The independence of the greater feudatories was still further limited by the principle, which the Conqueror seems to have observed, of avoiding the accumulation in any one hand of a great number of contiguous estates. The rule is not without some important exceptions, and it may have been suggested by the diversity of occasions on which the fiefs were bestowed, but the result is one which William must have foreseen. An insubordinate baron whose strength lay in twelve different counties would have to rouse the suspicions and perhaps to defy the arms of twelve powerful sheriffs, before he could draw his forces to a head. In his manorial courts, scattered and unconnected, he could set up no central tribunal, nor even force a new custom upon his tenants, nor could he attempt oppression on any extensive scale. By such limitation the people were protected and the central power secured. Yet the changes of ownership, even thus guarded, wrought other changes. It is not to be supposed that the Norman baron, when he had received his fief, proceeded to carve it out into demesne and tenants' land as if he were making a new settlement in an uninhabited country. He might indeed build his castle and enclose his chase with very little respect to the rights of his weaker neighbors, but he did not attempt any such radical change as the legal theory of the creation of manors seems to presume. The name "manor" is of Norman origin: but the estate to which it was given existed, in its essential character, long before the Conquest; it received a new name as the shire also did, but neither the one nor the other was created by this change. The local jurisdictions of the thegns who had grants of _sac_ and _soc_, or who exercised judicial functions among their free neighbors, were identical with the manorial jurisdictions of the new owners.