The years which saw the settlement of England, though not years of constant fighting like the two years between the march to Exeter and the fall of Chester, were not years of perfect peace.  William had to withstand foes on both sides of the sea, to withstand foes in his own household, to undergo his first defeat, to receive his first wound in personal conflict.  Nothing shook his firm hold either on duchy or kingdom; but in his later years his good luck forsook him.  And men did not fail to connect this change in his future with a change in himself, above all with one deed of blood which stands out as utterly unlike all his other recorded acts.

But the amount of warfare which William had to go through in these later years was small compared with the great struggles of his earlier days.  There is no tale to tell like the war of Val-es-dunes, like the French invasions of Normandy, like the campaigns that won England.  One event only of the earlier time is repeated almost as exactly as an event can be repeated.  William had won Maine once; he had now to win it again, and less thoroughly.  As Conqueror his work is done; a single expedition into Wales is the only campaign of this part of his life that led to any increase of territory.

When William sat down to the settlement of his kingdom after the fall of Chester, he was in the strictest sense full king over all England.  For the moment the whole land obeyed him; at no later moment did any large part of the land fail to obey him.  All opposition was now revolt.  Men were no longer keeping out an invader; when they rose, they rose against a power which, however wrongfully, was the established government of the land.  Two such movements took place.  One was a real revolt of Englishmen against foreign rule.  The other was a rebellion of William’s own earls in their own interests, in which English feeling went with the King.  Both were short sharp struggles which stand out boldly in the tale.  More important in the general story, though less striking in detail, are the relations of William to the other powers in and near the isle of Britain.  With the crown of the West-Saxon kings, he had taken up their claims to supremacy over the whole island, and probably beyond it.  And even without such claims, border warfare with his Welsh and Scottish neighbours could not be avoided.  Counting from the completion of the real conquest of England in 1070, there were in William’s reign three distinct sources of disturbance.  There were revolts within the kingdom of England.  There was border warfare in Britain.  There were revolts in William’s continental dominions.  And we may add actual foreign warfare or threats of foreign warfare, affecting William, sometimes in his Norman, sometimes in his English character.