England was now fully conquered, and William could for a moment sit down quietly to the rule of the kingdom that he had won. The time that immediately followed is spoken of as a time of comparative quiet, and of less oppression than the times either before or after. Before and after, warfare, on one side of the sea or the other, was the main business. Hitherto William has been winning his kingdom in arms. Afterwards he was more constantly called away to his foreign dominions, and his absence always led to greater oppression in England. Just now he had a moment of repose, when he could give his mind to the affairs of Church and State in England. Peace indeed was not quite unbroken. Events were tending to that famous revolt in the Fenland which is perhaps the best remembered part of William's reign. But even this movement was merely local, and did not seriously interfere with William's government. He was now striving to settle the land in peace, and to make his rule as little grievous to the conquered as might be. The harrying of Northumberland showed that he now shrank from no harshness that would serve his ends; but from mere purposeless oppression he was still free. Nor was he ever inclined to needless change or to that scorn of the conquered which meaner conquerors have often shown. He clearly wished both to change and to oppress as little as he could. This is a side of him which has been greatly misunderstood, largely through the book that passes for the History of Ingulf Abbot of Crowland. Ingulf was William's English secretary; a real history of his writing would be most precious. But the book that goes by his name is a forgery not older than the fourteenth century, and is in all points contradicted by the genuine documents of the time. Thus the forger makes William try to abolish the English language and order the use of French in legal writings. This is pure fiction. The truth is that, from the time of William's coming, English goes out of use in legal writings, but only gradually, and not in favour of French. Ever since the coming of Augustine, English and Latin had been alternative tongues; after the coming of William English becomes less usual, and in the course of the twelfth century it goes out of use in favour of Latin. There are no French documents till the thirteenth century, and in that century English begins again. Instead of abolishing the English tongue, William took care that his English-born son should learn it, and he even began to learn it himself. A king of those days held it for his duty to hear and redress his subjects' complaints; he had to go through the land and see for himself that those who acted in his name did right among his people. This earlier kings had done; this William wished to do; but he found his ignorance of English a hindrance. Cares of other kinds checked his English studies, but he may have learned enough to understand the meaning of his own English charters. Nor did William try, as he is often imagined to have done, to root out the ancient institutions of England, and to set up in their stead either the existing institutions of Normandy or some new institutions of his own devising. The truth is that with William began a gradual change in the laws and customs of England, undoubtedly great, but far less than is commonly thought. French names have often supplanted English, and have made the amount of change seem greater than it really was. Still much change did follow on the Norman Conquest, and the Norman Conquest was so completely William's own act that all that came of it was in some sort his act also. But these changes were mainly the gradual results of the state of things which followed William's coming; they were but very slightly the results of any formal acts of his. With a foreign king and foreigners in all high places, much practical change could not fail to follow, even where the letter of the law was unchanged. Still the practical change was less than if the letter of the law had been changed as well. English law was administered by foreign judges; the foreign grantees of William held English land according to English law. The Norman had no special position as a Norman; in every rank except perhaps the very highest and the very lowest, he had Englishmen to his fellows. All this helped to give the Norman Conquest of England its peculiar character, to give it an air of having swept away everything English, while its real work was to turn strangers into Englishmen. And that character was impressed on William's work by William himself. The king claiming by legal right, but driven to assert his right by the sword, was unlike both the foreign king who comes in by peaceful succession and the foreign king who comes in without even the pretext of law. The Normans too, if born soldiers, were also born lawyers, and no man was more deeply impressed with the legal spirit than William himself. He loved neither to change the law nor to transgress the law, and he had little need to do either. He knew how to make the law his instrument, and, without either changing or transgressing it, to use it to make himself all- powerful. He thoroughly enjoyed that system of legal fictions and official euphemisms which marks his reign. William himself became in some sort an Englishman, and those to whom he granted English lands had in some sort to become Englishmen in order to hold them. The Norman stepped into the exact place of the Englishman whose land he held; he took his rights and his burthens, and disputes about those rights and burthens were judged according to English law by the witness of Englishmen. Reigning over two races in one land, William would be lord of both alike, able to use either against the other in case of need. He would make the most of everything in the feelings and customs of either that tended to strengthen his own hands. And, in the state of things in which men then found themselves, whatever strengthened William's hands strengthened law and order in his kingdom.