His first care, when his health was re-established, was for the
restoration of Jumieges, which he built with great splendor, and often
visited. His chief desire was to enter the abbey as a brother of the
order, but his wish was opposed by the excellent Abbot Martin, who
pointed out to him that he ought not to desert the station to which he
had been called by Heaven, nor quit the government till his son was old
enough to take the charge upon himself, and at the same time encouraged
him by the example of many a saint, whose heavenward road had lain
through the toils and cares of a secular life.

William yielded to the arguments of the good father, but his heart was
still in the peaceful abbey, and he practised in secret the devotions
and austerities of the cloister to the utmost of his power, longing
earnestly for the time when he might lay aside the weary load of cares
of war and of government, and retire to that holy brotherhood.

In Normandy, his strict, keen justice made him greatly honored
and loved, but the French greatly hated and abhorred him, and his
transactions with them were sometimes cunning, sometimes violent. He
had much of the old Northman about him, and had not entered into the
Church's teachings of the sanctity of marriage. Like his father, he had
had a half-acknowledged wife, Espriota, who was the mother of his only
child, Richard, but he put her away in order to ally himself with one of
the great French families, and he had his child brought up at Bayeux,
among Norse-speaking nobles, as if he would rather see him a Norseman
than a, French prince.

The bold and devout but inconsistent William was the dread of all his
neighbors, and especially of Arnulf, Count of Flanders. William was in
alliance with Herluin, Count of Montreuil, against Arnulf; when, in