The King decided the complaints and issues of the nobility.
Chapter 4
The Times: 1066-1100
William came from Normandy to conquer the nation. He claimed that the former King, Edward, the Confessor, had promised the throne to him when they were growing up together in Normandy if Edward became King of England and had no children. William's men and horses came in boats powered by oars and sails. The conquest did not take long because of the superiority of his military expertise to that of the English. He organized his army into three groups: archers with bows and arrows, horsemen with swords and stirrups, and footmen with hand weapons. Each group played a specific role in a strategy planned in advance. The English army was only composed of footmen with hand weapons and shields and was inexperienced.
Declaring the English who fought against him to be traitors, William declared their land confiscated. As William conquered this land, he parceled it out among the barons who fought with him. They again made oaths of personal loyalty to him [fealty]. They agreed to hold the land as his vassals with future military services to him and receipt of his protection. They gave him homage by placing their hands within his and saying "I become your man for the tenement I hold of you, and I will bear you faith in life and member [limb] and earthly honor against all men". They held their land "of their lord", the King, by knight's service. The King had "enfeoffed" them [given them a fief: a source of income] with land. The theory that by right all land was the King's and that land was held by others only at his gift and in return for specified service was new to English thought.
The Saxon governing class was destroyed. The independent power of earls, who had been drawn from three great family houses, was curtailed. Most died or fled the country. The people were deprived of their most popular leaders, who were excluded from all positions of trust and profit, especially the clergy of all degrees.
William was a stern and fierce man and ruled as an autocrat by terror. Whenever the people revolted or resisted his mandates, he seized their lands or destroyed the crops and laid waste the countryside and so that they starved to death. He had a strict system of policing the nation. Instead of the Anglo-Saxon self- government throughout the districts and hundreds of resident authorities in local courts, he aimed at substituting for it the absolute rule of the barons under military rule so favorable to the centralizing power of the Crown. He used secret police and spies and the terrorism this system involved. This especially curbed the minor barons and preserved the public peace.
The English people were disarmed. Curfew bells were rung at 7:00 PM when everyone had to remain in their own dwellings on pain of death and all fires and candles were to be put out, This prevented any nightly gatherings, assassinations, or seditions. Order was brought to the kingdom so that no man dare kill another, no matter how great the injury he had received. William extended the King's peace on high roads to include the whole nation. Any individual of any rank could travel from end to end of the land unharmed. Before, prudent travelers would travel only in groups of twenty.
The barons subjugated the English who were on their newly acquired land. There began a hierarchy of seisin [rightful occupation] of land so that there could be no land without its lord. Also, every lord had a superior lord with the King as the overlord or supreme landlord. One piece of land may be held by several tenures. For instance, A, holding by barons's service of the King, may enfeoff B, a church, to hold of him on the terms of praying for the souls of his ancestors, and B may enfeoff a freeman C to hold of the church by giving it a certain percentage of his crops every year. There were about 200 barons who held land directly of the King. Other fighting men were the knights, who were tenants or subtenants of a baron. Knighthood began as a reward for valor on the field of battle by the King or a noble. Altogether there were about 5000 fighting men holding land.
The essence of Norman feudalism was that the land remained under the lord, whatever the vassal might do. The lord had the duty to defend the vassals on his land. The vassal owed military service to the lord and also the service of attending the courts of the hundred and the shire, which were courts of the King, administering old customary law. They were the King's courts on the principle that a crime anywhere was a breach of the King's peace.