William the Conqueror [5]
When we next see William's distinct personal action, he is still young, but no longer a child or even a boy. At nineteen or thereabouts he is a wise and valiant man, and his valour and wisdom are tried to the uttermost. A few years of comparative quiet were chiefly occupied, as a quiet time in those days commonly was, with ecclesiastical affairs. One of these specially illustrates the state of things with which William had to deal. In 1042, when the Duke was about fourteen, Normandy adopted the Truce of God in its later shape. It no longer attempted to establish universal peace; it satisfied itself with forbidding, under the strongest ecclesiastical censures, all private war and violence of any kind on certain days of the week. Legislation of this kind has two sides. It was an immediate gain if peace was really enforced for four days in the week; but that which was not forbidden on the other three could no longer be denounced as in itself evil. We are told that in no land was the Truce more strictly observed than in Normandy. But we may be sure that, when William was in the fulness of his power, the stern weight of the ducal arm was exerted to enforce peace on Mondays and Tuesdays as well as on Thursdays and Fridays.
It was in the year 1047 that William's authority was most dangerously threatened and that he was first called on to show in all their fulness the powers that were in him. He who was to be conqueror of Maine and conqueror of England was first to be conqueror of his own duchy. The revolt of a large part of the country, contrasted with the firm loyalty of another part, throws a most instructive light on the internal state of the duchy. There was, as there still is, a line of severance between the districts which formed the first grant to Rolf and those which were afterwards added. In these last a lingering remnant of old Teutonic life had been called into fresh strength by new settlements from Scandinavia. At the beginning of the reign of Richard the Fearless, Rouen, the French-speaking city, is emphatically contrasted with Bayeux, the once Saxon city and land, now the headquarters of the Danish speech. At that stage the Danish party was distinctly a heathen party. We are not told whether Danish was still spoken so late as the time of William's youth. We can hardly believe that the Scandinavian gods still kept any avowed worshippers. But the geographical limits of the revolt exactly fall in with the boundary which had once divided French and Danish speech, Christian and heathen worship. There was a wide difference in feeling on the two sides of the Dive. The older Norman settlements, now thoroughly French in tongue and manners, stuck faithfully to the Duke; the lands to the west rose against him. Rouen and Evreux were firmly loyal to William; Saxon Bayeux and Danish Coutances were the headquarters of his enemies.
When the geographical division took this shape, we are surprised at the candidate for the duchy who was put forward by the rebels. William was a Norman born and bred; his rival was in every sense a Frenchman. This was William's cousin Guy of Burgundy, whose connexion with the ducal house was only by the spindle-side. But his descent was of uncontested legitimacy, which gave him an excuse for claiming the duchy in opposition to the bastard grandson of the tanner. By William he had been enriched with great possessions, among which was the island fortress of Brionne in the Risle. The real object of the revolt was the partition of the duchy. William was to be dispossessed; Guy was to be duke in the lands east of Dive; the great lords of Western Normandy were to be left independent. 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