years of his reign were spent in the revolts and conspiracies of
unruly nobles, who hated the young duke as the one representative
of law and order, and who were not eager to set any one in his
place who might be better able to enforce them.

Nobility, so variously defined in different lands, in Normandy took
in two classes of men. All were noble who had any kindred or
affinity, legitimate or otherwise, with the ducal house. The
natural children of Richard the Fearless were legitimated by his
marriage with their mother Gunnor, and many of the great houses of
Normandy sprang from her brothers and sisters. The mother of
William received no such exaltation as this. Besides her son, she
had borne to Robert a daughter Adelaide, and, after Robert's death,
she married a Norman knight named Herlwin of Conteville. To him,
besides a daughter, she bore two sons, Ode and Robert. They rose
to high posts in Church and State, and played an important part in
their half-brother's history. Besides men whose nobility was of
this kind, there were also Norman houses whose privileges were
older than the amours or marriages of any duke, houses whose
greatness was as old as the settlement of Rolf, as old that is as
the ducal power itself. The great men of both these classes were
alike hard to control. A Norman baron of this age was well
employed when he was merely rebelling against his prince or waging
private war against a fellow baron. What specially marks the time
is the frequency of treacherous murders wrought by men of the
highest rank, often on harmless neighbours or unsuspecting guests.
But victims were also found among those guardians of the young duke
whose faithful discharge of their duties shows that the Norman
nobility was not wholly corrupt. One indeed was a foreign prince,
Alan Count of the Bretons, a grandson of Richard the Fearless