IN approaching the consideration of the institutional changes and modifications of polity resulting from the Norman Conquest, the most conspicuous phenomenon to attract attention is undoubtedly the introduction of what it is convenient to term the feudal system. In the present paper I propose to discuss one branch only of that process, namely, the introduction of that military tenure which Dr. Stubbs has termed “the most prominent feature of historical feudalism.”

In accordance with the anticataclysmic tendencies of modern thought, the most recent students of this obscure problem have agreed to adopt the theory of gradual development and growth. The old views on the subject are discredited as crude and unhistorical: they are replaced by confident enunciation of the theory to which I have referred. But when we examine the matter closely, when we ask for details of the process by which the Anglo- Saxon thegn developed into the Norman knight, we are met at once by the frank confession that “between the picture drawn in Domesday and the state of affairs which the charter of Henry I. was designed to remedy, there is a difference which the short interval, of time will not account for.”