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England under Foreign Kings
England under Foreign Kings; Part 3

England under Foreign Kings; Part 3

This harrying of the north showed that William would not endure rebellion tamely. He still had work to do, however. Amid the eastern fens, in the Isle of Ely, surrounded by marshes, Hereward, "the Last of the English", still resisted. He had come there from Peterborough, when the Danes left, and he was joined by the last of William's enemies, among them Morcar and the Bishop of Durham. For a year he held out. The monks of Ely are said to have betrayed the way into his camp, but when Morcar and his friends surrendered, Hereward with a few followers fought his way out and escaped. Morcar and the rest were treated as rebels. The King of Scotland, too, was forced to yield and to acknowledge William as his lord, just as his ancestors had acknowledged Edward the Elder and Canute.

These useless risings completed the work that Hastings had begun. They riveted the chain of William's power round England's neck. Each rebellion was followed by fresh confiscations of land, and the land was used to reward Norman followers. Even in the cases where an Englishman was not turned out from his estates, he was obliged to pay a fine and to admit that the land was really the king's and not his own; that he was the king's tenant and vassal and therefore bound to serve him.

This made more definite what is called the Feudal System. It is not true to say that this was altogether introduced by the Norman kings, for the essence of the feudal system, the idea that because a man had land, therefore he had certain rights and owed certain duties, had existed in Saxon times. In Edgar's day it had been ordained that every "landless man should have a lord", and "commendation", that is to say, the practice of a man's placing himself under the protection of a more powerful neighbour, was also common enough in Saxon England. But the Normans drew closer the tie between the man and his land. The holding of land became the basis of everything. The king at the head was the owner of all the land. He granted large estates to his nobles and barons, who were called tenants-in-chief, and who were bound by these grants of land to fight for the king if he called on them to do so. The tenants-in-chief in their turn granted parts of their estates to their followers, who were then called mesne-tenants (i.e. intermediate tenants) and were bound in their turn to obey the tenants-in-chief as superiors. Mesne-tenants might, if they pleased, regrant parts of their estates. And below all these classes of free tenants were vast numbers of serfs, called by various names of villeins, boors (bordarii), cottars, who had very small holdings of land, some with thirty acres and others with lesser holdings, and who had in return for this to work upon the lord's land and gather his crops for him. They were practically his property - part of his estate.

England under Foreign Kings; Part 3

Chronology