The greatest part of the cities and trading towns were under his particular jurisdiction, and indeed in a state not far removed from slavery. On these he laid a sort of imposition, at such a time and in such a proportion as he thought fit. This was called a tallage. If the towns did not forthwith pay the sum at which they were rated, it was not unusual, for their punishment, to double the exaction, and to proceed in levying it by nearly the same methods and in the same manner now used to raise a contribution in an enemy's country.
But the Jews were a fund almost inexhaustible. They were slaves to the king in the strictest sense; insomuch that, besides the various tallages and fines extorted from them, none succeeded to the inheritance of his father without the king's license and an heavy composition. He sometimes even made over a wealthy Jew as a provision to some of his favorites for life. They were almost the only persons who exercised usury, and thus drew to themselves the odium and wealth of the whole kingdom; but they were only a canal, through which it passed to the royal treasury. And nothing could be more pleasing and popular than such exactions: the people rejoiced, when they saw the Jews plundered,—not considering that they were a sort of agents for the crown, who, in proportion to the heavy taxes they paid, were obliged to advance the terms and enforce with greater severity the execution of their usurious contracts. Through them almost the whole body of the nobility were in 'debt to the king; and when he thought proper to confiscate the effects of the Jews, the securities passed into his hands; and by this means he must have possessed one of the strongest and most terrible instruments of authority that could possibly be devised, and the best calculated to keep the people in an abject and slavish dependence.
The last general head of his revenue were the customs, prisages, and other impositions upon trade. Though the revenue arising from traffic in this rude period was much limited by the then smallness of its object, this was compensated by the weight and variety of the exactions levied by an occasional exertion of arbitrary power, or the more uniform system of hereditary tyranny. Trade was restrained, or the privilege granted, on the payment of tolls, passages, paages, pontages, and innumerable other vexatious imposts, of which, only the barbarous and almost unintelligible names subsist at this day.
These were the most constant and regular branches of the revenue. But there were other ways innumerable by which money, or an equivalent in cattle, poultry, horses, hawks, and dogs, accrued to the exchequer. The king's interposition in marriages, even where there was no pretence from tenure, was frequently bought, as well as in other negotiations of less moment, for composing of quarrels, and the like; and, indeed, some appear on the records, of so strange and even ludicrous a nature, that it would not be excusable to mention them, if they did not help to show from how many minute sources this revenue was fed, and how the king's power descended to the most inconsiderable actions of private life.[73] It is not easy to penetrate into the true meaning of all these particulars, but they equally suffice to show the character of government in those times. A prince furnished with so many means of distressing enemies and gratifying friends, and possessed of so ample a revenue entirely independent of the affections of his subjects, must have been very absolute in substance and effect, whatever might have been the external forms of government.
For the regulation of all these revenues, and for determining all questions which concerned them, a court was appointed, upon the model of a court of the same nature, said to be of ancient use in Normandy, and called the Exchequer.
There was nothing in the government of William conceived in a greater manner, or more to be commended, than the general survey he took of his conquest. An inquisition was made throughout the kingdom concerning the quantity of land which was contained in each county,—the name of the deprived and the present proprietor,—the stock of slaves, and cattle of every kind, which it contained. All these were registered in a book, each article beginning with the king's property, and proceeding downward, according to the rank of the proprietors, in an excellent order, by which might be known at one glance the true state of the royal revenues, the wealth, consequence, and natural connections of every person in the kingdom,—in order to ascertain the taxes that might be imposed, and, to serve purposes in the state as well as in civil causes, to be general and uncontrollable evidence of property. This book is called Domesday or the Judgment Book, and still remains a grand monument of the wisdom of the Conqueror,—a work in all respects useful and worthy of a better age.
The Conqueror knew very well how much discontent must have arisen from the great revolutions which his conquest produced in all men's property, and in the general tenor of the government. He, therefore, as much as possible to guard against every sudden attempt, forbade any light or fire to continue in any house after a certain bell, called curfew, had sounded. This bell rung at about eight in the evening. There was policy in this; and it served to prevent the numberless disorders which arose from the late civil commotions.
For the same purpose of strengthening his authority, he introduced the Norman law, not only in its substance, but in all its forms, and ordered that all proceedings should be had according to that law in the French language.[74] The change wrought by the former part of this regulation could not have been very grievous; and it was partly the necessary consequence of the establishment of the new tenures, and which wanted a new law to regulate them: in other respects the Norman institutions were not very different from the English. But to force, against nature, a new language upon a conquered people, to make them, strangers in those courts of justice in which they were still to retain a considerable share, to be reminded, every time they had recourse to government for protection, of the slavery in which it held them,—this is one of those acts of superfluous tyranny from which very few conquering nations or parties have forborne, though no way necessary, but often prejudicial to their safety.