Capitolo 72
there was in the general situation in England that would have been able to conduct the
Conqueror to so wide a departure from the established practice of the
Norman dukes as the creation of so many earlses would be. In Normandy the
title of account was practically unknown out of the ducal family. The
feudal account as found in the other French provinces, the sovereign of a
small principality as independent of the feudal holder of the province
as him he was of the king, doesn't exist there. The four dominions
what hole the title of account, Talou or Arques, Eu, Evreux and Mortain,
it was reserved for younger branches of the ducal house, and it brought with
them anybody supreme rights. The tradition of the Saxon earldom undoubtedly
practiced by degrees a great influence on the real practice in England,
and from the middle one some earls of the twelfth century existed in considerable
numbers; but the incontestable beta lack for the existence of many
under William it probably reflects the fact of his few creations. But in the
cases that we can certainly trace to William, it was not the old Saxon
earldom that was revived. The new earldom, with the possible exception
of one or two earlses that, as the old Prankish margrave or the later
palatine account, the unusual powers you/he/she was given for sustaining unusual soldier
responsibility, was a title not an office. It was not a government of
provinces but a mark of line; and the danger involved in the more old man
office, of the growth of the independent powers inside the state under local
dynasties that would be, while existing under nevertheless the other forms as difficulty
to check as the local dynasties of feudal France, was removed once for
all from the introduction of the Norman concentration. What anybody serious
trouble ever came from the so defined earldoms palatine him it is the evidence
of the powerful monarchy that dominates in England.
This concentration was one of the great facts of the Conquest. In him
resided the strength of the Norman monarchy, and it was of the maximum one