the baronial courts, the legal aspects of the relation assumed greater and greater importance, the purely military features shrank into comparative insignificance, and the relation of tenure and service developed into the law of real property, to which are traceable many of the essential features of the property law of today.

35. The Curia Regis or King's Court.-A second line of the development of our legal system during this period was the centralization in the king's courts of the administration of justice. This also took place only gradually. During the Norman period the king's jurisdiction was but one of many. It was more or less vaguely recognized that, the king being the head of the whole feudal system, his prerogatives included that of administering justice to all his subjects. In practice, however, his judicial work was confined to the summary trial and punishment of those wrongs which were regarded as offenses against his honor as king, and the settlement of disputes which arose among his great lords who held land from him by direct grant-the tenants in capite (chief tenants). In this judicial

work, as in the administrative work from which it was as yet scarcely, if at all, differentiated, the king was assisted by his great lords, as the Saxon kings had been by the Witan.

More and more, however, this group tended to narrow down to the group of the monarch's personal followers who constituted his household, and so were in immediate and constant attendance upon his person. The multiplicity as well as the magnitude of the administrative tasks involved in the government of the kingdom, and the absence of the nobles from their wide estates, to say nothing of the conflicting interests of the king and these powerful vassals of his, naturally drove the king to rely more and more on this smaller group of household officers; and this group itself came to be called in a special sense the King's Court.

In the early days after the Conquest, they had, of necessity, been entrusted with much administrative as well as advisory authority. One principal task they performed was the raising of the royal revenue. How thoroughly their work was done is traceable in the monumental inventory of the taxable resources of the country compiled under their direction-the celebrated Domesday Book. An elaborate system of tax-collecting was gradually developed, with its administration centered in the Curia, and appeals from the tax-gatherers to it as the source of their authority gave a judicial turn to much of its deliberations. As a judicial body, too, it assisted the king in settling the duties owed him by his tenants, and in deciding disputes between these tenants

themselves. Moreover, it guarded the king's honor by visiting with swift and heavy punishment the offenses which were regarded as especially in violation of his peace.

This conception of the king's peace was much enlarged by the Norman monarchs. Not only were the king's own person and household sacred, but violence offered to any of his followers was a breach of his peace. One of the few direct enactments of William the Conqueror was his decree that all the men whom he had brought with him or who had come after him should be in his peace and quiet.

Gradually the performance of these judicial functions came to overshadow the other features of the work of the Curia, and the King's Court took on more and more the aspect of a court of law, at the same time retaining from its connection with the work of administration an efficiency in enforcing its decisions and a constancy in operation which distinguished it thoroughly from the loosely constituted Witan of Anglo-Saxon days.

36. The local and ecclesiastical courts.-Apart from those great causes in which the interests of the crown or of its tenants in capite were directly involved, the administration of justice throughout the kingdom generally lay almost wholly in the hands of local courts: communal, like the shire and hundred courts, and the kindred courts set up in cities and at fairs; feudal, as were a multitude of baronial and manorial courts erected as a matter of feudal right by the greater land-holders for the settlement of disputes between their tenants; and finally the

courts in which the Church administered a foreign law.

These ecclesiastical courts deserve a special mention, particularly because of their influence on certain branches of our modern law. William the Norman had, probably in return for the valued aid of the Pope in his invasion of England, recognized the courts of the Church as entitled to jurisdiction in England in matters spiritual. This recognition was very broadly interpreted by the ecclesiastics; and church courts administering the canon law, a welldefined and organized system of rules derived in part from Scripture but in greater part from Roman law, dealt with cases affecting the Church, the clergy, and such matters as marriage and divorce, wills, and the administration of the estates of deceased persons. In these matters our law is still deeply colored by the doctrines of the canon law.

37. General view of the period. While English feudalism was unique in the actual power it gave to a king strong enough to wield it—a power which was most significantly indicated in the reservation of loyalty to the king which limited the homage rendered by each vassal tenant to his overlord, yet in the feudal incident of the lord's right to hold court for his undertenants, and in the Church's right to deal with all matters spiritual, a strong decentralizing force threatened the monarchy; and when a disputed succession gave an opportunity to the baronage to free themselves from the strong hand of an overlord, the wars that marked the reign of Stephen threatened a general anarchy, from which