A.n. 1066-1154. 



CHAPTER XI. 



FEUDALISM. 



It is a legal theory, herice a common error, to suppose that at 

 the Conquest all the English soil became the demesne lands of 

 the king.^ If this had been so, all popular rights over the soil 

 would have lapsed. It is, however, true that all justice was 

 vested in the Crown, and therefore, except on sufferance, no 

 private tribunal could deal with matters of a public nature. 

 What the Conqueror claimed for himself was, not all the land, 

 but all the seignorial rights over it. These he redistributed 

 amongst his followers in unequal portions. Whenever he 

 found that one particular area of land subject to seignorial 

 rights was insufficient to adequately reward some successful 

 general, he gave him half a dozen such areas. But he took 

 care to decentralise the donee's power by scattering the gift in 

 various counties, so that any attempts of the subject to revolt 

 and concentrate his tenantry, would have attracted the atten- 

 tion of more than one county sheriff.^ Each of these areas of 

 land was henceforth termed a manor, in which the new 

 owners had powers to keep a portion of the lands in their own 

 hands, to impose services in return for another portion parcelled 

 out to inferior tenants, to leave a third portion in waste, and 

 to institute a court for the punishment of offences and the 

 proper observance of duties and services. The new manor was, 

 however, nothing more than the Saxon's tun. The fresh in- 



* Jacobs, Compleat Court Keej)er, ch. i. 



' Stubbs, Constit. Hist, Ed. IV., ch. ix. p. 296. 



133 



