Philip I at the age of eight succeeded his father under the regency of Baldwin V, count of Flanders. The most important event of Philip’s minority, and one in which he took no part, was the conquest of England. The Norman knights were distinguished above all others by their immoderate desire for warlike adventure and their brilliant exploits. Some of them, landing sixty years before as pilgrims on the south coast of Italy, had helped the besieged inhabitants of Salerno to drive off a Saracen army. Inspired by the success of their compatriots, the sons of a petty nobleman, Tancred de Hauteville, followed by a band of adventurers, wrested Apulia from the Greeks, Lombards, and Arabs, and sustained with success a most unequal struggle against the German and Byzantine emperors, who joined forces to exterminate them. They made prisoner the German pope Leo IX, devoted to the family of the emperor Henry III; and, humbling themselves before their captive, obtained permission to hold their conquest as a fief of the church. Robert Guiscard completed the subjection of Apulia and Calabria, and his brother Roger conquered Sicily, and it was thus the Normans founded the kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the pope obtained suzerainty over it. Norman valour was the talk of Europe, when William the Bastard, son of Robert the Magnificent, began to assemble an army for the conquest of England. Warriors, full of confidence in his destiny, rushed from all directions to his standard.[4] It was several hundred years since Britain had been conquered by the Saxons, and the country was now under the rule of King Harold, whom a storm had once wrecked, before he was king, upon the coast of Normandy. As William’s prisoner, Harold was compelled to cede the Norman his rights to the throne; and when free at this price no longer considered himself bound by an oath extracted under compulsion. It was the custom in those days to consider shipwrecked persons as delivered by the judgment of God to the lord of the shore on which the storm had cast them. They could be held captive and even put to torture for the sake of ransom. William recalled to Harold his promise, especially invoked the will of Edward the Confessor, the last king of England, and declared his willingness to abide by the decision of the church. The consistory, assembled at the Lateran, pronounced in William’s favour, and at the instigation of the monk Hildebrand awarded him the kingdom of England and sent him, together with a blessed standard, a diploma as sovereign of the country. A great battle fought between the two rivals near Hastings in 1066 decided the issue. Harold lost his life; and England, after a desperate struggle, became the conquest of the Normans. William divided the country into fiefs for his barons and knights, and thenceforth feudalism spread over England the network it had already fastened upon France, Germany, and Italy. [Illustration: PHILIP I (From an old French print)]