William the Conqueror | Page 5

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
Tillieres had been built as a defence against them. An advance of the
King's dominions had made Tillieres 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 Tillieres. 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 Tillieres, 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 Tillieres 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