Vulgar words in William the Conqueror (Page 1)

This book at a glance

bastard x 13
            

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~   ~   ~   Sentence 22   ~   ~   ~

That we are what we are to this day largely comes of the fact that there was a moment when our national destiny might be said to hang on the will of a single man, and that that man was William, surnamed at different stages of his life and memory, the Bastard, the Conqueror, and the Great.

~   ~   ~   Sentence 52   ~   ~   ~

We must see how one who started with all the disadvantages which are implied in his earlier surname of the Bastard came to win and to deserve his later surnames of the Conqueror and the Great.

~   ~   ~   Sentence 80   ~   ~   ~

William was not as yet the Great or the Conqueror, but he was the Bastard from the beginning.

~   ~   ~   Sentence 88   ~   ~   ~

In truth the feeling of the kingliness of the stock, the doctrine that the king should be the son of a king, is better satisfied by the succession of the late king's bastard son than by sending for some distant kinsman, claiming perhaps only through females.

~   ~   ~   Sentence 90   ~   ~   ~

The succession of a bastard was never likely to be quite undisputed or his reign to be quite undisturbed.

~   ~   ~   Sentence 91   ~   ~   ~

Now William succeeded to his duchy under the double disadvantage of being at once bastard and minor.

~   ~   ~   Sentence 96   ~   ~   ~

He called on his barons to swear allegiance to his bastard of seven years old as his successor in case he never came back.

~   ~   ~   Sentence 102   ~   ~   ~

The succession of one who was at once bastard and minor could happen only when no one else had a distinctly better claim William could never have held his ground for a moment against a brother of his father of full age and undoubted legitimacy.

~   ~   ~   Sentence 176   ~   ~   ~

But his descent was of uncontested legitimacy, which gave him an excuse for claiming the duchy in opposition to the bastard grandson of the tanner.

~   ~   ~   Sentence 416   ~   ~   ~

At its beginning William is still the Bastard of Falaise, who may or may not be able to keep himself in the ducal chair, his right to which is still disputed.

~   ~   ~   Sentence 1,036   ~   ~   ~

Then in the words of the Chronicler, "it was known to him that William Bastard, King Edward's kinsman, would come hither and win this land."

~   ~   ~   Sentence 1,037   ~   ~   ~

This is all that our own writers tell us about William Bastard, between his peaceful visit to England in 1052 and his warlike visit in 1066.

~   ~   ~   Sentence 1,276   ~   ~   ~

But that this could be was because that conquest was wrought by the Bastard of Falaise and by none other.

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