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Before then we can look at William as an English statesman, we must
first look on him in the land in which he learned the art of
statesmanship. We must see how one who started with all the
disadvantages which are implied in his earlier surname of the
Bastard came to win and to deserve his later surnames of the
Conqueror and the Great.
CHAPTER II--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.
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