William the Conqueror | Page 9

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 Alencon. 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 Alencon 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 Ambrieres; but
Ambrieres 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