He needed no mentor to teach him the tactics of warfare he had learned them by observation.
Toughened by his years of exposure to merciless bloodshed and calculated injury, William was becoming a formidable fighter himself, physically strong, skilled with the sword and bow, an expert rider and possessed of uncommon courage and strength of purpose. Of his five official guardians, one was murdered while out riding, another poisoned, two others, including William's tutor, assassinated after being violently attacked in William's own bedchamber.Īmid this vortex of mayhem, William grew to young manhood, and at the age of fifteen or sixteen, established his independent court at Valognes.
He lived in the midst of private wars, accustomed to hearing news of assassinations and casual murders. Meanwhile the great magnates fought among themselves, each one a petty warlord in his castle stronghold, from which he went out from time to time to attack his enemies.īy the time he grew out of childhood, William must have been wary in the extreme, habituated to violence for it was occurring all around him. Year after year, with the Norman countryside in near anarchy, Walter continued to keep the young duke safe, snatching him up when danger threatened and taking him out of the castle and into a nearby village, to some anonymous peasant hut, where they could stay hidden. Protected by his uncle Walter, his mother's brother, who slept in William's room and was his bodyguard, the child duke spent many watchful nights alert for the sound of hoofbeats, listening for marauders and would-be kidnappers intent on capturing and controlling him so that the lands and wealth of Normandy could become theirs. At the best of times, these feuding magnates were held in check by the greater power of a strong overlord, as well as by the force of custom and feudal law at the worst of times, there was little or nothing to restrain their instinct to combat one another in treacherous, frequently brutal warfare.īefore he left for his pilgrimage, Robert had made young William heir to the duchy-and heir to its political turmoil. Born in 1028, the natural son of Robert, Duke of Normandy, young William was left fatherless at age seven when Robert died while on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.Įleventh-century Normandy was a savagely turbulent society, in which aggressive and unruly landowners struggled endlessly for preeminence, under the overlordship of the duke.
It was a miracle that William survived his childhood. So that no one dared to do anything contrary to his will."
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