Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/73

Rh have been no conquest of England, and without some study of them that conquest cannot be understood.

If we pass over rapidly, as for lack of information we must needs do, the dozen years of William's minority, we find his reign in Normandy chiefly occupied with his struggles with his vassals, his neighbors, and the king of France, all a necessary consequence of his feudal position as duke. The Norman vassals, always turbulent and rebellious, seem to have broken forth anew upon the death of Robert the Magnificent, and such accounts as have reached us of the events of the next twelve years reveal a constant state of anarchy and disorder. The revolt of the barons came to a head in 1047, when the whole of Lower Normandy rose under the leadership of the two chief vicomtes of the region, Ranulf of Bayeux and Néel of Saint-Sauveur, the ruins of whose family castle of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte still greet the traveller who leaves Cherbourg for Paris. William, who was hunting in the neighborhood of Valognes, was obliged to flee half-clad in the night and to pick his way alone by devious paths across the enemy's country to his castle of Falaise. With the assistance of the French king he was able to collect an army from Upper Normandy and meet the rebels on the great plain of Val-des-Dunes, near Caen, where the Mont-joie of the French and the Dex aie of the duke's followers answered the barons' appeals to their local saints of St. Sauveur, St. Sever, and St. Amand. William was victorious; the