This revolution, which practically transferred the greater part of the soil of England to the hands of strangers, was great indeed.  But it must not be mistaken for a sudden blow, for an irregular scramble, for a formal proscription of Englishmen as such.  William, according to his character and practice, was able to do all this gradually, according to legal forms, and without drawing any formal distinction between natives and strangers.  All land was held of the King of the English, according to the law of England.  It may seem strange how such a process of spoliation, veiled under a legal fiction, could have been carried out without resistance.  It was easier because it was gradual and piecemeal.  The whole country was not touched at once, nor even the whole of any one district.  One man lost his land while his neighbour kept his, and he who kept his land was not likely to join in the possible plots of the other.  And though the land had never seen so great a confiscation, or one so largely for the behoof of foreigners, yet there was nothing new in the thing itself.  Danes had settled under Cnut, and Normans and other Frenchmen under Edward.  Confiscation of land was the everyday punishment for various public and private crimes.  In any change, such as we should call a change of ministry, as at the fall and the return of Godwine, outlawry and forfeiture of lands was the usual doom of the weaker party, a milder doom than the judicial massacres of later ages.  Even a conquest of England was nothing new, and William at this stage contrasted favourably with Cnut, whose early days were marked by the death of not a few.  William, at any rate since his crowning, had shed the blood of no man.  Men perhaps thought that things might have been much worse, and that they were not unlikely to mend.  Anyhow, weakened, cowed, isolated, the people of the conquered shires submitted humbly to the Conqueror’s will.  It needed a kind of oppression of which William himself was never guilty to stir them into actual revolt.

The provocation was not long in coming.  Within three months after his coronation, William paid a visit to his native duchy.  The ruler of two states could not be always in either; he owed it to his old subjects to show himself among them in his new character; and his absence might pass as a sign of the trust he put in his new subjects.  But the means which he took to secure their obedience brought out his one weak point.  We cannot believe that he really wished to goad the people into rebellion; yet the choice of his lieutenants might seem almost like it.  He was led astray by partiality for his brother and for his dearest friend.  To Bishop Ode of Bayeux, and to William Fitz-Osbern, the son of his early guardian, he gave earldoms, that of Kent to Odo, that of Hereford to William.  The Conqueror was determined before all things that his kingdom should be united and obedient; England should not be split up like Gaul and Germany; he would have no man