Seems to me once you have won the war, your troubles are just beginning. You've got a small number of men few that can speak the local language. How do you go about putting your men in charge, putting your institutions in place?
You replace the top level nobles with your own people, but at some point you need to use the local low level rulers, yes? How do you get their support and loyalty?
"Sir Pierre, I'm granting you Waterford Castle and all the land that belonged Baron Biscuit."
Pierre presumably has a platoon (dozen? hundred?) men at arms to help him keep order. Also, at this point, you have the dual problem of needing your vassals support to chase down locals who had a following, and also to control, make productive, and raise taxes off the land you hold, all this with having only a small number of people are know both medieval French and old English.
Edit as per request:
The wikipedia article fills in much of my question about what is happening at upper levels of the Norman administration. I'm still unclear about the logistics where a tiny force can maintain control over a large population of people who don't understand them when they give an order. One source (http://www.localhistories.org/population.html) claims 2 million people at the time of the Doomsday book, ~20 years after the conquest. It's not clear to me if the population in 1066 was above or below this. If the wiki article is correct in there being about 8,000 Norman land owners, that's about 250 Anglo-Saxons per Norman. It's not clear if a landowner in this case is just a knight, or if his personal retinue of men at arms is included. Eg: Is my example of Sir Pierre above counted as one land owner or 12 to 100? If as 1, then 8000 land owners with a bunch of men at arms each drops the ratio to somewhere around 1:20. But that would also mean some 80,000 Normans. So far I've not run into (or missed...) any mention of followup invasion forces. Was there a large influx of Norman supporters -- their own armsmen, armourers, managers that followed over the next years?
Maintaining order with a 1:100 ratio is daunting. The United States averages about 1 policeman per hundred people, (969/100,000 population) and the U.S. inhabitants by in large are agreeable to their government. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_number_of_police_officers) By comparison the Palestinian Authority has about 12:100. But both the US and the PA have a LOT of government in addition to police. The Normans have to run the entire government with their 1 to whatever ratio of Normans to Anglo Saxons.
From the wiki article, not mentioned directly, but likely true: The invading aristocrats and both Norman and Anglo clergy spoke and wrote latin. This would go a long way to bridging the communication gap. Presumably there were traders who knew enough Anglo Saxon and Norman French to get by too.
Norman sheriffs replaced Anglo-Saxon sheriffs, along with essentially all of the nobility. But at some level in this society there was a layer of Normans, and the layer directly beneath them was Anglo Saxon. How did the mechanics of that work?
As a thought experiment, I considered my local village -- Warburg, Alberta. It has about 700 people in it, and a similar number of people in the surrounding country side. I'm trying to visualize how, say 6 Francophone Quebecois, would take over the town and district and make it stick, using only the high school french teacher as translator. The invaders might last a week. Sure a hunting rifle is no match to an AR-15 in close combat, but there are a lot of hunting rifles.
In Medieval England a peasant with a pruning hook or axe is no match against an armoured knight. But it doesn't take long to turn a pruning hook into a bill hook. And a scythe blade mounted on a pole instead of a snathe would make short work of a war horse's back tendons.
The Harrying of the North. (I wonder if this originally was 'Harrowing' to vex, distress, break up. Harrowing in that sense though came into use a couple of centuries later) suggests that depopulation was the Norman answer when rebellion burned bright. Modern England is about 50,000 sq. mi. 2 million people is an average of about 40 people per square mile. Given the tendency for villages to be small, and to farm the surrounding land, there must still have been a LOT of rough land. The wiki article on the Harrying says that in Yorkshire, the hardest hit, some 2/3 of the villages had a 'wasted manor' and that the county as a whole had a value only of 40% of its former value. It seems that William stomped hard on local hot spots.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrying_of_the_North)
Ratios again: If you have 1 warrior per 100 local inhabitants, that's an average of 2.5 square miles per soldier. Or roughly a modern township per squad of 12. Finding a hundred people who don't want to be found with a force this small would be hard. Hence the destruction of villages, burning of food and tools. This is before the Doomsday book is commissioned. Williams men didn't have decent maps of the country, and would have to find each village by following the road to it.
If the object of the harrying was stop rebellion it wasn't very effective. A partial answer to my question, as to consolidation was, "he didn't" The Normans were playing Whack-a-Mole for 20 years. At some point the Anglo Saxons had to accept the rule of the Normans. The advantages of some sort of order was greater than the desire to have their A.S. lords in charge.
