William the Conqueror

1028–

kingdom. The Northmen, changed, name and thing, into Normans, were now in all things members of the Christian and French-speaking world. But French as the Normans of William's day had become, their relation to the kings and people of France was not a friendly one. At the time of the settlement of Rolf, the western kingdom of the Franks had not yet finally passed to the Duces Francorum at Paris; Rolf became the man of the Karolingian king at Laon. France and Normandy were two great duchies, each owning a precarious supremacy in the king of the West-Franks. On the one hand, Normandy had been called into being by a frightful dismemberment of the French duchy, from which the original Norman settlement had been cut off. France had lost in Rouen one of her greatest cities, and she was cut off from the sea and from the lower course of her own r

lliance, mutual support against the Karolingian king, had passed away. A King of the French reigning at Paris was more likely to remember what the Normans had cost him as duke than what they had done for him as king. And the alliance was only an alliance of princes. The mutual dislike between the people of the two countries

tive doctrine was strong, a full-grown son was always likely to succeed his father. The growth of feudal notions too had greatly strengthened the hereditary principle. Still no rule had anywhere been laid down for cases where the late prince had not left a full-grown son. The question as to legitimate birth was equally unsettled. Irregular unions of all kinds, though condemned by the Church, were tolerated in practice, and were nowhere more common than among the No

m, might have made him legitimate, as some of his predecessors had been made, by a marriage with his mother. In 1028 Robert succeeded his brother Richard in the duchy. In 1034 or 1035 he determined to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He called on his barons to swear allegiance to his bastard of seven years old as his successor in case he never came back. Their wise counsel to stay at home, to look

rchmen, some claimed only through females. Robert had indeed two half-brothers, but they were young and their legitimacy was disputed; he had an uncle, Robert Archbishop of Rouen, who had been legitimated by the later marriage of his parents. The rival who in the end gave William most trouble was his cousin Guy of Burgundy, son of a daughter of his grandfather Richard the Good. Tho

was as old as the settlement of Rolf, as old that is as the ducal power itself. The great men of both these classes were alike hard to control. A Norman baron of this age was well employed when he was merely rebelling against his prince or waging private war against a fellow baron. What specially marks the time is the frequency of treacherous murders wrought by men of the highest rank, often on harmless neighbours or unsuspecting guests. But victims were also found among those guardians of the young duke whose faithful discharge of their duties shows that the Norman nobility was not wholly corrupt. One indeed was a foreign prince, Alan Count of the Bretons, a grandson of Richard the Fearless through a daughter. Two others, the seneschal Osbern and Gilbert Count of Eu, were irregular kinsmen of the duke. All these were murdered, the Breton count by poison. Such a childhood as this made William play

ound was quite different. The counts of Chartres were troublesome neighbours to the duchy, and the castle of Tillières had been built as a defence against them. An advance of the King's dominions had made Tillières a neighbour of France, and, as a neighbour, it was said to be a standing menace. The King of the French, acting in concert with the disaffected party in Normandy, was a dangerous enemy, and the young Duke and his counsellors determined to give up Tillières. Now comes the first distinct exercise of William's personal will. We are without exact dates, but the time can be hardly later than 1040, when William was from twelve to thirteen years old. At his special request, the defender of Tillières, Gilbert Crispin, who at first held out again

ch William had to deal. In 1042, when the Duke was about fourteen, Normandy adopted the Truce of God in its later shape. It no longer attempted to establish universal peace; it satisfied itself with forbidding, under the strongest ecclesiastical censures, all private war and violence of any kind on certain days of the week. Legislation of this kind has two sides. It was an immediate gain if peace was really e

and those which were afterwards added. In these last a lingering remnant of old Teutonic life had been called into fresh strength by new settlements from Scandinavia. At the beginning of the reign of Richard the Fearless, Rouen, the French-speaking city, is emphatically contrasted with Bayeux, the once Saxon city and land, now the headquarters of the Danish speech. At that stage the Danish party was distinctly a heathen party. We are not told whether Danish was still spoken so late as the time of William's youth. We can hardly believe tha

e island fortress of Brionne in the Risle. The real object of the revolt was the partition of the duchy. William was to be dispossessed; Guy was to be duke in the lands east of Dive; the great lords of Western Normandy were to be left independent. To this end the lords of the Bessin and the C?tentin revolted, their leader being Neal, Viscount of Saint-Sauveur in the C?tentin. We are told that the mass of the people everywhere wished well to their duke; in the common sovereign lay their only chance of protection against their immediate

tle, a tourney of horsemen on an open table-land just within the land of the rebels between Caen and Mezidon. The young duke fought well and manfully; but the Norman writers allow that it was French help that gained him the victory. Yet one of the many anecdotes of the battle points to a source of strength which was always ready to tell for any lord against rebellious vassals. One of the

ands to the east. The difference between them never again takes a political shape. William was now lord of all Normandy, and able to put down all later disturbers of the peace. His real reign now begins; from the age of nineteen or twenty, his acts are his own. According to his abiding practice, he showed himself a merciful conqueror. Through his whole reign he shows a distinct unwillingness to take human life except in fair fighting on the battle-field. No blood was shed after the victory of Val-ès-dunes; one rebel died in bonds; the others underwent no harder punishment than

e of his day, to do justice, to visit wrong with sure and speedy punishment, whoever was the wrong-doer. If a ruler did this first of duties well, much was easily forgiven him in other ways. But William had as yet little to be forgiven. Throughout life he steadily practised some unusual virtues. His strict attention to religion was always marked. And his religion was not that mere lavish bounty to the Church which was consistent with any amount of cruelty or license. William's religion really influenced his life, public and private. He set an unusual example of a princely household governed according to the rules of morality, and he dealt with ecclesiastical matters in the spirit of a true reformer. He did not, like so many princes of his age, make ecclesiastical preferments a source of corrupt gain, but promoted good men from all quarters. His own education is not likely to have received much attention; it is not clear whether he had mastered the rarer art of writing or the more usual one of reading; but both his promotion of learned churchmen and the care given to the education of some of his children show that he at least v

Canterbury, was the King's special favourite and adviser. These men may have suggested the thought of William's succession very early. On the other hand, at this time it was by no means clear that Edward might not leave a son of his own. He had been only a few years married, and his alleged vow of chastity is very doubtful. William's claim was of the flimsiest kind. By English custom the king was chosen out of a single kingly house, and only those who were descended from kings in the male line were counted as members of that house. William was not descended, even in the female line, from any English king; his whole kindred with Edward was that

t to shame. Such a tale set forth the noblest side of William's character, as the man who did something to put down such enemies of mankind as he who cursed him. The possessions of William Talvas passed through his daughter Mabel to Roger of Montgomery, a man who plays a great part in William's history; but it is the disloyalty of the burghers, not of their lord, of which we hear just now. They willingly admitted an Angevin garrison. William in return laid siege to Domfront on the Varenne, a strong castle which was then an outpost of Maine against Normandy. A long skirmishing warfare, in which William won for himself a name by deeds of personal prowess, went on during the autumn and winter (1048–49). One tale specially illustrates more than one point in the feelings of the time. The two princes, William and Geoffrey, give a mutual challenge; each gives the other notice of the garb and shield that he will wear that he may not be mistaken. The spirit of knight-errantry was coming in, and we see that William himself in his younger days was touched by it. But we see also that coat-armour was as yet unknown. Geoffrey and his host, so the Normans say, shrink from the challenge and decamp in the night, leaving the way open for a sudden march upon Alen?on. The disloyal bu

somewhat doubtful justice, is noteworthy on two grounds. First, the accuser of the banished count was one who was then a poor serving-knight of his own, but who became the forefather of a house which plays a great part in English history, Robert surnamed the Bigod. Secondly, the vacant county was granted by William to his own half-brother Robert. He had already in 1048 bestowed the bishopric of Bayeux on his other half-brother Odo, who cannot at that time have been more than twelve years old. He must therefore have held the see for a good while without consecration, and at no time of his fifty years' holding of it did he sh

ith him by some tie of kindred or affinity which made a marriage between them unlawful by the rules of the Church. But no genealogist has yet been able to find out exactly what the canonical hindrance was. It is hard to trace the descent of William and Matilda up to any common forefather. But the light which the story throws on William's character is the same in any case. Whether he was seeking a wife or a kingdom, he would have his will, but he could wait for it. In William's doubtful position, a marriage

ct, that Matilda was actually descended from Alfred in the female line; so that William's children, though not William himself, had some few drops of English blood in their veins. William or his advisers, in weighing every chance which might help his interests in the direction of Engl