Yet that man was one who had not only passed the age of three score years and ten,[329] but had passed it without ever having held any office, in court, camp, or administration, of sufficient importance to give scope for the display of any special capacities for generalship or government, or for the acquisition of special knowledge and experience in the conduct of politics or of war. Neither by birth nor by origin was William the Marshal a magnate of the highest rank. The founder of the Marshal family, one Gilbert, who seems to have been either a cadet or a connexion by marriage of the Norman house of Tancarville, was marshal to Henry I; that office became hereditary in his family, and furnished a surname to all his race. The office of the King’s Marshal was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a grand serjeanty and nothing more; the military duties and responsibilities originally involved in it had long since passed into other hands, and the material advantages attached to it seem to have been of small extent and importance; it gave to its holder little more than a position of honour and dignity in the royal household, the right of carrying the sword of state on certain public occasions, and, possibly, a sort of inchoate right to the custody of the royal castle of Marlborough. William was a younger son; at the age of twelve years or thereabouts {c. 1155} he was sent, with a companion and a serving-lad, to seek his fortune abroad, in the household of his father’s cousin William of Tancarville, the chamberlain of Normandy. There he shewed so little promise of distinction that the other young squires declared “William Waste-meat”[330] to be good for nothing but eating, drinking, and sleeping. The chamberlain, however, had a better opinion of his young kinsman. He knighted him at a moment when Henry II and Louis VII were at strife and some partisans of Louis were threatening the Norman Vexin: and Sir William in his first fight--in defence of the castle of Drincourt--proved himself well worthy of his spurs.[331] But immediately afterwards the two Kings made peace; and it was not in war, but in the tournaments which on the Continent (they were as yet unknown in England) furnished at once a school of arms and a means of subsistence for the younger members of the baronial houses in time of peace, that William first made himself a name.[332]