At this deed was Count Baldwin much enraged; and when
matters had thus remained a while, Duke William sent once more to Count
Baldwin to parley again of the marriage. The count sounded his daughter
on the subject, and she answered that it pleased her well. So the
nuptials took place with very great joy. And after the aforesaid
matters, Count Baldwin, laughing withal, asked his daughter wherefore she
had so lightly accepted the marriage she had aforetime so cruelly
refused. And she answered that she did not then know the duke so well as
she did now; for, said she, if he had not great heart and high emprise,
he had not been so bold as to dare come and beat me in my father's
chamber."

Amongst the historians who treat this story as a romantic and untruthlike
fable, some believe themselves to have discovered, in divers documents of
the eleventh and twelfth centuries, circumstances almost equally singular
as regards the cause of the obstacles met with at first by Duke William
in his pretensions to the hand of Princess Matilda, and as regards the
motive for the first refusal on the part of Matilda herself. According
to some, the Flemish princess had conceived a strong passion for a noble
Saxon, Brihtric Meaw, who had been sent by King Edward the Confessor to
the court of Flanders, and who was remarkable for his beauty. She wished
to marry him, but the handsome Saxon was not willing; and Matilda at
first gave way to violent grief on that account, and afterwards, when she
became queen of England, to vindictive hatred, the weight of which she
made him feel severely. Other writers go still farther, and say that,
before being sought in marriage by William, Matilda had not fallen in
love with a handsome Saxon, but had actually married a Flemish burgess,
named Gerbod, patron of the church of St. Dertin, at St. Omer, and that
she had by him two and perhaps three children, traces of whom recur, it
is said, under the reign of William, king of England. There is no
occasion to enter upon the learned controversies of which these different
allegations have been the cause; it is sufficient to say that they have
led to nothing but obscurity, contradiction, and doubt, and that there is
more moral verisimilitude in the account just given, especially in
Matilda's first prejudice against marriage with a bastard, and in her
conversation with her father, Count Baldwin, when she had changed her
opinion upon the subject. Independently of the