William was away hunting in a Norman forest when his faithful fool (as they called a sort of clown kept by a king to amuse the court) broke in where he lay asleep and shouted, “Fly, or you will never leave here a living man!” The young duke jumped up, dressed in haste, and mounted his horse, riding through the forest in the moonlight and fording rivers till he came to the castle of a friend who was sure to be faithful to him. This knight and his three sons rode with William to his own castle.
It turned out that a number of the Norman lords who had taken the oath to satisfy Duke Robert were now declaring that they would not serve under the low-born grandson of a tanner. The fool had learned that they were plotting rebellion and the death of his young master.
William, who was now twenty years old, gathered an army of loyal knights and men, and waged fierce warfare against the traitors, who retreated within the walls of a Norman town. The young duke soon captured the town, and proved to these rebels, as well as to the men of the neighboring kingdom of France, that the grandson of a tanner might be a greater general than the son of a king. At the beginning of a great battle of brave knights against braver knights, a champion of heroic size came out from the ranks of the enemy and threw down his gauntlet, or glove, challenging any knight of Normandy to come and fight him with the sword. William himself took up the gauntlet, and drove his sword through an open place in the big knight’s armor, so that he fell from his horse dead.
Then, like the Philistines of old when David slew their giant, the Duke’s enemies fled in all directions. Many of them were slain in battle, others while running away were cut down by the battle-axes of Norman knights, and many more perished in the flooded river.
Those were brutal days, when people thought that whatever a great king or noble might do was all right if he only had the power to put it through. An example of such high-handed dealing is William’s conquest of England. He had once paid a visit to Edward the Confessor, the priestly king of England. The duke claimed, on his return to Normandy, that Edward had promised to leave the kingdom to him, as a relative. It happened that Harold, an English earl, was shipwrecked on the coast of Normandy. William seized Harold, shut him up in prison, and kept him there until he promised to do his best to make William King of England at the death of Edward.
Two years later, when Edward the Confessor died, it was found that in spite of his promise to William he had advised in his will that Harold be elected king by the witan, an assembly of English freemen. This body of men took the good old king’s advice, chose Harold king, and saw that he was crowned at once. Harold excused himself for breaking his word to William because King Edward had decided in his favor instead of William’s, and because the oath he had made had been forced from him while he was a prisoner.
William, however, was very angry when he heard that Harold had allowed himself to be crowned king of England. Getting together as large an army as he could in Normandy, he sailed across the Channel. In leaping ashore from his boat he tripped and fell forward with his hands upon the ground. Realizing that his soldiers would think this a bad sign, he clutched both hands full of earth, and rising he held them up, exclaiming, “See, I have taken possession of this land of England.”
The Normans took position in the village of Hastings. Harold went into camp on top of Senlac hill, now called Battle, about six miles from Hastings, and dug trenches around. Here a great battle began at four o’clock in the morning of the 14th of October, 1066. In advance of the Norman lines rode a knight in armor, bearing the duke’s colors, singing the Song of Roland, the great paladin in the army of Charlemagne, who had lived and fought nearly three hundred years before. It was a brave combat, with many knights and nobles on each side. The Norman found the Englishman a foeman worthy of his steel.