William also enunciated a most important doctrine, which clashed with the continental theory of feudalism. He insisted that every man's duty to the king outweighed that to his immediate feudal suzerain. If any lord opposed the king and bade his vassals follow him, the vassals would be committing high treason if they consented to do so. Their allegiance to the crown was more binding than that which they owed to their local baron or earl. Although, then, the Norman conquest turned England into a feudal hierarchy, where the villein did homage to the knight, the knight to the earl, the earl to the king, yet the strength of the royal power gained rather than lost by the change. William was far more the master of his barons than was St. Edward of his great earls like Godwine or Siward. And this was not merely owing to the fact that William was a strong and Edward a weak man, but much more to the new political arrangements of the realm. William never allowed an earl to rule more than one shire, while Godwine or Leofric had ruled six or seven. William's sheriffs were a firm check on the local magnates, while Edward's had been no more than the king's local bailiffs. Moreover, there were many counties where William made no earl at all, and where his sheriff was therefore the sole representative of authority. [Sidenote: =The Great Council.=] The kingly power, too, was as much strengthened in the central as in the local government. The Saxon Witan had represented the nation as opposed to the king: it had an existence independent of him, and we have even seen it depose kings. The Norman "Great Council," on the other hand, which superseded the Witan,[8] was simply the assembly of the king's vassals called up by him to give him advice. Though the class of persons who were summoned to it was much the same as those who had appeared at the Witan--bishops, earls, and so forth--yet they now came, not as "the wise men of England," but as the king's personal vassals, his "tenants-in-chief." All who held land directly from the crown might appear if they chose, but as a matter of fact it was only the greater men who came; the knights and other small freeholders would not as a rule visit an assembly where their importance was small and their advice was not asked. [Sidenote: =William and the Church.--Ecclesiastical Courts.=]