Chapter III. The Constitution of England in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries

I have no intention whatever of entering, in the present Chapter, into any examination of the minute details of our early English legal antiquities, still less into the controversies to which many points relating to them have given rise. I wish merely to give such a sketch of the political condition of England, at the time when England and Normandy began to influence each other’s affairs, as may make the narrative of their mutual intercourse intelligible. |The Old-English constitution survived the Norman Conquest.| What the constitution was under Eadgar, that it remained under William. This assertion must be taken with all the practical drawbacks which are involved in the forcible transfer of the crown to a foreign dynasty, and in the division of the greater part of the lands of the kingdom among the followers of the foreign King. But the constitution remained the same; the laws, with a few changes in detail, remained the same; the language of public documents remained the same. The powers which were vested in King William and his Witan remained constitutionally the same as those which had been vested in King Eadgar and his Witan a hundred years before. |The changes immediately following on the Conquest practical, not formal.| The change in the social condition of the country, the change in the spirit of the national and local administration, the change in the relation of the kingdom to foreign lands, were changes as great as words can express. The practical effect of these changes was a vast increase of the royal power, and the introduction of wholly new relations between the King and every class of his subjects. But formal constitutional change there was none. I cannot too often repeat, for the saying is the very summing up of the whole history, that the Norman Conquest was not the wiping out of the constitution, the laws, the language, the national life of Englishmen. The changes which distinguish the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from the |Various causes of the ultimate results of the Conquest.| tenth and eleventh are not owing to any one cause. Many of them are merely the natural results of altered circumstances. Many of them are the work of lawgivers legislating for a new state of things, and, in not a few cases, confirming or restoring ancient English institutions under foreign names. Many of them are due to the ingenuity of lawyers whose minds were full of theories of law wholly alien to the principles of ancient English jurisprudence. All these changes were in some sort the final results of the Conquest. Some of them were actually caused by the Conquest; others were hastened by it. But of very few |Change in the monarchy from the old Teutonic to the later mediæval type.| indeed was it the direct and immediate cause. The English kingship gradually changed from a kingship of the old Teutonic type into a kingship of the later mediæval type. The change began before the Norman Conquest; it was hastened by the Norman Conquest; but it was not completed till long after the Norman Conquest. Such a change was not, and could not be, the work of one man or of one generation. But English kingship, like the other main features of the English polity, may be said to have fully put on its later form when the absent Edward was proclaimed in the place of his father, when the King was for the first time held to reign before he had received the rite which clothed him with the kingly office.