William the Conqueror | Page 3

the Bastard
came to win and to deserve his later surnames of the Conqueror and the
Great.

CHAPTER II
--THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM--A.D. 1028-1051

If William's early reign in Normandy was his time of schooling for his
later reign in England, his school was a stern one, and his schooling
began early. His nominal reign began at the age of seven years, and his
personal influence on events began long before he had reached the
usual years of discretion. And the events of his minority might well
harden him, while they could not corrupt him in the way in which so
many princes have been corrupted. His whole position, political and
personal, could not fail to have its effect in forming the man. He was

Duke of the Normans, sixth in succession from Rolf, the founder of the
Norman state. At the time of his accession, rather more than a hundred
and ten years had passed since plunderers, occasionally settlers, from
Scandinavia, had changed into acknowledged members of the Western
or Karolingian 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 river. On the other
hand, the French and the Norman dukes had found their interest in a
close alliance; Norman support had done much to transfer the crown
from Laon to Paris, and to make the Dux Francorum and the Rex
Francorum the same person. It was the adoption of the French speech
and manners by the Normans, and their steady alliance with the French
dukes, which finally determined that the ruling element in Gaul should
be Romance and not Teutonic, and that, of its Romance elements, it
should be French and not Aquitanian. If the creation of Normandy had
done much to weaken France as a duchy, it had done not a little
towards the making of France as a kingdom. Laon and its crown, the
undefined influence that went with the crown, the prospect of future
advance to the south, had been bought by the loss of Rouen and of the
mouth of the Seine.
There was much therefore at the time of William's accession to keep
the French kings and the Norman dukes on friendly terms. The old
alliance had been strengthened by recent good offices. The reigning
king, Henry the First, owed his crown to the help of William's father
Robert. On the other hand, the original ground of the alliance, 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 was strong. The Normans had
learned French ways, but French and Normans had not become
countrymen. And, as the fame of Normandy grew, jealousy was
doubtless mingled with dislike. William, in short, inherited a very
doubtful and dangerous state of relations towards the king who was at
once his chief neighbour and his overlord.
More doubtful and dangerous still were the relations which the young
duke inherited towards the people of his own duchy and the kinsfolk of
his own house. William was not as yet the Great or the Conqueror, but
he was the Bastard from the beginning. There was then no generally
received doctrine as to the succession to kingdoms and duchies.
Everywhere a single kingly or princely house supplied, as a rule,
candidates for the succession. Everywhere, even where the elective
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,