Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/303

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was such that it enabled him to feed troops of mercenaries and to take armed knights into his pay. Another leading citizen, next in wealth to Conan, was William the son of Ansgar, whose name seems to imply the purest Norman blood. Conan had entered into a treaty with William, the object of which, we are told, was to betray the metropolis of Normandy and the Duke of the Normans—the sleepy Duke, as our guide calls him—into the power of the island King. Nor was this merely the scheme of Conan and William; public feeling in the city went heartily with them. A party still clave to the Duke; but the mass of the men of Rouen threw in their lot with Conan, and were, like him, ready to receive William as their sovereign instead of Robert. They may well have thought that, in the present state of things, any change would be for the better; the utter lawlessness of the time, which might have its charms for turbulent nobles, would have no charms for the burghers of a great city. Or the men of Rouen may have argued then, much as the men of Bourdeaux argued ages later, that they were likely to enjoy a greater measure of municipal freedom, under a King of the English, dwelling apart from them in his own island, than they would ever win from a Duke of the Normans, holding