3

The Bastard

Bad as things had been in England in the wake of Cnut’s death, they had been worse in Normandy after the death of Duke Robert.

The duke had set out for the Holy Land in 1035 knowing full well that he might not return, and so had taken steps to safeguard Normandy’s succession. Although he had never succeeded in finding a suitable duchess, he had once enjoyed a liaison with a girl from the town of Falaise called Herleva.¹ Later chroniclers romanticized this relationship, reporting that Robert had been smitten as he watched Herleva from a distance (dancing in one version, washing her clothes in another), but the truth was probably more prosaic. The most reliable account states that she was the daughter of Fulbert, described on different occasions as an undertaker and a ducal chamberlain. Robert probably began their affair before his accession in 1027, for in that year, or possibly the next, Herleva bore him a son. The new duke chose to honour the memory of his great-grandfather, and called the boy William.²

Little William, of course, had a glorious future ahead of him. After his death he was commonly called ‘the Great’, though posterity would eventually settle on ‘the Conqueror’. Contemporaries, however, preferred to describe him with reference to the circumstances of his birth: as a young man he was reportedly taunted on account of his mother’s humble origins, and chronicles composed towards the end of his life— non-Norman ones, at least— routinely call him ‘the Bastard’.³ Whether his parentage was a problem at the start of his career is a more open question. A strictly contemporary French writer, Ralph Glaber, seems to have been in two minds about it, one minute assuring us that Duke Robert’s lack of a legitimate child was ‘a cause of great distress to his people’, but then explaining in the same breath that the Normans had always accepted rulers who were the products of unions with concubines (which was quite true). Probably by the time William was born opinion was becoming divided: Glaber’s further comment that the custom might be thought an abomination suggests that some sections of society considered it so, and William of Jumièges was clearly embarrassed by the practice, for he refers to earlier Norman dukes taking wives ‘in the Danish manner’(more Danico) and makes no mention at all of Robert’s liaison with Herleva.⁴

But if monks were bothered by bastardy, secular society seems to have regarded it with equanimity. The English, as we have seen, originally preferred Harold Harefoot, son of Cnut’s concubine, over Harthacnut, the son of his anointed queen. Similarly, although Robert ended his relationship with Herleva soon after his accession as duke, he promoted her male kinsfolk to honourable positions at his court, and found Herleva herself a respectable husband called Herluin de Conteville, by whom she had at least two more sons. Most tellingly of all, Robert made it known that his own son by Herleva was to be his heir, and seems to have had no difficulty in persuading the rest of society to accept this decision; before the duke left for the Holy Land the Norman magnates swore an oath recognizing William as their future ruler.⁵

According to Ralph Glaber, William’s status as Robert’s heir was also officially sanctioned by the king of France, Henry I, who had recently been restored to power thanks to Norman assistance.⁶ Such was the kind of co-dependent relationship that the two powers had developed in recent decades: the kings of France had frequently looked to the dukes of Normandy for military support, and the dukes had always looked to the kings for legitimization. Strictly speaking, though, ‘France’ did not exist in the eleventh century: the earliest reference to the ‘kingdom of France’ does not occur until over a hundred years later, and the kings of France did not style themselves as such until the thirteenth century. Prior to that point, the title they used was Rex Francorum — king of the Franks.⁷

The Franks, originally, were one of the barbarian tribes who had dwelt beyond the fringes of the Roman Empire. After that empire crumbled in the middle of the first millennium, it was the Franks who eventually made themselves Europe’s new masters. Under the leadership of a succession of warrior rulers, they expanded from their homelands in what is now north-eastern France and conquered more or less everything in their path, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the Elbe. This expansion reached its zenith during the reign of the celebrated Frankish king Charles the Great, or Charlemagne as he is better known. Charlemagne’s power was such that in AD 800 the then pope crowned him as a new emperor, and by the time of his death fourteen years later, his empire stretched 1,500 miles from north to south and a similar distance from east to west. Historians call it the Carolingian Empire, from Carolus, the Latin for Charles.

But very soon after Charlemagne’s death his empire began to collapse. For all its imperial pretensions, it was a dominion founded on predatory warfare: plunder, booty and tribute. While the treasure and the slaves kept pouring in, the Franks willingly turned out to swell their emperor’s armies. Once there was nothing left to conquer, and only a hostile frontier to defend, they tended to stay at home. Added to this was the problem of dynastic rivalry. Rather like we do today, the families of early medieval Europe expected inheritances to be shared, at least among the male descendants of the deceased. In 843, barely a quarter of a century after Charlemagne’s death, his feuding grandsons agreed to split the empire into three. A few decades later, having been briefly reunited (by Charles the Fat), it was divided again, this time into two, and this time for good. The eastern part would eventually become Germany, the western half France.⁸

But in the meantime West Francia (as historians call it) continued to disintegrate. Denied the ability to plunder their neighbours, the Franks took to fighting against each other. They also found themselves in the uncomfortable situation of being attacked, by Vikings from the north, Saracens from the south, and even Magyars (Hungarians) from the east. There was no sense in summoning great imperial armies against such fast-moving, hit-and-run raiders, so Frankish kings delegated the responsibility for defence to their great men in the localities— their counts and dukes. But, of course, such power and authority, once relinquished, is hard to claw back. The great counts and dukes of France still governed in the king’s name, but increasingly without reference to him. They began building their own fortifications, holding their own courts, even minting their own coins. Royal authority was also eroded by further dynastic division. For much of the tenth century, the throne of West Francia passed between the direct Carolingian line and a rival branch called the Capetians. Eventually, in 987, the Capetians established themselves decisively as the new royal family, but by then the kingdom they ruled was only a shadow of its former self, and their authority was confined to a small area of northern France. ‘Although first among the Franks’, a sympathetic bishop told King Robert II (996–1031), ‘you are but a serf in the order of kings.’

But it was not just the king who witnessed his authority ebbing away. In a society that had been militarized by the raids, the dukes and counts of West Francia soon found themselves in exactly the same predicament of being challenged from below. Power ultimately devolved to those who could marshal the resources to resist their supposed superiors, while at the same time repressing those beneath them. The clearest manifestation of this trend was fortification. During the time of the Viking raids, the dukes and counts had built large fortresses, generally called castella, in order to protect whole communities. In the second half of the tenth century, however, a new breed of castella emerged, built not so much to protect communities as to dominate them. What we, in short, would regard as castles.⁹

Some of these new castles are easily identified as such today: along the valley of the River Loire stand several giant stone towers built around the turn of the first millennium by the buccaneering Fulk Nerra, count of Anjou, whose grasp of the potential of this new weapon transformed him from a comparatively minor figure into one of West Francia’s greatest regional rulers. The wonderful thing about castles, however, from the point of view of the ambitious potentate, was that they did not have to be fashioned in stone, laboriously and expensively, in order to be effective. It was equally possible to dominate a particular area on a fraction of the budget by raising earthworks to form protective enclosures, and topping them with wooden palisades. Instead of a stone donjon, castle-builders could opt for a single large mound of earth, known as a motte, topped with a simple wooden tower. Such innovation (both the great stone tower and the motte have no precedents) enabled men of comparatively modest means— cadets of established noble families, or ambitious men of non-noble rank— to resist their overlords, assert themselves against their neighbours, and to impose their own lordship— however debatable or unwelcome— on their localities.¹⁰

Provided, that is, they had the men with which to garrison them. If the appearance of a new species of fortification was one indication of the changes occurring in Frankish society around the turn of the millennium, the other was the appearance of a new breed of warrior. Again, change occurred initially as a consequence of the Viking raids. The switch from offensive to defensive warfare meant that it was no use relying on a system where armies had to be called up from among the local aristocracy; effective defence required men who were armed and ready all year round, and accordingly dukes and counts began to recruit such full-time professionals into their entourages. Of course, great men had always retained warriors; what seems to have happened as the millennium approached, and traditional structures of authority in West Francia continued to crumble, is that they began to increase the size of their retinues. As society became ever more dog eat dog, the top dogs were those who could maintain the biggest military followings. In search of extra muscle, lords reached out beyond the ranks of the nobility, recruiting the landless and sometimes even the unfree, and issuing them with swords, mail shirts and horses. Because they were mounted, such men were sometimes referred to in French as chevaliers. In England, they would be known as knights.¹¹

Around the turn of the millennium then, power and authority in West Francia (which from now on we shall call France) was increasingly about the control of castles and the recruitment of knights. In each case, it is important to emphasize not only their novelty, but also their crudeness. Great and noble stone castles were very rare— the vast majority were rough and ready constructions of earth and timber. Great and noble knights were rarer still. Most were little better than peasants in terms of their social origins. Not only were they a long way from donning shining armour; chevaliers were also a long way from embracing a code of chivalry, with high ideals of justice and honour. These early knights did not see it as their responsibility to protect the poor and the weak. On the contrary, a large part of their job was to terrorize the lower orders, persuading them to accept the authority and the material demands of the new castellan lords. No sooner do we encounter castles and knights than we start to hear about ‘bad customs’— new tolls, new taxes, restrictions on movement and behaviour. To be a knight originally was to help discipline a peasantry that had hitherto enjoyed considerably greater freedom, coercing them into accepting the new order that was starting to emerge.¹²

If we had to sum this new society up in a single word, we might describe it as feudal— but only if we were prepared for an outbreak of fainting fits among medieval historians. The problem with the word feudal, they will tell you, is that it is not actually a medieval word at all, but a coinage of sixteenth-century lawyers, while the abstraction ‘feudalism’ does not occur until as late as the nineteenth century. This is undeniably true, as is the more reasonable objection that both ‘feudal’ and ‘feudalism’ have been employed so loosely and so variously by historians in the past as to be all but meaningless to scholars working in the present. It is worth pointing out, however, that the term ‘feudal’ does derive from the medieval Latin word feodum, meaning fief, which was a parcel of land given to some knights in reward for their service. Since we first start to hear of fiefs in significant numbers from the start of the eleventh century, there are still good reasons for using the words ‘feudal’ and ‘feudalism’ to describe a society that was everywhere affected, if not yet entirely dominated, by the arrival of knights and castles.¹³

How, then, does this generalized picture of society in France compare with what was happening in Normandy? Obviously, Normandy was very different in having been a Viking colony. The Norsemen had not merely raided here; they had settled and stayed to rule. We might expect, therefore, that the duchy would be different by virtue of its Norseness. It seems, however, that this was not the case. As we have already seen, the Normans had been quite quick to abandon much of their Scandinavian heritage, dropping Norse in favour of French, and converting—at least at the higher levels of society—from paganism to Christianity. More surprising still, they appear to have successfully maintained (or resurrected) many of the governmental structures of their Carolingian predecessors. They ruled, for example, from centres associated with the old Carolingian counts, and issued a Carolingian-style silver coinage. Normandy’s borders remained more or less where they had lain in earlier centuries. Far from demonstrating the kind of comprehensive disruption that one might expect from a violent takeover, the duchy exhibited notable administrative continuity. It was an exceptional region, but paradoxically this was because the Normans had preserved the public authority of the Carolingians that elsewhere had collapsed.¹⁴

Consequently, if we look at Normandy around the turn of the millennium, we find that the rule of Duke Richard II (996–1026) was comparatively strong. If his predecessors had struggled to assert their authority over other Viking chieftains who had settled in Normandy, by Richard’s day that authority was uncontested. It is at this time, for instance, that we have the first evidence of a titled aristocracy beneath the duke himself. Richard conferred the title ‘count’ on his brothers and half-brothers, as well as on his uncle Rodulf (the earliest individual to use the title, in a charter of 1011). Around the same time, Richard appointed a number of ‘viscounts’, administrative officials for his own demesne. The significant point is that in each case the duke was in charge of appointments, and these titles remained revocable. They were not simply assumed by their holders, as was the case in other regions.¹⁵

Nor is there any evidence in Normandy of the kind of fragmentation we see elsewhere in France. Take castles, for instance. We do see castles in the duchy by this date, but they are few in number, and either in the hands of the duke or his deputies. At Rouen, for example, we know that the dukes had a great stone tower from the time of Richard’s namesake father (now sadly vanished, but possibly depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry). Those castles entrusted to counts were seemingly to help them to defend difficult border regions. Count Rodulf, for example, had a mighty donjon at Ivry (substantial ruins of which still survive) on Normandy’s eastern frontier.¹⁶ We also see knights in Normandy, at least to the extent that we see men in mail shirts fighting on horseback. The Normans had long since abandoned the Viking practice of fighting on foot, and had quickly become adept at the Frankish art of mounted warfare. But the fighting they engaged in during the early years of the eleventh century was external; within the duchy itself there is no evidence of the proliferation of unlicensed castles, or the endemic violence associated with independent castellans and lawless gangs of knights.¹⁷

One fact illustrates this better than any other. In southern France the collapse of public authority in the years immediately before the millennium had provoked a remarkable reaction. At the instigation of local religious leaders, but driven too by a groundswell of popular enthusiasm and indignation, large crowds had gathered in great open-air assemblies to decry the violence, and to call upon the power of the Almighty to bring it to an end. Armed with relics, penances and the power of excommunication, the Church aimed to impose a ‘Peace of God’ to protect the most vulnerable members of society. A little later, when lay rulers responded to the same imperative, they would declare a ‘Truce of God’, restricting feuds and fighting to certain days of the week.¹⁸

In 1023, a council was convened at Compiègne, a town in the territory of the king of France, to discuss the introduction of the Peace of God, or the Truce, into northern France. Duke Richard attended the meeting, accompanied by his leading churchmen, as did the king of France and the count of Flanders. But while in other areas the Peace was proclaimed as a result of the meeting, in the end it was agreed that it would not be introduced into Normandy. Richard’s duchy had no need of such drastic measures. In Normandy, the duke’s own peace was enough.¹⁹

This situation changed, however, after the old duke died in 1026, and the duchy was divided in the rancorous dispute between his two sons, Richard and Robert. While it remains unclear whether Robert had any direct hand in Richard’s death the following year, the fact that he had encouraged rebellion against ducal authority did him no favours when he himself took over as duke. The fallout from the feud between the two brothers may in itself explain why Robert soon clashed with two senior members of his own family. Hugh, bishop of Bayeux and son of the late Count Rodulf, was besieged in his father’s castle at Ivry and fled into exile. More serious still, Robert fell out with his namesake uncle, the archbishop of Rouen, who similarly fled after a siege and promptly laid Normandy under interdict. Since both of Robert’s opponents were leading churchmen, it is equally possible that they objected as much to his methods as to the man himself. In his bid for power, the new duke had built up a substantial military following on the promise of future reward, and once in power he made good that promise by plundering the lands of the Church. Estates that his predecessors had granted to monasteries for the good of their eternal souls Robert seized and turned into fiefs for his knights. Feudalism, it seems, was arriving in Normandy with a vengeance.

And yet in the event the threat to ducal authority was arrested. Robert made peace with the Church, restoring the confiscated lands, and candidly admitting in his charters that he had been led astray by ‘the counsel of evil men’. He recalled the exiled archbishop, who not only lifted the interdict but became his most trusted counsellor, lending the administration a valuable air of continuity and stability. It was therefore obvious that the archbishop should be the principal prop of government when his nephew decided to head off to the Holy Land in 1035, and even more so when the duke failed to return, leaving the seven-year-old William as his heir. That there was some measure of stability in Normandy after William’s accession is suggested by the ongoing support that his government afforded to the English exiles, Edward and Alfred, in their bids to return home, and that stability doubtless owed much to the archbishop’s steady hand on the tiller. The problem was that by this time Archbishop Robert was already an elderly man. Not long afterwards, in March 1037, he died, and with him all sense of order in Normandy.²⁰

The clearest manifestation of the chaos that followed was the sudden emergence of unlicensed castles. ‘Lots of Normans, forgetful of their loyalties, built earthworks in many places’, explains William of Jumièges, ‘and erected fortified strongholds for their own purposes. Having dared to establish themselves securely in their own fortifications they immediately hatched plots and rebellions, and fierce fires were lit all over the country.’ The duchy rapidly descended into violence as magnates struggled to gain the upper hand against their rivals. A well-informed twelfth-century writer called Orderic Vitalis tells the story of the unfortunate William Giroie, who was seized by his enemies at a wedding feast, taken outside and horribly mutilated— his nose and ears cut off, his eyes gouged out. Normandy seems to have experienced a rash of mafioso-style killings, as powerful families used any methods against each other, knowing that the government of the young Duke William was powerless to protect or punish them.²¹

During this dangerous time William was not without guardians. Besides the late archbishop, Duke Robert had arranged for a number of leading laymen to aid and protect his son. Alan, count of Brittany, and Gilbert, count of Brionne, both cousins to the late duke, were supposed to be William’s principal protectors. It soon became apparent, however, that these men could offer their young charge very little protection at all. Count Alan was the first to fall, killed in a siege at the start of October 1040; Count Gilbert followed soon afterwards, assassinated by his rivals while out riding one morning. With his most powerful guardians gone, the violence moved even closer to William. In 1041 his tutor, Turold, was murdered, and then Osbern, his household steward— the latter had his throat cut while he slept at the castle of Le Vaudreuil in the same chamber as the duke himself. Such well-attested atrocities later inspired Orderic Vitalis to put words into William’s own mouth. ‘Many times’, the future Conqueror says on his deathbed, ‘I was smuggled secretly out of the castle at night by my Uncle Walter and taken to the cottages and hiding places of the poor, to save me from discovery by traitors who sought my death.’²²

Despite the attention to detail— William did have an Uncle Walter on his mother’s side— this wonderfully evocative passage falls some way short of total conviction. Had the men who murdered his guardians really intended William’s death they could clearly have achieved it. Their intention was almost certainly not to do away with the duke but to control him, and by extension control Normandy’s government. What we appear to be witnessing, in other words, is not simply random acts of violence arising from private feuds, but a carefully orchestrated coup. William of Jumièges, writing shortly after these events took place, refused to name the murderers, for the good reason that ‘they are the very men who now surround the duke’. Orderic Vitalis, writing several generations later, could afford to be less cautious, and named one of them as Rodulf of Gacé—; a man who, when we next encounter him, is described as William’s guardian and ‘the leader of the Norman army’.²³

It is also apparent from the chroniclers’ accounts that this coup was supported by the king of France. As we have already noted, Henry I had regained the French throne in 1033 thanks in part to the help of Duke Robert, and soon afterwards had returned the favour by formally recognizing William as Robert’s heir. But support for William, it seems, did not necessarily translate into support for the guardians chosen by his father. ‘They scattered the firebrands of Henry, king of the French,’ says William of Jumièges of the plotters, ‘shamelessly inciting him to bring ruin on the country.’

The problem was that, having involved Henry in their successful bid for power, Normandy’s new regents subsequently found it difficult to persuade him to bow out. Not long afterwards, the king demanded the surrender of Tillières, a Norman casde close to the French border— possibly because rebels from his own realm were sheltering inside. The regents agreed, and helped the king besiege the castle until its garrison surrendered. A year or so later, however, for reasons that are altogether unclear, Henry sponsored a rebellion right in the heart of Normandy, supplying soldiers to a viscount who had seized William’s birthplace of Falaise and invading the south of the duchy in support of the rebels. In the event this revolt was defeated; the viscount fled into exile and the king eventually withdrew. Even so, it illustrates how lightly some Norman lords wore their loyalty, and how vulnerable to invaders the duchy had become as a result.

Significantly, these two episodes involving the king of France— tentatively dated by historians to the period 1041–3— seem also to locate an important milestone in the life of the young Duke William. In his account of the siege of Tillières, William of Jumièges describes the duke as a boy and attributes all the decision-making to his regents. By contrast, when Jumièges describes the decision to deal with the viscount who seized Falaise it is presented as William’s own. (‘As soon as the duke heard the plans of this spiteful character, he summoned troops and swiftly laid siege to him.’) William, in other words, seems to have come of age at some point between the two sieges. At this stage, of course, he would still have been quite young, probably no more than fifteen years old; but an early assumption of authority accords well with other evidence. To come of age in the warrior society of eleventh-century Francia meant, above all, to be invested with arms, and the chroniclers agree that in William’s case this happened when he was very young— ‘at the earliest possible age,’ according to the later writer William of Malmesbury, ‘in the hope of restoring peace in the provinces’. Malmesbury also tells us that the duke was invested with arms by the king of France, which would fit well with the collaboration of William’s guardians and Henry I in taking Tillières.²⁴

One writer who made much of the young duke’s assumption of arms was William of Poitiers, whose Gesta Guillelmi (‘Deeds of William’) is without doubt our most important source for the Conqueror’s career. Although he did not start writing it until the 1070s, Poitiers had lived through the earlier events he describes and had served since the 1050s as a chaplain in the duke’s own household. As such he is not only a contemporary witness but also the chronicler who stood closest to the man himself (as a household chaplain he would have heard William’s confession). Like all our sources, Poitiers is not without his problems. The fact that he was writing a history for consumption at the Conqueror’s own court means that we have to allow for a cloying degree of obsequiousness, and take much of what he says about William’s motives with a large pinch of salt. Despite this, however, he remains a uniquely valuable voice, not least because his own career had been so varied. Poitiers took his surname from the place he had studied; but by birth he was a Norman. Moreover, according to Orderic Vitalis, ‘he had been a brave soldier before entering the church, and had fought with warlike weapons for his earthly prince’. Unlike most learned men, therefore, Poitiers knew much of the practicalities of warfare and could empathize with warriors like William in a way that most cloistered monks could not.²⁵

Both his bias and his military experience are apparent when Poitiers describes William’s coming of age:

At last a most joyful day dawned splendidly for all who desired and eagerly awaited peace and justice. Our duke, adult more in his understanding of honourable things and in the strength of his body than in his age, was armed as a knight. The news of this spread fear throughout Francia; Gaul had not another man who was reputed to be such a knight in arms. It was a sight both delightful and terrible to see him hold the reins, girded honourably with his sword, his shield shining, formidable with his helmet and javelin.²⁶

Despite his insistence on the delight and terror that the newly armed adolescent inspired, even Poitiers admits that William faced an uphill struggle trying to govern Normandy, adding ‘there was too much licence everywhere for unlawful deeds’. Years of anarchy had led not only to the unauthorized construction of castles and the proliferation of murderous feuds; it had also led to the duke’s own officials— his counts and viscounts— going their own way. If such men did not openly rebel, as had been the case at Falaise, nor did they pay much heed to the authority of the young duke and his advisers. Around the time of William’s knighting, the situation was still sufficiently desperate that his government made a belated attempt to introduce the Peace of God into Normandy, effectively admitting that the duke’s own authority was inadequate. The move, however, proved a failure. The bishops of Normandy, who would have been expected to enforce a ban on violence, belonged to the same feuding aristocratic families.²⁷

Nevertheless, there is reason to think that William must have made some progress in combating disorder in the years that followed. According to William of Poitiers, the young duke ‘began to remove completely from his entourage those whom he knew to be incompetent or wicked, and to draw on the counsels of the wisest and best’. By the mid-1040s, the two new names which stand out in particular among the witness-lists to his charters are William fitz Osbern and Roger of Montgomery. On the face of it they were an unlikely pair, one being the son of Osbern, the murdered ducal steward, the other the son of the man who had arranged the murder. In all other respects, however, they were men of a similar stamp to the duke himself—young, ambitious and warlike—and together they would serve him faithfully for the rest of their lives.

This rise to prominence of his friends suggests that William’s personal authority was beginning to grow; that he was, as Poitiers says, selecting his own associates and dismissing those who had appointed themselves during his minority. At the same time, the ducal chaplain tells us, his young master began ‘forcefully demanding the services owed by his own men’. William, in other words, once surrounded by a team he could trust, set about reining in the counts and viscounts who had grown accustomed to ignoring his authority. Inevitably, such behaviour provoked a reaction.²⁸

Towards the end of the year 1046, a new rebellion raised its head. Unlike the successful coup of five years earlier, it was directed squarely at the duke himself with the aim of killing and replacing him. According to the chroniclers, the leader was one of William’s cousins, Guy, who had been raised alongside him in the ducal household, and rewarded with the castle and county of Brionne. The suspicion remains, however, that Guy was little more than a figurehead; as a legitimate grandson of Duke Richard II, he could be talked up to justify opposition to the bastard William. The real ringleaders, one suspects, were Guy’s known associates, a group of viscounts and nobles based in western Normandy, displeased by the duke’s efforts to curtail their independence.²⁹

Sadly, no contemporary writers go into any great detail about this most dangerous challenge to William’s rule. Over a century later, however, a Norman historian called Wace wrote a dramatic account that fits well with the other known facts and is therefore likely to be true in its essentials. According to Wace, William was staying at Valognes in the far west of Normandy when he was woken one night and warned that his life was in immediate danger. At once the duke leapt on his horse and rode hard across the country, fearfully fording rivers in the dark and taking care to avoid major towns in case he was recognized and captured. Near Bayeux he met a loyal lord whose sons helped him to reach Falaise, over sixty miles from the start of his frantic dash.

But Falaise, as Wace explains, offered only a temporary respite. Realizing that he was powerless against the combined might of the western viscounts, William left Normandy and sought the assistance of the king of France— a fact confirmed by both William of Jumièges and William of Poitiers. Given the events of a few years earlier, this action might seem surprising; it was certainly desperate. William probably appealed to Henry as a vassal to his superior lord; very likely the duke had sworn allegiance to the king, either on the occasion of his knighting, or perhaps at the time of his accession. If so, William was now calling in his side of the bargain, demanding his sovereign’s assistance.³⁰

Henry agreed. Early in 1047, the French king summoned his army and rode to William’s aid. The duke assembled such forces as he could from eastern Normandy, and together they set out into the west to confront the rebels. The rebels, for their part, rose to the challenge, summoning their kinsmen and vassals to create a formidable army of their own, and thus setting the scene for that rarest of medieval military events: a set-piece battle.

The rebels had marched east, crossing the River Orne at various points, and congregated about nine miles south-east of the town of Caen, at a place called Val-ès-Dunes. This topographical detail is provided by Wace, who as a sometime resident of Caen clearly knew the area well, and who once again compensates for the brevity of more strictly contemporary chroniclers. As Wace explains, it is wide-open country: ‘the plains are long and broad, without great hills or valleys … there are no wooded areas or rocks, but the land slopes down towards the rising sun’.

It was out of the rising sun that the young duke of Normandy and the king of France emerged to meet their enemies. Wace’s blow-by-blow description of the battle itself is the least credible part of his account; his casual mention of ‘common’ troops might be taken to indicate that infantry as well as cavalry were involved, but apart from that we have no idea of the size or composition of the two armies. William of Poitiers, naturally, assures us that the crucial factor in deciding the outcome was the prowess of the duke himself. ‘Rushing in, he spread such terror by his slaughter that his adversaries lost heart and their arms weakened.’ Wace, while allowing that William ‘fought nobly and well’, believed that the result was determined by the defection of one of the leading rebels, Ralph Taisson, on the eve of battle. Whatever the true cause, all writers agree that the combined French and Norman forces eventually gained the upper hand, and the remaining rebels turned and fled. At that point the battle became a rout, and those fugitives that were not cut down by their pursuers drowned as they tried to re-cross the Orne. (According to Wace, the mills downriver came to a standstill, so great was the number of bodies.)³¹

Count Guy, the revolt’s nominal leader, managed to escape the battlefield and shut himself up in his castle at Brionne. Of his few known accomplices, some were killed in the battle, while others fled to exile in Brittany. The fate of Grimoald of St Plessis, whom Wace names as the lord responsible for the attempt on William’s life at Valognes, provides a particularly good illustration of the importance of the victory, since he had built an unlicensed castle at Le Plessis-Grimoult, the remains of which can still be seen today. Grimoald was captured during the battle and cast into prison, so the assumption is that his castle was destroyed as part of the general pattern described by the chroniclers. ‘Happy battle’, exclaimed William of Jumièges, ‘that in one day ruined so many castles of criminals and houses of evildoers.’ Val-ès-Dunes, said William of Poitiers, was momentous, and deserved to be remembered by future ages, because it ‘threw down many castles with the impelling hand of victory’.³²

It was indeed a great victory. William, nineteen years old, had vindicated his right in the face of those who had tried to overthrow and destroy him. There remained much to do in restoring the authority of the duke of Normandy to what it had been in the time of his illustrious ancestors, but the threat to the duchy’s integrity had been banished. That Val-ès-Dunes had shifted the balance of power decisively was made plain for all to see the following autumn, when the duke convened a great council outside of Caen, close to the site of his triumph. Relics were brought especially from Rouen, the great magnates and the bishops of Normandy dutifully assembled, and, at last, the Truce of God was proclaimed.³³