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, 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 it marks the state of things that the new guardian was
one of the murderers of those whom he succeeded. This was Ralph of
Wacey, son of William’s great-uncle, Archbishop Robert. Murderer as he
was, he seems to have discharged his duty faithfully. There are men who
are careless of general moral obligations, but who will strictly carry
out any charge which appeals to personal honour. Anyhow Ralph’s
guardianship brought with it a certain amount of calm. But men, high in
the young duke’s favour, were still plotting against him, and they
presently began to plot, not only against their prince but against their
country. The disaffected nobles of Normandy sought for a helper against
young William in his lord King Henry of Paris.
The art of diplomacy had never altogether slumbered since much earlier
times. The king who owed his crown to William’s father, and who could
have no ground of offence against William himself, easily found good
pretexts for meddling in Norman affairs. It was not unnatural in the
King of the French to wish to win back a sea-board which had been given
up more than a hundred years before to an alien power, even though that
power had, for much more than half of that time, acted more than a
friendly part towards France. It was not unnatural that the French
people should cherish a strong national dislike to the Normans and a
strong wish that Rouen should again be a French city. But such motives
were not openly avowed then any more than now. The alleged ground 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 against French and
Normans alike, gave up the castle to Henry. The castle was burned; the
King promised not to repair it for four years. Yet he is said to have
entered Normandy, to have laid waste William’s native district of
Hiesmois, to have supplied a French garrison to a Norman rebel named
Thurstan, who held the castle of Falaise against the Duke, and to have
ended by restoring Tillières as a menace against Normandy. And now the
boy whose destiny had made him so early a leader of men had to bear his
first arms against the fortress which looked down on his birth-place.
Thurstan surrendered and went into banishment. William could set down
his own Falaise as the first of a long list of towns and castles which he
knew how to win without shedding of blood.
When we next see William’s distinct personal action, he is still young,
but no longer a child or even a boy. At nineteen or thereabouts he is a
wise and valiant man, and his valour and wisdom are tried to the
uttermost. A few years of comparative quiet were chiefly occupied, as a
quiet time in those days commonly was, with ecclesiastical affairs. One
of these specially illustrates the state of things with which 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 enforced for four days in the
week; but that which was not forbidden on the other three could no longer
be denounced as in itself evil. We are told that in no land was the
Truce more strictly observed than in Normandy. But we may be sure that,
when William was in the fulness of his power, the stern weight of the
ducal arm was exerted to enforce peace on Mondays and Tuesdays as well as
on Thursdays and Fridays.
It was in the year 1047 that William’s authority was most dangerously
threatened and that he was first called on to show in all their fulness
the powers that were in him. He who was to be conqueror of Maine and
conqueror of England was first to be conqueror of his own duchy. The
revolt of a large part of the country, contrasted with the firm loyalty
of another part, throws a most instructive light on the internal state of
the duchy. There was, as there still is, a line of severance between the
districts which formed the first grant to Rolf 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 that the Scandinavian gods still kept any avowed
worshippers. But the geographical limits of the revolt exactly fall in
with the boundary which had once divided French and Danish speech,
Christian and heathen worship. There was a wide difference in feeling on
the two sides of the Dive. The older Norman settlements, now thoroughly
French in tongue and manners, stuck faithfully to the Duke; the lands to
the west rose against him. Rouen and Evreux were firmly loyal to
William; Saxon Bayeux and Danish Coutances were the headquarters of his
enemies.
When the geographical division took this shape, we are surprised at the
candidate for the duchy who was put forward by the rebels. William was a
Norman born and bred; his rival was in every sense a Frenchman. This was
William’s cousin Guy of Burgundy, whose connexion with the ducal house
was only by the spindle-side. But his descent was of uncontested
legitimacy, which gave him an excuse for claiming the duchy in opposition
to the bastard grandson of the tanner. By William he had been enriched
with great possessions, among which was the 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 Côtentin revolted, their
leader being Neal, Viscount of Saint-Sauveur in the Côtentin. 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 lords. But the lords had armed force of the land at their
bidding. They first tried to slay or seize the Duke himself, who chanced
to be in the midst of them at Valognes. He escaped; we hear a stirring
tale of his headlong ride from Valognes to Falaise. Safe among his own
people, he planned his course of action. He first sought help of the man
who could give him most help, but who had most wronged him. He went into
France; he saw King Henry at Poissy, and the King engaged to bring a
French force to William’s help under his own command.
This time Henry kept his promise. The dismemberment of Normandy might
have been profitable to France by weakening the power which had become so
special an object of French jealousy; but with a king the common interest
of princes against rebellious barons came first. Henry came with a
French army, and fought well for his ally on the field of Val-ès-dunes.
Now came the Conqueror’s first battle, 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
leaders of the revolt, Ralph of Tesson, struck with remorse and stirred
by the prayers of his knights, joined the Duke just before the battle.
He had sworn to smite William wherever he found him, and he fulfilled his
oath by giving the Duke a harmless blow with his glove. How far an oath
to do an unlawful act is binding is a question which came up again at
another stage of William’s life.
The victory at Val-ès-dunes was decisive, and the French King, whose help
had done so much to win it, left William to follow it up. He met with
but little resistance except at the stronghold of Brionne. Guy himself
vanishes from Norman history. William had now conquered his own duchy,
and conquered it by foreign help. For the rest of his Norman reign he
had often to strive with enemies at home, but he had never to put down
such a rebellion again as that of the lords of western Normandy. That
western Normandy, the truest Normandy, had to yield to the more
thoroughly Romanized lands 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 payment of fines, giving of
hostages, and destruction of their castles. These castles were not as
yet the vast and elaborate structures which arose in after days. A
single strong square tower, or even a defence of wood on a steep mound
surrounded by a ditch, was enough to make its owner dangerous. The
possession of these strongholds made every baron able at once to defy his
prince and to make himself a scourge to his neighbours. Every season of
anarchy is marked by the building of castles; every return of order
brings with it their overthrow as a necessary condition of peace.
* * * * *
Thus, in his lonely and troubled childhood, William had been schooled for
the rule of men. He had now, in the rule of a smaller dominion, in
warfare and conquest on a smaller scale, to be schooled for the conquest
and the rule of a greater dominion. William had the gifts of a born
ruler, and he was in no way disposed to abuse them. We know his rule in
Normandy only through the language of panegyric; but the facts speak for
themselves. He made Normandy peaceful and flourishing, more peaceful and
flourishing perhaps than any other state of the European mainland. He is
set before us as in everything a wise and beneficent ruler, the protector
of the poor and helpless, the patron of commerce and of all that might
profit his dominions. For defensive wars, for wars waged as the faithful
man of his overlord, we cannot blame him. But his main duty lay at home.
He still had revolts to put down, and he put them down. But to put them
down was the first of good works. He had to keep the peace of the land,
to put some cheek on the unruly wills of those turbulent barons on whom
only an arm like his could put any cheek. He had, in the language 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 valued the best attainments of his time.
Had William’s whole life been spent in the duties of a Norman duke,
ruling his duchy wisely, defending it manfully, the world might never
have known him for one of its foremost men, but his life on that narrower
field would have been useful and honourable almost without a drawback.
It was the fatal temptation of princes, the temptation to territorial
aggrandizement, which enabled him fully to show the powers that were in
him, but which at the same time led to his moral degradation. The
defender of his own land became the invader of other lands, and the
invader could not fail often to sink into the oppressor. Each step in
his career as Conqueror was a step downwards. Maine was a neighbouring
land, a land of the same speech, a land which, if the feelings of the
time could have allowed a willing union, would certainly have lost
nothing by an union with Normandy. England, a land apart, a land of
speech, laws, and feelings, utterly unlike those of any part of Gaul, was
in another case. There the Conqueror was driven to be the oppressor.
Wrong, as ever, was punished by leading to further wrong.
With the two fields, nearer and more distant, narrower and wider, on
which William was to appear as Conqueror he has as yet nothing to do. It
is vain to guess at what moment the thought of the English succession may
have entered his mind or that of his advisers. When William began his
real reign after Val-ès-dunes, Norman influence was high in England.
Edward the Confessor had spent his youth among his Norman kinsfolk; he
loved Norman ways and the company of Normans and other men of French
speech. Strangers from the favoured lands held endless posts in Church
and State; above all, Robert of Jumièges, first Bishop of London and then
Archbishop of 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 Edward’s mother Emma, a daughter of
Richard the Fearless, was William’s great-aunt. Such a kindred, to say
nothing of William’s bastardy, could give no right to the crown according
to any doctrine of succession that ever was heard of. It could at most
point him out as a candidate for adoption, in case the reigning king
should be disposed and allowed to choose his successor. William or his
advisers may have begun to weigh this chance very early; but all that is
really certain is that William was a friend and favourite of his elder
kinsman, and that events finally brought his succession to the English
crown within the range of things that might be.
But, before this, William was to show himself as a warrior beyond the
bounds of his own duchy, and to take seizin, as it were, of his great
continental conquest. William’s first war out of Normandy was waged in
common with King Henry against Geoffrey Martel Count of Anjou, and waged
on the side of Maine. William undoubtedly owed a debt of gratitude to
his overlord for good help given at Val-ès-dunes, and excuses were never
lacking for a quarrel between Anjou and Normandy. Both powers asserted
rights over the intermediate land of Maine. In 1048 we find William
giving help to Henry in a war with Anjou, and we hear wonderful but vague
tales of his exploits. The really instructive part of the story deals
with two border fortresses on the march of Normandy and Maine. Alençon
lay on the Norman side of the Sarthe; but it was disloyal to Normandy.
Brionne was still holding out for Guy of Burgundy. The town was a
lordship of the house of Bellême, a house renowned for power and
wickedness, and which, as holding great possessions alike of Normandy and
of France, ranked rather with princes than with ordinary nobles. The
story went that William Talvas, lord of Bellême, one of the fiercest of
his race, had cursed William in his cradle, as one by whom he and his
should be brought 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 Alençon. The disloyal burghers received the duke with
mockery of his birth. They hung out skins, and shouted, “Hides for the
Tanner.” Personal insult is always hard for princes to bear, and the
wrath of William was stirred up to a pitch which made him for once depart
from his usual moderation towards conquered enemies. He swore that the
men who had jeered at him should be dealt with like a tree whose branches
are cut off with the pollarding-knife. The town was taken by assault,
and William kept his oath. The castle held out; the hands and feet of
thirty-two pollarded burghers of Alençon were thrown over its walls, and
the threat implied drove the garrison to surrender on promise of safety
for life and limb. The defenders of Domfront, struck with fear,
surrendered also, and kept their arms as well as their lives and limbs.
William had thus won back his own rebellious town, and had enlarged his
borders by his first conquest. He went farther south, and fortified
another castle at Ambrières; but Ambrières was only a temporary conquest.
Domfront has ever since been counted as part of Normandy. But, as
ecclesiastical divisions commonly preserve the secular divisions of an
earlier time, Domfront remained down to the great French Revolution in
the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishops of Le Mans.
* * * * *
William had now shown himself in Maine as conqueror, and he was before
long to show himself in England, though not yet as conqueror. If our
chronology is to be trusted, he had still in this interval to complete
his conquest of his own duchy by securing the surrender of Brionne; and
two other events, both characteristic, one of them memorable, fill up the
same time. William now banished a kinsman of his own name, who held the
great county of Mortain, _Moretoliam_ or _Moretonium_, in the diocese of
Avranches, which must be carefully distinguished from Mortagne-en-Perche,
_Mauritania_ or _Moretonia_ in the diocese of Seez. This act, of
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
show any very episcopal merits. This was the last case in William’s
reign of an old abuse by which the chief church preferments in Normandy
had been turned into means of providing for members, often unworthy
members, of the ducal family; and it is the only one for which William
can have been personally responsible. Both his brothers were thus placed
very early in life among the chief men of Normandy, as they were in later
years to be placed among the chief men of England. But William’s
affection for his brothers, amiable as it may have been personally, was
assuredly not among the brighter parts of his character as a sovereign.
The other chief event of this time also concerns the domestic side of
William’s life. The long story of his marriage now begins. The date is
fixed by one of the decrees of the council of Rheims held in 1049 by Pope
Leo the Ninth, in which Baldwin Count of Flanders is forbidden to give
his daughter to William the Norman. This implies that the marriage was
already thought of, and further that it was looked on as uncanonical.
The bride whom William sought, Matilda daughter of Baldwin the Fifth, was
connected with 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 with the daughter of the Count of
Flanders would be useful to him in many ways; and Matilda won her
husband’s abiding love and trust. Strange tales are told of William’s
wooing. Tales are told also of Matilda’s earlier love for the Englishman
Brihtric, who is said to have found favour in her eyes when he came as
envoy from England to her father’s court. All that is certain is that
the marriage had been thought of and had been forbidden before the next
important event in William’s life that we have to record.
Was William’s Flemish marriage in any way connected with his hopes of
succession to the English crown? Had there been any available bride for
him in England, it might have been for his interest to seek for her
there. But it should be noticed, though no ancient writer points out the
fact, 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
England, may have reckoned this piece of rather ancient genealogy among
the advantages of a Flemish alliance. But it is far more certain that,
between the forbidding of the marriage and the marriage itself, a direct
hope of succession to the English crown had been opened to the Norman
duke.