Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/307

 quest brought temptations, his character seems to have deteriorated as he met with resistance, and, though he was always ready to allow his own will to override justice, he became more tyrannical as he grew older. He amassed great riches by oppression and became avaricious (for his character generally, see A.-S. Chron. an. 1066). Like all his race, he was addicted to legal subtleties; his oppression generally wore the garb of legality, and was for that reason specially grinding. Adopting the character of the lawful successor of the Confessor, he maintained English laws and institutions, continuing, for example, the three annual courts of the earlier kings; but he gave these courts, and indeed all the higher machinery of government and administration, a feudal character, though he kept English feudalism in subordination to the power of the crown (for his use of legal fictions in dealing with English lands, see, iv. 8–9, v. 15–51). Nor does his surname, ‘the Conqueror,’ used by Orderic [see ], prove that he laid stress on the fact that he gained and held England by the sword, for the term at that time signified ‘an acquirer’ or, in legal phraseology, ‘a purchaser.’ He is generally called ‘the Bastard’ by contemporary writers, and after the accession of William Rufus is often distinguished from him by being called ‘the Great’ (ib. u.s. ii. 531–3). His laws in their fuller form (, Laws, p. 490) cannot be accepted as genuine, but the short version printed by Bishop Stubbs (Select Charters, p. 80), and given with some variations by Hoveden (ii. 216), apparently represents enactments made by him on different occasions, and his confirmation of Canute's law and his regulation of appeals (, p. 489) are most probably genuine (see Stubbs's Pref. to p. ii, Rolls Ser.). Hoveden, apparently on the authority of Ranulf de Glanville [q. v.], says that in the fourth year of his reign William caused twelve men from each shire to declare on oath the customs of the kingdom. There seems no reason to reject this tradition, though the pretended results of the inquest cannot be accepted as genuine [for William's children, see under, (d. 1083)]. Assertions that he had any illegitimate children or was unfaithful to his wife lack historical basis.

[The life of William is exhaustively related in Freeman's Norman Conquest, vols. ii. iii. iv., with which should be read Bishop Stubbs's Const. Hist. i. cc. 9, 11, and reference may be made to Palgrave's brilliant, though not always trustworthy, Normandy and England, vol. iii.; Lappenberg's England under Norman Kings, transl. by Thorpe, and parts of M. de Crozal's Lanfranc. The principal original authorities are: Will. of Poitiers, the Conqueror's chaplain, ed. Giles, violently anti-English, ending about 1067; Will. of Jumièges, ed. Duchesne, though much of lib. vii. is the work of Robert of Torigni, after 1135; A.-S. Chron. ed. Plummer. For the battle of Hastings: the Bayeux tapestry; Guy of Amiens ap. Mon. Hist. Brit.; the poem of Bishop Baudri, ed. Delisle, ap. Mém. de la Société des Antiq. de Normandie, av. 1873, xxviii; a little later come Orderic, ed. Duchesne, and, better, ed. Prévost ap. Société de l'Histoire de France; Geoffrey Gaimar's French Poem (Chron. Anglo-Norm. vol. i.); Flor. Wig.; Eadmer's Hist. Nov., ed. Migne; Will. of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum (Rolls Ser.); Sym. Dunelm. (Rolls Ser.); Wace's Roman de Rou (temp. Hen. II), ed. Andresen.]  WILLIAM II (d. 1100), king of England, third son of William II, duke of Normandy (afterwards king of England; see ), and his wife Matilda of Flanders [q. v.], was probably born between 1056 and 1060. He was educated and knighted by Lanfranc [q. v.] In 1074 or 1077 he and one of his brothers—either Henry or Richard—had a quarrel with their eldest brother, Robert [see ], which served as a pretext for Robert's rebellion against their father [for details see ]. In the war which followed William fought on his father's side, and was wounded in a skirmish at Gerberoi, 1079. The Conqueror on his deathbed declared that William had always been a dutiful son, and sent him on 8 Sept. 1087 to England with a letter to Lanfranc desiring the archbishop to make him king ‘if he deemed it might justly be done.’ William sailed from Touques, taking with him two English prisoners whom the dying Conqueror had just released, Morkere, earl of Northumbria [q. v.], and Wulfnoth, brother of Harold. He led them to Winchester, and there put them again in prison, where he kept them the rest of their lives. On 26 Sept. Lanfranc crowned him at Westminster.

The new king was of middle height, square-built and strong, with a broad forehead, eyes of varying colour and marked with white specks, yellowish hair, and a complexion so ruddy that the nickname derived from it—‘Rufus,’ ‘the Red’—is used by contemporaries not only as an epithet to distinguish him from his father, but even as a substitute for his real name. Immediately after his coronation he returned to Winchester, to make from the treasury there a lavish distribution of gifts to the churches and alms to the poor of his realm for the good of his father's soul. He returned to