But the case gained tenfold strength when William added that the doer of the wrong was of all men the one most specially bound not to do it.  The usurper was in any case William’s man, bound to act in all things for his lord.  Perhaps he was more; perhaps he had directly sworn to receive William as king.  Perhaps he had promised all this with an oath of special solemnity.  It would be easy to enlarge on all these further counts as making up an amount of guilt which William not only had the right to chastise, but which he would be lacking in duty if he failed to chastise.  He had to punish the perjurer, to avenge the wrongs of the saints.  Surely all who should help him in so doing would be helping in a righteous work.

The answer to all this was obvious.  Putting the case at the very worst, assuming that Harold had sworn all that he is ever said to have sworn, assuming that he swore it in the most solemn way in which he is ever said to have sworn it, William’s claim was not thereby made one whit better.  Whatever Harold’s own guilt might be, the people of England had no share in it.  Nothing that Harold had done could bar their right to choose their king freely.  Even if Harold declined the crown, that would not bind the electors to choose William.  But when the notion of choosing kings had begun to sound strange, all this would go for nothing.  There would be no need even to urge that in any case the wrong done by Harold to William gave William a casus belli against Harold, and that William, if victorious, might claim the crown of England, as a possession of Harold’s, by right of conquest.  In fact William never claimed the crown by conquest, as conquest is commonly understood.  He always represented himself as the lawful heir, unhappily driven to use force to obtain his rights.  The other pleas were quite enough to satisfy most men out of England and Scandinavia.  William’s work was to claim the crown of which he was unjustly deprived, and withal to deal out a righteous chastisement on the unrighteous and ungodly man by whom he had been deprived of it.

In the hands of diplomatists like William and Lanfranc, all these arguments, none of which had in itself the slightest strength, were enough to turn the great mass of continental opinion in William’s favour.  But he could add further arguments specially adapted to different classes of minds.  He could hold out the prospect of plunder, the prospect of lands and honours in a land whose wealth was already proverbial.  It might of course be answered that the enterprise against England was hazardous and its success unlikely.  But in such matters, men listen rather to their hopes than to their fears.  To the Normans it would be easy, not only to make out a case against Harold, but to rake up old grudges against the English nation.  Under Harold the son of Cnut, Alfred, a prince half Norman by birth, wholly Norman by education, the brother of the late king, the lawful heir to the crown, had