n6 The Norman Conquest
The best concrete example of the great power that the
Conqueror was exercising by the end of his reign and,
doubtless, his most original piece of work, was the Domes-
day survey. While it had no technical bearing upon his
relations to his people, either as feudal lord or sovereign,
it was of immense practical value in putting the resources
of the newly acquired country at his command. The
Domesday survey was really a census, undertaken on a
scale of magnitude and precision, which, for times when
anything of the sort was almost unheard of, testifies, as
nothing else does, to the organising genius and energy of
its author. William had conquered him a country; it
lay open and subdued before him and gave him an un-
matched opportunity to do with it as he chose. He
would know his new acquisition to the smallest details,
its resources, its population, its local conditions and
history. The Domesday Book gives us a knowledge of
England in the eleventh century such as is possessed of
no other European country for the same period.r
The early Norman kings in governing took counsel
with a body of nobles, a central court, that seems quite
analogous in general make-up to the ducal court of Nor-
mandy. So many important parts of the English gov-
ernment have grown out of this body that there has, not
unnaturally, been much interest shown in its origin.
Many scholars have felt great pride in tracing all the
best products of England's later constitution to some-
thing primitively Anglo-Saxon, and hence have dis-
cussed this question with a considerable amount of bias.
The cause for pride seems so obviously to lie in the suc-
cessful development of a primitive institution into some-
thing of permanent value that one ought to be able to
approach the question of origins with an open mind.
The Anglo-Saxon witan would seem a natural and familiar
* The method of making the Domesday survey and the kind of material
collected are illustrated in documents 3 and 4 in A. and S., and in Trans-
lations and Reprints (Statistical Documents of the Middle Ages), pp. 6-7.
The method by which the survey was made is of even greater governmental
interest than the fact of the survey itself. See below, p. 153.