In 1066 William won the Battle of Hastings, and on the strength of this victory claimed England as its conqueror, and not merely as the chosen successor of Edward. As conqueror of the country the whole of England was at his disposal, and he gave the lands of the Saxon (or according to Mr. Freeman and Mr. Green, ‘English’) proprietors to his French followers. They made full use of the King’s grant, and in a few years almost every Saxon landlord had disappeared, or if any remained, they remained as tenants of small portions of their estates to the ownership of which a Norman landlord had—as they called it—“succeeded.” We are told of one Norman Knight, who having fought for William at Hastings, refused to take any share in this wholesale robbery. He had done his duty as a vassal in fighting for William, and he preferred to return to Normandy and be contented with his own property there; not so though the rest. You must understand that the great change brought about by the conquest was at first only a change of landlords, and involved no alteration in the laws and customs by which property was held. The parishes, the manors, the farms, the occupying tenants, and the labourers on the estates were not disturbed. Even the live and dead stock on the farms were all claimed by the new owners, and to a large extent actually got possession of by them. After this process of ousting the Saxon landlords had been going on for some years—not, as you may suppose without a good deal of fighting and cruelty—the country was becoming settled, and the King thought it time to learn in whose possession its lands were, and what their estates were worth. So he appointed a commission of enquiry, to go through the whole country and report to him the names of all the possessors of estates, and what amount of land producing corn their estates contained, and what live and dead stock, including the tenants belonging to each estate, were on the land, and what each manor and estate was valued at. The results of this enquiry, which took some six years to complete, were put together by clerks, and written out in as concise a manner as possible on parchment—and so Domesday Book was formed. As the commissioners had to ascertain so far as they could, what differences had taken place in the ownership and occupation of land, and in its condition and value, since the Conquest, Domesday Book, although made some 20 years after England was under the Normans, gives us a picture of the country as it was in later Saxon times, and it is from this book that most of our knowledge of the condition of England in the Saxon period is derived. THE PARISHES OF LOTHINGLAND.