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, and were nowhere more common than among the Norman dukes.  In truth the feeling of the kingliness of the stock, the doctrine that the king should be the son of a king, is better satisfied by the succession of the late king’s bastard son than by sending for some distant kinsman, claiming perhaps only through females.  Still bastardy, if it was often convenient to forget it, could always be turned against a man.  The succession of a bastard was never likely to be quite undisputed or his reign to be quite undisturbed.

Now William succeeded to his duchy under the double disadvantage of being at once bastard and minor.  He was born at Falaise in 1027 or 1028, being the son of Robert, afterwards duke, but then only Count of Hiesmois, by Herleva, commonly called Arletta, the daughter of Fulbert the tanner.  There was no pretence of marriage between his parents; yet his father, when he designed William to succeed him, 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 after his dominions and to raise up lawful heirs, was unheeded.  Robert carried his point.  The succession of young William was accepted by the Norman nobles, and was confirmed by the overlord Henry King of the French.  The arrangement soon took effect.  Robert died on his way back before the year 1035 was out, and his son began, in name at least, his reign of fifty-two years over the Norman duchy.

The succession of one who was at once bastard and minor could happen only when no one else had a distinctly better claim William could never have held his ground for a moment against a brother of his father of full age and undoubted legitimacy.  But among the living descendants of former dukes some were themselves of doubtful legitimacy, some were shut out by their profession as churchmen, 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.  Though William’s succession was not liked, no one of these candidates was generally preferred to him.  He therefore succeeded; but the first twelve years of his reign were spent in the revolts and conspiracies of unruly nobles, who hated the young duke as the one representative of law and order, and who were not eager to set any one in his place who might be better able to enforce them.

Nobility, so variously defined in different lands, in Normandy took in two classes of men.  All were noble who had any kindred or affinity, legitimate or otherwise, with the ducal house.  The natural children of Richard the Fearless were legitimated by his marriage with their mother Gunnor, and many of the great houses of Normandy sprang from her brothers and sisters.  The mother of William received no such exaltation as this.  Besides her son, she had borne to Robert a daughter Adelaide, and, after Robert’s death, she married a Norman knight named Herlwin of Conteville.  To him, besides a daughter, she bore two sons, Ode and Robert.  They rose to high posts in Church and State, and played an important part in their half-brother’s history.  Besides men whose nobility was of this kind, there were also Norman houses whose privileges were older than the amours or marriages of any duke, houses whose greatness 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 the man while he was still a child.  The helpless boy had to seek for support of some kind.  He got together the chief men of his duchy, and took a new guardian by their advice.  But...