A.D. 1051.]

WILLIAM OF NORMANDY.

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was driven back by a tempest; and he changed its direction, to enforce the submission of Alan, of Brittany. He then went upon a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Before his departure, he presented to the nobles a little boy whom he said was his son; and told them that his "little bastard" should be their lord if he saw them no more. He died in Bithynia, in 1035, the same year in which Canute died.

possession of his father's Edward of England and very difference of their

The young William of Normandy was placed under the care of Henry I. of France. At the death of Robert he was put in dominions; and the seat of his court was Rouen. William of Normandy were second-cousins; but the ages would have been enough to have prevented much intercourse between them. Edward was called to his kingdom, in 1042, seven years after the death of Robert. William was a youth of fourteen, and from the time of his accession, the great duchy was distracted by the contests of the nobles, and by the pretensions to the sovereign power of Guido, Count of Macon. But there was an energetic will maturing in the boy, whose illegitimacy his father had been proud to proclaim, according to the morality of those times; and he fought against Guido, and conquered in a great battle in 1047. In a year or two he had consolidated his power; and in 1051 was free to visit his cousin Edward in England.

Here then, in all the vigour of youthful manhood, came William of Normandy, to look upon the rich lands, and to understand something of the rough people over whom his feeble relative was the nominal ruler. In the fields through which he travelled, he saw an industrious race, churls and slaves, cultivating diligently, and not without skill, after the modes of their predecessors. In the towns he saw busy artisans, who were associated for mutual protection, and had their peculiar laws, handed down in code after code, but with little essential change in their principles. He saw powerful earls-bold, bearded men—who were great landed possessors, but not holding their arable and their pastures, their woods and waters, as fiefs of the crown, but as independent lords, and tyrannising, wherever they dared, in a most kingly fashion. He saw cathedrals and abbeys, built in a rude style, but splendidly endowed by the piety of the faithful. He heard on every side a tongue which sounded harsh to his ears-a tongue which his own people called barbarous and unfit for gentlemen. The same language, with slight difference, was spoken by the thirty thousand warriors whom Rollo planted a century and a half before, where he now ruled; but it was now the "abhorred English idiom." He saw a land that arms might win, and a people that craft might denationalise. He might be the peaceful successor of Edward, or he might fight for the crown against some pretender, when the childless king should be no more. William sojourned a little while at the court of Edward; and he there found ample encouragement for his ambition, and ready instruments of his will, when the fortunate hour should come. When that hour came, the laws of rude Germanic tribes should be changed for the Roman code. The turbulent earls and sheriffs should be supplanted by his own obedient vassals. The cathedrals and abbeys should be filled by intelligent Norman priests. The language of the Saxon should be supplanted by the refined Norman-French, in which the romances of his poets were sung, and the judgments of his clerks were delivered. "He was a stark

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