It was a tempestuous element, but it was new life, and it is impossible to conceive of what that country would have been without this stimulating, brilliant infusion into its national life.
With such marvellous facility did this people adopt the speech and manners of their neighbors, that in the year 1066 they were prepared to instruct the Britons in the ways of a more polished civilization.

Only a century before the birth of William the Conqueror, his ancestors had lived by looting.

They were highwaymen and robbers by profession.

His mother, a Norman peasant girl, daughter of a tanner, won the love of that gay duke known as "Robert the Devil." William, the child of this unconsecrated union, upon the death of his father succeeded to the dukedom.

One of the steps in the rapid climb of this family of Rollo had been a marriage connecting them with the royal family of England.
King Edward, William's remote cousin, died without an heir.