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There was much therefore at the time of William's accession to keep
the French kings and the Norman dukes on friendly terms. The old
alliance had been strengthened by recent good offices. The
reigning king, Henry the First, owed his crown to the help of
William's father Robert. On the other hand, the original ground of
the alliance, mutual support against the Karolingian king, had
passed away. A King of the French reigning at Paris was more
likely to remember what the Normans had cost him as duke than what
they had done for him as king. And the alliance was only an
alliance of princes. The mutual dislike between the people of the
two countries was strong. The Normans had learned French ways, but
French and Normans had not become countrymen. And, as the fame of
Normandy grew, jealousy was doubtless mingled with dislike.
William, in short, inherited a very doubtful and dangerous state of
relations towards the king who was at once his chief neighbour and
his overlord.
More doubtful and dangerous still were the relations which the
young duke inherited towards the people of his own duchy and the
kinsfolk of his own house. William was not as yet the Great or the
Conqueror, but he was the Bastard from the beginning. There was
then no generally received doctrine as to the succession to
kingdoms and duchies. Everywhere a single kingly or princely house
supplied, as a rule, candidates for the succession. Everywhere,
even where the elective doctrine was strong, a full-grown son was
always likely to succeed his father. The growth of feudal notions
too had greatly strengthened the hereditary principle. Still no
rule had anywhere been laid down for cases where the late prince
had not left a full-grown son. The question as to legitimate birth
was equally unsettled. Irregular unions of all kinds, though
condemned by the Church, were tolerated in practice, and were
nowhere more common than among the Norman dukes. In truth the
feeling of the kingliness of the stock, the doctrine that the king
should be the son of a king, is better satisfied by the succession
of the late king's bastard son than by sending for some distant
kinsman, claiming perhaps only through females. Still bastardy, if
it was often convenient to forget it, could always be turned
against a man. The succession of a bastard was never likely to be
quite undisputed or his reign to be quite undisturbed.
Now William succeeded to his duchy under the double disadvantage of
being at once bastard and minor. He was born at Falaise in 1027 or
1028, being the son of Robert, afterwards duke, but then only Count
of Hiesmois, by Herleva, commonly called Arletta, the daughter of
Fulbert the tanner. There was no pretence of marriage between his
parents; yet his father, when he designed William to succeed him,
might have made him legitimate, as some of his predecessors had
been made, by a marriage with his mother. In 1028 Robert succeeded
his brother Richard in the duchy. In 1034 or 1035 he determined to
go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He called on his barons to swear
allegiance to his bastard of seven years old as his successor in
case he never came back. Their wise counsel to stay at home, to
look after his dominions and to raise up lawful heirs, was
unheeded. Robert carried his point. The succession of young
William was accepted by the Norman nobles, and was confirmed by the
overlord Henry King of the French. The arrangement soon took
effect. Robert died on his way back before the year 1035 was out,
and his son began, in name at least, his reign of fifty-two years
over the Norman duchy.
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