[Footnote 16: It is singular that in Sussex the 'Cloninctune' of Domesday is, conversely, an error for 'Doninctune'. The source of the error in both cases must have been the likeness of 'cl' to 'd' in the original returns, on which these names cannot have begun with a capital letter.] [Footnote 17: _Rot. Pip._, 31 Hen. I.] THE INTRODUCTION OF KNIGHT SERVICE INTO ENGLAND[1] 'The growth of knighthood is a subject on which the greatest obscurity prevails; and the most probable explanation of its existence in England, the theory that it is a translation into Norman forms of the thegnage of the Anglo-Saxon law, can only be stated as probable.'--STUBBS, _Const. Hist._, i. 260. 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:[2] they are replaced by confident enunciation of the theory to which I have referred.[3] 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'.[4] To meet this difficulty, to account for this flaw in the unbroken continuity of the series, a _Deus ex machinâ_ has been found in the person of Ranulf Flambard.