To this end the lords of the Bessin and the Cotentin revolted, their leader being Neal, Viscount of Saint-Sauveur in the Cotentin.  We are told that the mass of the people everywhere wished well to their duke; in the common sovereign lay their only chance of protection against their immediate lords.  But the lords had armed force of the land at their bidding.  They first tried to slay or seize the Duke himself, who chanced to be in the midst of them at Valognes.  He escaped; we hear a stirring tale of his headlong ride from Valognes to Falaise.  Safe among his own people, he planned his course of action.  He first sought help of the man who could give him most help, but who had most wronged him.  He went into France; he saw King Henry at Poissy, and the King engaged to bring a French force to William’s help under his own command.

This time Henry kept his promise.  The dismemberment of Normandy might have been profitable to France by weakening the power which had become so special an object of French jealousy; but with a king the common interest of princes against rebellious barons came first.  Henry came with a French army, and fought well for his ally on the field of Val-es-dunes.  Now came the Conqueror’s first battle, a tourney of horsemen on an open table-land just within the land of the rebels between Caen and Mezidon.  The young duke fought well and manfully; but the Norman writers allow that it was French help that gained him the victory.  Yet one of the many anecdotes of the battle points to a source of strength which was always ready to tell for any lord against rebellious vassals.  One of the leaders of the revolt, Ralph of Tesson, struck with remorse and stirred by the prayers of his knights, joined the Duke just before the battle.  He had sworn to smite William wherever he found him, and he fulfilled his oath by giving the Duke a harmless blow with his glove.  How far an oath to do an unlawful act is binding is a question which came up again at another stage of William’s life.

The victory at Val-es-dunes was decisive, and the French King, whose help had done so much to win it, left William to follow it up.  He met with but little resistance except at the stronghold of Brionne.  Guy himself vanishes from Norman history.  William had now conquered his own duchy, and conquered it by foreign help.  For the rest of his Norman reign he had often to strive with enemies at home, but he had never to put down such a rebellion again as that of the lords of western Normandy.  That western Normandy, the truest Normandy, had to yield to the more thoroughly Romanized lands to the east.  The difference between them never again takes a political shape.  William was now lord of all Normandy, and able to put down all later disturbers of the peace.  His real reign now begins; from the age of nineteen or twenty, his acts are his own.  According to his abiding practice, he showed himself a merciful conqueror.  Through his whole reign he shows a