the greatest was William of Normandy. In William
the wild impulses of the northman's blood mingled strangely with the cool
temper of the modern statesman. As he was the last, so he was the most
terrible outcome of the northern race. The very spirit of the sea-robbers
from whom he sprang 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 owned, "was William's peer." Boy as he was at Val-es-dunes, horse
and man went down before his lance. All the fierce gaiety of his nature
broke out in the warfare of his youth, in his rout of fifteen Angevins
with but five men at his back, in his defiant ride over the ground which
Geoffry Martel claimed from him, a ride with hawk on fist as if war and
the chase were one. No man could bend William's bow. His mace crashed its
way through a ring of English warriors to the foot of the Standard. He
rose to his greatest height at moments when other men despaired. His
voice rang out as a trumpet when his soldiers fled before the English
charge at Senlac, and his rally turned the flight into a means of
victory. In his winter march on Chester he strode afoot at the head of
his fainting troops and helped with his own hand to clear a road through
the snowdrifts. And with the northman's daring broke out the northman's
pitilessness. When the townsmen of Alencon hung raw hides along their
walls in scorn of the "tanner's" grandson, William tore out his
prisoners' eyes, hewed off their hands and feet, and flung them into the
town. Hundreds of Hampshire men were driven from their homes to make him
a hunting-ground and his harrying of Northumbria left Northern England a
desolate waste. Of men's love or hate he recked little. His grim look,
his pride, his silence, his wild outbursts of passion, left William
lonely even in his court. His subjects trembled as he passed. "So stark
and fierce was he," writes the English chronicler, "that none dared
resist his will." 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 seizure of
the throne. It was only when he passed from his palace to the loneliness
of the woods that the King's temper unbent. "He loved the wild deer as
though he had been their father."

[Sidenote: His rule]

It was the genius of William which lifted him out of this mere northman