William the Great, as men of his own day styled him, William the Conqueror, as by one event he stamped himself on our history, was now Duke of Normandy. The full grandeur of his indomitable will, his large and patient statesmanship, the loftiness of aim which lifts him out of the petty incidents of his age, were as yet only partly disclosed. But there never was a moment from his boyhood when he was not among the greatest of men. His life was one long mastering of difficulty after difficulty. The shame of his birth remained in his name of “the Bastard.” His father, Duke Robert, had seen Arlotta, the daughter of a tanner of the town, washing her linen in the little brook by [Illustration: WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.] Falaise, and, loving her, had made her the mother of his boy. Robert’s departure on a pilgrimage from which he never returned left William a child-ruler among the most turbulent baronage in Christendom, and treason and anarchy surrounded him as he grew to manhood. Disorder broke at last into open revolt. Surprised in his hunting-seat at Valognes by the rising of the Bessin and Cotentin districts, in which the pirate temper and lawlessness lingered longest, William had only time to dash through the fords of Vire with the rebels on his track. A fierce combat of horse on the slopes of Val-ès-dunes, to the southeastward of Caen, left him master of the duchy, and the old Scandinavian Normandy yielded forever to the new civilization which streamed in with French alliances and the French tongue. William was himself a type of the transition. In the young duke’s character the old world mingled strangely with the new, the pirate jostled roughly with the statesman. William was the most terrible, as he was the last outcome of the northern race.