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.

The succession of one who was at once bastard and minor could happen only when no one else had a distinctly better claim William could never have held his ground for a moment against a brother of his father of full age and undoubted legitimacy.  But among the living descendants of former dukes some were themselves of doubtful legitimacy, some were shut out by their profession as churchmen, some claimed only through females.  Robert had indeed two half-brothers, but they were young and their legitimacy was disputed; he had an uncle, Robert Archbishop of Rouen, who had been legitimated by the later marriage of his parents.  The rival who in the end gave William most trouble was his cousin Guy of Burgundy, son of a daughter of his grandfather Richard the Good.  Though William’s succession was not liked, no one of these candidates was generally preferred to him.  He therefore succeeded; but the first twelve years of his reign were spent in the revolts and conspiracies of unruly nobles, who hated the young duke as the one representative of law and order, and who were not eager to set any one in his place who might be better able to enforce them.