It may well be asked why the destructive effects of Norman victory were arrested on ancient demesne soil? Was not the king as likely to exercise his discretion in respect of the peasantry as any feudal lord, and is it likely that he would have let himself be fettered by considerations and obligations which did not bind his subjects? In view of such questions one is tempted to treat the protection of the tenants on the ancient demesne merely as a peculiar boon granted to the people whom the king had to give away. I need not say that such an interpretation would be entirely wrong. I hope I have been able to make out convincingly that legal protection given against private lords on manors which had been alienated was only an outgrowth from that certainty of condition which was allowed on the king's own lands. I will just add now that one very striking fact ought to be noticed in this connexion; certainty of tenure and service is limited to one particular class in the manor, although that class is the most numerous one. If this privilege came into being merely by the fixation of status at the time when a manor passed from the crown, the state of the villain pure would have got fixed in the same way as that of the villain socman. But it did not, and so one cannot shirk the difficult question, What gave rise to the peculiar protection against the lord when the lord happened to be king? I think that three considerations open the way out of the difficulty. To begin with, the king was decidedly considered as the one great safeguard of Saxon tradition and the one defender against Norman encroachments. He had constantly to hear the cry about 'the laws of Edward the Confessor,' and although the claim may be considered as a very vague one in general matters, it became substantiated in this case of tenure and services by the Domesday record. Then again, the proportion of free owners who had lapsed into territorial dependence must have been much greater on the king's land than anywhere else; it was quite usual to describe an allodial owner from the feudal point of view as holding under the king in a particular way, and villain socage was only one of several kinds of socage after all. Last, but not least, the protection against exactions was in reality directed not against the king personally but against his officers, and the king personally was quite likely to benefit by it almost as much as his men. It amounted after all only to a recognition of definite customs in general, to a special judicial organisation of the manor which made it less dependent upon the steward, and to the facilities afforded for complaint and revision of judgments. As to this last it must be noted that the king's men were naturally enough in a better position than the rest of the English peasantry; the curse of villainage was that manorial courts were independent of superior organisation as far as the lower tenants were concerned. But courts in