The rulers of the new Duchy were nearly all strong men, hard fighters, shrewd-headed, and ambitious; but the greatest of the line was undoubtedly William, an illegitimate son of Duke Robert ‘the Devil’. William’s ambition was of the restless type of his Scandinavian forefathers, and his duchy in northern France seemed to him too small to match his hopes. When he noted that England was ruled by Edward ‘the Confessor’, a feeble son of Ethelred ‘the Rede-less’, who had gained the throne on the death of Cnut’s two sons, he determined shrewdly that his conquests should lie in this direction. Many things favoured his cause, not the least that Edward the Confessor himself, who had been brought up in Normandy and who had no direct heirs, was quite willing to acknowledge William as his successor. The national hero of England at the time Edward died, and who promptly proclaimed himself king, was Harold the Saxon, a member of the powerful family of Godwin that had for years controlled and owned the greater part of the land in the south. Unfortunately for Harold the north and midlands were mainly governed by the House of Morkere and their friends, who hated the family of Godwin as dangerous rivals far more than they dreaded a Norman invasion. Thus any help that they or their tenants proffered was so slow in its rendering and so niggardly in its amount that it proved of very little use. In addition to jealousies at home, Harold, at the moment that he heard William, Duke of Normandy, had indeed landed on the south coast, was far off in Yorkshire, where he had just succeeded in repelling an invasion of Danes at the battle of Stamford Bridge. At once he started southwards, but as he marched his army melted away, some of the men to enjoy the spoils taken from the Danes, others to attend to their harvests. The deserters could claim that they were following the advice of the Father of Christendom, since Pope Gregory VII had given William a banner that he had blessed and had denounced Harold as a perjurer. One of the reasons for Gregory’s anger with the Saxons was that Harold had dared to appoint as Archbishop of Canterbury a bishop of whom he did not approve, while further the crafty William had persuaded him that Harold, who as a young man had been wrecked upon the Norman coast, had sworn on the bones of some holy saint that he would never seize the crown of England. He had been a prisoner in William’s power and only on this condition had he been set free to return to his native land.