With the affairs of Wales William had little personally to do.  In this he is unlike those who came immediately before and after him.  In the lives of Harold and of William Rufus personal warfare against the Welsh forms an important part.  William the Great commonly left this kind of work to the earls of the frontier, to Hugh of Chester, Roger of Shrewsbury, and to his early friend William of Hereford, so long as that fierce warrior’s life lasted.  These earls were ever at war with the Welsh princes, and they extended the English kingdom at their cost.  Once only did the King take a personal share in the work, when he entered South Wales, in 1081.  We hear vaguely of his subduing the land and founding castles; we see more distinctly that he released many subjects who were in British bondage, and that he went on a religious pilgrimage to Saint David’s.  This last journey is in some accounts connected with schemes for the conquest of Ireland.  And in one most remarkable passage of the English Chronicle, the writer for once speculates as to what might have happened but did not.  Had William lived two years longer, he would have won Ireland by his wisdom without weapons.  And if William had won Ireland either by wisdom or by weapons, he would assuredly have known better how to deal with it than most of those who have come after him.  If any man could have joined together the lands which God has put asunder, surely it was he.  This mysterious saying must have a reference to some definite act or plan of which we have no other record.  And some slight approach to the process of winning Ireland without weapons does appear in the ecclesiastical intercourse between England and Ireland which now begins.  Both the native Irish princes and the Danes of the east coast begin to treat Lanfranc as their metropolitan, and to send bishops to him for consecration.  The name of the King of the English is never mentioned in the letters which passed between the English primate and the kings and bishops of Ireland.  It may be that William was biding his time for some act of special wisdom; but our speculations cannot go any further than those of the Peterborough Chronicler.

Revolt within the kingdom and invasion from without both began in the year in which the Conquest was brought to an end.  William’s ecclesiastical reforms were interrupted by the revolt of the Fenland.  William’s authority had never been fully acknowledged in that corner of England, while he wore his crown and held his councils elsewhere.  But the place where disturbances began, the abbey of Peterborough, was certainly in William’s obedience.  The warfare made memorable by the name of Hereward began in June 1070, and a Scottish harrying of Northern England, the second of five which are laid to the charge of Malcolm, took place in the same year, and most likely about the same time.  The English movement is connected alike with the course of the Danish fleet and with the appointment of Turold to