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William I, the Conqueror






Born: Falaise, 1027. Ascended the Throne:

25 December 1066. Coronation: Westminster Abbey, 25 December 1066. Married: Matilda, daughter of the Count of Flanders, c.1050.

Children: Four sons and six daughters.

Died: 1087. Buried: St Stephen's Abbey, Caen, Normandy.

Wiliam I, the Conqueror (1027-1087), was the first Norman king of England. He was born at Falaise, France. He was the son of Robert I, Duke of Normandy, and inher­ited Normandy at the age of eight. During his youth there was much unrest. At the age of 20, he put down a great rebellion at the battle of Val-es-dunes, which he won with the aid of his lord, King Henry of France. From that time on, William ruled Normandy with an iron hand.

In 1051, William visited England. King Edward the Confessor granted him the suc­cession to the English throne as his nearest adult heir. In 1064, Harold, Edward's brother-in-law, was shipwrecked on the Norman coast and taken prisoner. He pro­mised to support William's claim to the throne in return for his freedom. But when Edward died in 1066, Harold obtained the succession on the basis of a deathbed grant by Edward and election by the nobles and prelates of England.

William immediately invaded England. His expedition had the pope's blessings, because William was expected to depose the Anglo-Saxon archbishop of Canterbury and introduce ecclesiastical reforms. Before William could sail, the king of Norway invaded northern England. King Harold hurried north and defeated the Norwegian invaders at Stamford Bridge. William lan­ded before Harold could return to defend the coast. The Normans destroyed the Anglo-Saxon army and killed Harold at the Battle of Hastings.

On Christmas Day, 1066, William was crowned king. William then supressed local rebellions. He took lands from those who resisted him, and gave them to his followers to hold in return for their military service to him. To emphasize the legitimacy of his crown, William confimed the laws of Edward the Confessor and retained all the powers of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy. He levied Danegeld, the only national tax on landed property in all of Europe at that time. At Salisbury in 1086, he made all the landholders, even the vassals of his barons, swear allegiance directly to him as king.

William was devout, firm in purpose, and unchanging in gaining his ends. His greatest monument is Domesday Book, an exhaustive survey of the land, the principal landholders, the farm population, and the material and financial resources of his realm.

William invaded England with about 12000 men. Legend tells that when he land­ed on the rocky coast he stumbled and fell. Turning the mishap into a good omen, he took a handful of soil and said, " See, I have grasped England's land".

It took William 4 more years to conquer all of England. He was often brutal in sub­duing the Saxons, but brutality was com­mon at the time.

The Norman Conquest was a turning point in English History. It brought isola­ted England into contact with the European continent. It also influenced the growth of the English language, as Anglo-Saxon mingled with Norman French.

William died on September 9, 1087, and was buried at Caen, France. His son William Rums succeeded him on the throne of England as William II.

" William I was constantly moving about the land, mainly to secure the obedience of remote parts, partly to save the expense of sending the produce of royal manors about the country, and partly also to enjoy hunt­ing in the royal forests. Many of his meals therefore must have been in the nature of highly organized and rather formal picnics.

...William I made a practice of holding three great feasts a year at which he wore his crown and entertained in state his bish­ops, abbots, earls, and barons with a great crowd of knights attendant on them. At Easter the party met at Winchester, at Whitsuntide, at Westminster, and at Christmas at Gloucester. These were the great social occasions of the year...

Of necessity William I's court was an armed camp as it moved about the country to impress the fact of conquest upon Englishmen. It was the austerity of his char­acter and his love of hunting that his English subjects noticed most about him." (DM.Stenton. English Society in the Early Middle Ages)

" William, duke (count) of Normandy in France and the first Norman king of England, was one of the greatest soldiers and rulers of his age. A bastard child, he succeeded his father at the age of eight, sur­vived a perilous boyhood in his turbulent duchy, and by 1060 had mastered his barons and begun to dominate the neighbouring French principalities. In 1063 he conquered the neighbouring county of Maine, and in 1066 he invaded and conquered England. His government in both Normandy and England was, by contemporary standards, good. Although necessarily cruel and avari­cious, his zeal for law and order, his concern for justice, and his interest in ecclesiastical reform made his rule generally bearable and to the church more than welcome.

Because of his Normanization of the aristocracy, lay and clerical, in England, and the consequent introduction of many French customs, English history began to follow a new course.

...According to a brief description of William's person by an anonymous author... he was just above average height and had a robust, thick-set body. Though he was always sparing of food and drink, he became fat in later life. He had a rough bass voice and was a good and ready speaker. Writers of the next generation agree that he was exceptionally strong and vigorous. William was an out-of-door man, a hunter and sol­dier, fierce and despotic, generally feared; uneducated, he had few graces but was intelligent and shrewd and soon obtained the respect of his rivals."

(The New Encyclopaedia Britannica)

" On 9 September 1087, William died. His body was carried to his great church of St. Stephen at Caen. Towards the end of his life he had grown very fat and when the attendants tried to force the body into the stone sarcophagus, it burst, filling the church with a foul smell. It was an unfortu­nate ending to the career of an unusually fortunate and competent king". (The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain)

Compiled by A. Artemova, O.Leonovich

It took William 4 more years to conquer all of England. He was often brutal in sub­duing the Saxons, but brutality was com­mon at the time.

The Norman Conquest was a turning point in English History. It brought isola­ted England into contact with the European continent. It also influenced the growth of the English language, as Anglo-Saxon mingled with Norman French.

William died on September 9, 1087, and was buried at Caen, France. His son William Rufus succeeded him on the throne of England as William II.

" William I was constantly moving about the land, mainly to secure the obedience of remote parts, partly to save the expense of sending the produce of royal manors about the country, and partly also to enjoy hunt­ing in the royal forests. Many of his meals therefore must have been in the nature of highly organized and rather formal picnics.

...William I made a practice of holding three great feasts a year at which he wore his crown and entertained in state his bish­ops, abbots, earls, and barons with a great crowd of knights attendant on them. At Easter the party met at Winchester, at Whitsuntide, at Westminster, and at Christmas at Gloucester. These were the great social occasions of the year...

Of necessity William I's court was an armed camp as it moved about the country to impress the fact of conquest upon Englishmen. It was the austerity of his char­acter and his love of hunting that his English subjects noticed most about him." (D.M.Stenton. English Society in the Early Middle Ages)

" William, duke (count) of Normandy in France and the first Norman king of England, was one of the greatest soldiers and rulers of his age. A bastard child, he succeeded his father at the age of eight, sur­vived a perilous boyhood in his turbulent duchy, and by 1060 had mastered his barons and begun to dominate the neighbouring French principalities. In 1063 he conquered the neighbouring county of Maine, and in 1066 he invaded and conquered England. His government in both Normandy and England was, by contemporary standards, good. Although necessarily cruel and avari­cious, his zeal for law and order, his concern for justice, and his interest in ecclesiastical reform made his rule generally bearable and to the church more than welcome.

Because of his Normanization of the aristocracy, lay and clerical, in England, and the consequent introduction of many French customs, English history began to follow a new course.

...According to a brief description of William's person by an anonymous author... he was just above average height and had a robust, thick-set body. Though he was always sparing of food and drink, he became fat in later life. He had a rough bass voice and was a good and ready speaker. Writers of the next generation agree that he was exceptionally strong and vigorous. William was an out-of-door man, a hunter and sol­dier, fierce and despotic, generally feared; uneducated, he had few graces but was intelligent and shrewd and soon obtained the respect of his rivals."

(The New Encyclopaedia Britannica)

" On 9 September 1087, William died. His body was carried to his great church of St. Stephen at Caen. Towards the end of his life he had grown very fat and when the attendants tried to force the body into the stone sarcophagus, it burst, filling the church with a foul smell. It was an unfortu­nate ending to the career of an unusually fortunate and competent king". (The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain)

Compiled by A. Artemova, O.Leonovich


Inventors and Inventions

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was an Italian inventor, artist, architect, and scientist. Da Vinci had an interest in engineering and made detailed sketches of the airplane, the helicopter (and other fly­ing machines), the parachute, the submarine, the armored car, the bal-lista (a giant crossbow), rapid-fire guns, the centrifugal pump (de­signed to drain wet areas, like marshes), ball bearings, the worm gear (a set of gears in which many teeth make contact at once, reducing the

strain on the teeth, allowing more pressure to be put on the mechanism), and many other incredible ideas that were centuries ahead of da Vinci's time.

Tomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) was an American inventor (also known as the Wizard of Menlo Park) whose many inventions revolu­tionized the world. His work includes improving the incandescent elec­tric light bulb and inventing the phonograph, the phonograph record, the carbon telephone transmitter, and the motion-picture projector.

Edison's first job was as a telegraph operator, and in the course of his duties, he redesigned the stock-ticker machine. The Edison Universal Stock Printer gave him the capital($40, 000) to set up a lab­oratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, to invent fulltime (with many employees).

Edison experimented with thousands of different light bulb filaments to find just the right materials to glow well, be long-lasting, and be inexpensive. In 1879, Edison dis­covered that a carbon filament in an oxygen-free bulb glowed but did not burn up for quite a while. This incandescent bulb revolutionized the world.

Most scientists work very neatly and carefully, but Dr. Alexander Fleming preferred working in a less organized way. In fact, if Alexander Fleming had been a tidy man, he wouldn't have discovered penicillin.

Dr. Fleming was a scientist at St. Mary's Hospital in London. One day in September 1928, a scientist called Pryce came in to Fleming's laboratory. On the desk there were some dirty glass dishes from old experiments. Fleming picked up one of the dishes to show Pryce. On the dish there were yellow spots of bacteria. But when Fleming looked more closely, he saw a green mould on the dish.

Fleming noticed something unusual. The yellow bacteria near the mould had disappeared: the green mould had killed them. Fleming was seeing the effects of penicillin for the first time.

Fleming called the discovery " a chance observation". It was chance that the right kind of mould had grown. It was chance that Fleming hadn't washed his dirty dishes. It was chance that he had picked up the dish with the mould to show to Pryce.

Fleming thought it was an interesting discovery but he didn't know how important it was. Neither did the other scientists in the hospital. " When I showed it to them they thought it was just a dirty dish, " Fleming said. But Alexander Fleming had discovered a drug which has saved millions of lives.

 

 


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