already conquered, redeemed their lands.  They bought them back at a price, and held them as a fresh grant from King William.  Some special offenders, living and dead, were exempted from this favour.  The King took to himself the estates of the house of Godwine, save those of Edith, the widow of his revered predecessor, whom it was his policy to treat with all honour.  The lands too of those who had died on Senlac were granted back to their heirs only of special favour, sometimes under the name of alms.  Thus, from the beginning of his reign, William began to make himself richer than any king that had been before him in England or than any other Western king of his day.  He could both punish his enemies and reward his friends.  Much of what he took he kept; much he granted away, mainly to his foreign followers, but sometimes also to Englishmen who had in any way won his favour.  Wiggod of Wallingford was one of the very few Englishmen who kept and received estates which put them alongside of the great Norman landowners.  The doctrine that all land was held of the King was now put into a practical shape.  All, Englishmen and strangers, not only became William’s subjects, but his men and his grantees.  Thus he went on during his whole reign.  There was no sudden change from the old state of things to the new.  After the general redemption of lands, gradually carried out as William’s power advanced, no general blow was dealt at Englishmen as such.  They were not, like some conquered nations, formally degraded or put under any legal incapacities in their own land.  William simply distinguished between his loyal and his disloyal subjects, and used his opportunities for punishing the disloyal and rewarding the loyal.  Such punishments and rewards naturally took the shape of confiscations and grants of land.  If punishment was commonly the lot of the Englishman, and reward was the lot of the stranger, that was only because King William treated all men as they deserved.  Most Englishmen were disloyal; most strangers were loyal.  But disloyal strangers and loyal Englishmen fared according to their deserts.  The final result of this process, begun now and steadily carried on, was that, by the end of William’s reign, the foreign king was surrounded by a body of foreign landowners and office-bearers of foreign birth.  When, in the early days of his conquest, he gathered round him the great men of his realm, it was still an English assembly with a sprinkling of strangers.  By the end of his reign it had changed, step by step, into an assembly of strangers with a sprinkling of Englishmen.