Introduction of Feudalism 99
William could have had no thought of introducing a
"system" that was to be modified. And, furthermore,
several things, necessarily resulting from the Con-
quest, had an effect upon the feudal holdings and made
them differ somewhat from the continental type.x Most
prominent was the scattering of the large fiefs, which has
been ascribed to a deliberate plan of William to make it
diffcult for his great nobles to concentrate their forces.
But it was an inevitable result of the piecemeal con-
quest of the country; William conquered first the south-
east and, shortly after, the south-west, and must hasten
to reward his clamorous followers in those regions; then
came the series of uprisings in the north, the confisca-
tion of most of the land, and the consequent new grants
there; and, last of all, the country about Chester and
the Welsh border was subdued, and many of the Norman
nobles, who had begun to get their allotments in the
south-east four or five years before, received their final
holdings in the regions last conquered. Moreoever,
when a Norman was, in any part of England, put into
the place of a rebellious Saxon lord, he was likely to find
the lands of his predecessor very irregular and scattered;
for the majority of the Anglo-Saxon nobles had never
gone far in rounding out their holdings.
A second effect of the Conquest was a sharper defin-
ing of feudal obligation and incident. This resulted from
the rapid creation of so many new holdings. On the con-
tinent, where the feudal landholding had grown step by
step through centuries, all sorts of anomalies and relics
of earlier forms of tenure remained; in conquered Eng-
land, where things were being made over new and the
king was strong, there was a tendency to push the feudal
1 These differences progressed with time, but never to a point that
obscured the fact that post-Conquest feudalism was institutionally derived
from the continent. As a matter of nomenclature and to avoid confusion,
it may be useful to call the feudalism in England before the Conquest
Anglo-Saxon feudalism, that which William brought in continental feud-
alism: and that which developed from it in England after the Conquest
English feudalism.