ecclesiastical affairs. One of these specially illustrates the
state of things with which William had to deal. In 1042, when the
Duke was about fourteen, Normandy adopted the Truce of God in its
later shape. It no longer attempted to establish universal peace;
it satisfied itself with forbidding, under the strongest
ecclesiastical censures, all private war and violence of any kind
on certain days of the week. Legislation of this kind has two
sides. It was an immediate gain if peace was really enforced for
four days in the week; but that which was not forbidden on the
other three could no longer be denounced as in itself evil. We are
told that in no land was the Truce more strictly observed than in
Normandy. But we may be sure that, when William was in the fulness
of his power, the stern weight of the ducal arm was exerted to
enforce peace on Mondays and Tuesdays as well as on Thursdays and
Fridays.

It was in the year 1047 that William's authority was most
dangerously threatened and that he was first called on to show in
all their fulness the powers that were in him. He who was to be
conqueror of Maine and conqueror of England was first to be
conqueror of his own duchy. The revolt of a large part of the
country, contrasted with the firm loyalty of another part, throws a
most instructive light on the internal state of the duchy. There
was, as there still is, a line of severance between the districts
which formed the first grant to Rolf and those which were
afterwards added. In these last a lingering remnant of old
Teutonic life had been called into fresh strength by new
settlements from Scandinavia. At the beginning of the reign of
Richard the Fearless, Rouen, the French-speaking city, is
emphatically contrasted with Bayeux, the once Saxon city and land,