The very spirit of the “sea-wolves” who had so long “lived on the pillage of the world” seemed embodied in his gigantic form, his enormous strength, his savage countenance, his desperate bravery, the fury of his wrath, the ruthlessness of his revenge. “No knight under heaven,” his enemies confessed, “was William’s peer.” Boy as he was, horse and man went down before his lance at Val-ès-dunes. All the fierce gayety of his nature broke out in the chivalrous adventures of his youth, in his rout of fifteen Angevins with but five soldiers at his back, in his defiant ride over the ground which Geoffry Martel claimed from him--a ride with hawk on fist as though war and the chase were one. No man could bend his bow. His mace crashed its way through a ring of English warriors to the foot of the standard. He rose to his greatest heights in moments when other men despaired. His voice rang out like a trumpet to rally his soldiers as they fled before the English charge at Senlac. In his winter march on Chester he strode afoot at the head of his fainting troops, and helped with his own hands to clear a road through the snowdrifts. With the northman’s daring broke out the northman’s pitilessness. When the townsmen of Alençon hung raw hides along their walls in scorn of the baseness of his birth, with cries of “Work for the tanner!” William tore out his prisoners’ eyes, cut off their hands and feet, and flung them into the town. At the close of his greatest victory he refused Harold’s body a grave. Hundreds of Hampshire men were driven from their homes to make him a hunting-ground, and his harrying of Northumbria left the north of England a desolate waste. There is a grim, ruthless ring about his very jests. In his old age Philip of France mocked at the Conqueror’s unwieldy bulk and at the sickness which confined him to his bed at Rouen. “King William has as long a lying-in,” laughed his enemy, “as a woman behind her curtains!” “When I get up,” swore William, “I will go to mass in Philip’s land, and bring a rich offering for my churching. I will offer a thousand candles for my fee. Flaming brands shall they be, and steel shall glitter over the fire they make.” At harvest-tide town and hamlet flaring into ashes along the French border fulfilled the Conqueror’s vow. There is the same savage temper in the loneliness of his life. He recked little of men’s love or hate. His grim look, his pride, his silence, his wild outbursts of passion, spread terror through his court. “So stark and fierce was he,” says the English chronicler, “that none dared resist his will.” His graciousness to Anselm only brought out into stronger relief the general harshness of his tone. His very wrath was solitary. “To no man spake he, and no man dared speak to him,” when the news reached him of Harold’s accession to the throne. It was only when he passed from the palace to the loneliness of the woods that the king’s temper unbent. “He loved the wild deer as though he had