Ignoring that last comedic intervention, I don't think anyone's saying that William wiped out a golden age. What I think some of us are saying is that squires, landlords, princes and the like, whose ancestors did not come by their massive holdings via honest means, are actually parasites on the people who work the land for them. They don't work themselves yet they take a cut, a healthy one at that, enough to make them far wealthier than their workers, sufficient to keep their tenants poor enough to be beholden to them. Their landed wealth is their power, yet not one of them ever made one square inch of that land. They don't even improve it - that's done by their tenants.