ABSTRACT
The Norman dukes had been struggling to bring order into Norman society much as the Wessex kings had been working in England, and the pleas reserved for the duke - breaking into a homestead and the rest - were almost identical with ‘the king’s pleas’ of Cnut. The one new thing which stemmed from the Conquest was a pyramidal system of land-tenure culminating in the king. The new king shared out the conquered country between his principal followers in return for the service of fixed numbers of knights, since Duke William’s first requirement in a hostile land was an army supported by incomes from land. The evolution of the writ continued to be the central strand in the growth of the legal system. The most fruitful new writ of the time, the Writ of Trespass, came into existence stealthily, about a quarter of the way through the thirteenth century.
