It was crime sufficient in an Englishman to be opulent, or noble, or powerful; and the policy of the king, concurring with the rapacity of foreign adventurers, produced almost a total revolution in the landed property of the kingdom. Ancient and honorable families were reduced to beggary; the nobles themselves were every where treated with ignominy and contempt; they had the mortification of seeing their castles and manors possessed by Normans of the meanest birth and lowest stations;[*] and they found themselves carefully excluded from every road which led either to riches or preferment.[**] [9] As power naturally follows property, this revolution alone gave great security to the foreigners; but William, by the new institutions which he established, took also care to retain forever the military authority in those hands which had enabled him to subdue the kingdom. He introduced into England the feudal law, which he found established in France and Normandy, and which, during that age, was the foundation both of the stability and of the disorders in most of the monarchical governments of Europe. He divided all the lands of England, with very few exceptions, beside the royal demesnes, into baronies; and he conferred these, with the reservation of stated services and payments, on the most considerable of his adventurers. These great barons, who held immediately of the crown, shared out a great part of their lands to other foreigners, who were denominated knights or vassals, and who paid their lord the same duty and submission, in peace and war, which he himself owed, to his sovereign. The whole kingdom contained about seven hundred chief tenants, and sixty thousand two hundred and fifteen knights’ fees;[***] and as none of the native English were admitted into the first rank, the few who retained their landed property were glad to be received into the second, and, under the protection of some powerful Norman, to load themselves and their posterity with this grievous burden, for estates which they had received free from their ancestors.[****] The small mixture of English which entered into this civil or military fabric, (for it partook of both species,) was so restrained by subordination under the foreigners, that the Norman dominion seemed now to be fixed on the most durable basis, and to defy all the efforts of its enemies. [* Order. Vitalis, p. 521. M. West, p. 229.] [** See note I, at the end of the volume.] [*** Order. Vitalis, p. 523. Secretum Abbatis, apud Selden. Title of Honor, p. 573. Spel. Gloss, in verbo Feodum. Sir Robert Cotton.] [**** M. West. p. 225. M. Paris, p. 4. Bracton, lib. i. cap. 11, num. I, Flets, lib, cap. 8, n. 2]