"You are the man I want, to keep these wild blades in order. A man like you is needed over them. I make you a sea-king here and now, and my clerk shall give you it in writing." And a sea-king Ulf was from that day, or, as we should now call it, "admiral,"--that is to say, a captain over other captains. It made Thorfin very angry, but since he cared a great deal for his own skin, he took considerable pains to keep in good order for many a day to come. "But first," said Ulf, cautiously, "Tell me what this is all about." Now those were the days when a king looked on his kingdom very much as though it was his private farm. It, and the people in it, existed chiefly for his sole benefit; and if they objected, so much the worse for the people. So, when Duke William of Normandy told Ulf a long story about his troubles, how Edward the Confessor, King of England and his cousin, had promised that when he died he would leave the kingdom to William, Ulf saw nothing strange in that. Why should not a man give a farm to his cousin when he died, especially when that cousin's wife, Matilda, was another cousin? Then Harold, Duke of Wessex, had sworn by a whole tubful of relics of dead saints that when Edward died he would not stand in William's way. That, too, was a great thing to do. A promise ought to be kept to the letter, and how much more a sacred oath like that!--although men do say that Harold did not know there was a relic within a mile of him at the time he gave the promise. But that promise Harold had not kept. On the contrary, he had claimed, first, that when he made it he had been shipwrecked on the Norman coast; he was really a prisoner, and gave the promise that he might get away; which as a matter of honour but made a bad matter worse. Then, more reasonably, from our point of view, he claimed that the kingdom of England belonged to the English, and was not his to give. Englishmen had made _him_ King, not William, and that was the end of it,--an answer which was likely to drive William nearly wild. And it did. William swore a great oath that before he died he would be King of all England. And Ulf, with many another, promised to help him. Then Ulf went straight back to his ship again and that very night set a double guard as anchor-watch, for never in all his life, he said, had he seen so many thieves together at one time, and so few honest men. All of those same thieves and the other few presently set sail across the channel; and, odd to say, to this day there are men who proudly claim that a very far back ancestor of theirs "came over with William the Conqueror." But perhaps they have made themselves believe that that particular person was one of those honest ones. Ulf talked it over with young Wulf in the first watch that night.