William was in his park of Rouvray, near Rouen, trying a bow and arrows for the chase, when a faithful servant arrived from England, to tell him that Edward was dead and Harold proclaimed king.  William gave his bow to one of his people, and went back to his palace at Rouen, where he paced about in silence, sitting down, rising up, leaning upon a bench, without opening his lips and without any one of his people’s daring to address a word to him.  There entered his seneschal William de Bretenil, of whom “What ails the duke?” asked they who were present.  “Ye will soon know,” answered he.  Then going up to the duke, he said, “Wherefore conceal your tidings, my lord?  All the city knows that King Edward is dead; and that Harold has broken his oath to you, and had himself crowned king.”  “Ay,” said William, “it is that which doth weigh me down.”  “My lord,” said William Fitz-Osbern, a gallant knight and confidential friend of the duke, “none should be wroth over what can be mended:  it depends but on you to stop the mischief Harold is doing you; you shall destroy him, if it please you.  You have right; you have good men and true to serve you; you need but have courage:  set on boldly.”  William gathered together his most important and most trusted counsellors; and they were unanimous in urging him to resent the perjury and injury.  He sent to Harold a messenger charged to say, “William, duke of the Normans, doth recall to thee the oath thou swarest to him with thy mouth and with thy hand, on real and saintly relics.”  “It is true,” answered Harold, “that I swore, but on compulsion; I promised what did not belong to me; my kingship is not mine own; I cannot put it off from me without the consent of the country.  I cannot any the more, without the consent of the country, espouse a foreigner.  As for my sister, whom the duke claims for one of his chieftains, she died within the year; if he will, I will send him the corpse.”  William replied without any violence, claiming the conditions sworn, and especially Harold’s marriage with his daughter Adele.  For all answer to this summons Harold married a Saxon, sister of two powerful Saxon chieftains; Edwin and Morkar.  There was an open rupture; and William swore that “within the year he would go and claim, at the sword’s point, payment of what was due to him, on the very spot where Harold thought himself to be most firm on his feet.”

And he set himself to the work.  But, being as far-sighted as he was ambitious, he resolved to secure for his enterprise the sanction of religious authority and the formal assent of the Estates of Normandy.  Not that he had any inclination to subordinate his power to that of the Pope.  Five years previously, Robert de Grandmesnil, abbot of St. Evroul, with whom William had got embroiled, had claimed to re-enter his monastery as master by virtue solely of an order from Pope Nicholas II.  “I will listen to the legates of the Pope, the common father of the