As Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror had been quite as powerful as his overlord the King of France. When he came to England he was determined that none of the barons to whom he had granted estates should ever be his equal in this way. He therefore summoned all landowning men in England to a council at Salisbury in 1086, and made them take an oath of allegiance to himself before all other lords. Because he was a strong man he kept his barons true to their oath or punished them, but during the reign of his grandson Stephen, who disputed the English throne with his cousin Matilda and therefore tried to buy the support of the military class by gifts and concessions, the vices of feudalism ran almost unchecked. ‘They had done homage to him and sworn oaths,’ says the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, ‘but they no faith kept ... for every rich man built his castles and defended them against him, and they filled the land with castles.... Then they took these whom they suspected to have any goods by night and by day, seizing both men and women, and they put them in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured them with pains unspeakable.... I cannot and I may not tell of all the wounds and of all the tortures that they inflicted upon the wretched men of this land; and this state of things lasted the nineteen years that Stephen was king and ever grew worse and worse.’ Stephen was a weak ruler struggling with a civil war; so that it might be argued that no system of government could have worked well under such auspices; but if we turn to the normal life of the peasant folk on the estates of the monastery of Mont St. Michael in the thirteenth century, we shall see that the humble tenants at the base of the feudal pyramid paid dearly enough for the protection of their overlords. ‘In June the peasants must cut and pile the hay and carry it to the manor-house ... in August they must reap and carry in the Convent grain, their own grain lies exposed to wind and rain.... On the Nativity of the Virgin the villein owes the pork due, one pig in eight ... at Xmas the fowl fine and good ... on Palm Sunday the sheep due ... at Easter he must plough, sow, and harrow. When there is building the tenant must bring stone and serve the masons ... he must also haul the convent wood for two deniers a day. If he sells his land he owes his lord a thirteenth of its value, if he marries his daughter outside the lord’s demense he pays a fine,--he must grind his grain at the lord’s mill and bake his bread at the lord’s oven, where the customary charges never satisfy the servants.’ Certainly the peasant of the Middle Ages can have had little time to lament even his own misery. Perhaps to keep his hovel from fire and pillage and his family from starvation was all to which he often aspired.