up
his studies; but we may fairly believe that he learned enough to
understand the simple formulae of his own English charters. This leads
one to ask the question: Would he not have been as likely to understand
his own praises in the tongue of the conquered English as in what is
supposed to represent his own native speech? Have we, after all,
departed any further from the tongue of the oldest Charter of London
than the Imperial dialect of abstractions and antitheses has departed
from the simple and vigorous speech of the Roman de Rou? And, if he
could spell it out in either tongue, he would find it somewhat faint
praise to be told that, judged by the standard of the nineteenth
century, he was a mere barbarian, but that M.F. Galeron would
condescend so far as to suggest to his contemporaries to judge the local
hero by a less rigid rule. If this is all the credit that the great
William can get from his own people in his own birthplace, we can only
say that, while demurring to his title of legislator of England, we
would give him much better measure than this, even if we were writing on
the site of the choir of Waltham.

Antiquaries have, till lately, generally acquiesced in the local belief
that the existing building is the actual castle of Robert the Devil. The
belief in no way commits us to the details of the local legend. Robert
must have had an astonishingly keen sight if he could, from any window
of the existing keep, judge of the whiteness of a pair of feet and
ankles at the bottom of the rock. Nor does it at all follow that, if
the present keep was standing at the time of William's birth, William
was therefore born in it. The Duke's mistress would be just as likely to
be lodged in some of the other buildings within the circuit of the
castle as in the great square tower of defence. And, if we accept the
belief, which is now becoming more prevalent, that the present keep is
of the twelfth century and not of the eleventh, we are not thereby at
all committed to the dogma that, because Robert the Devil lived before
1066, he could not possibly have had a castle of stone. In the wars of
the eleventh and twelfth centuries many castles in Normandy were
destroyed, not a few of them by William himself after the great revolt
which was put down at Val-es-dunes. The Norman castle, evidently of the
type used after the Conquest, was introduced into England before the
Conquest by the foreign favourites of Edward the Confessor. The