He seems to have been a violent and tyrannical prince; a perfidious, encroaching, and dangerous neighbor; an unkind and ungenerous relation.

He was equally prodigal and rapacious in the management of his treasury; and if he possessed abilities, he lay so much under the government of impetuous passions, that he made little use of them in his administration; and he indulged without reserve that domineering policy which suited his temper, and which, if supported, as it was it him, with courage and vigor, proves often more successful in disorderly times, than the deepest foresight and most refined artifice.
The monuments which remain of this prince in England are the Tower, Westminster Hall, and London Bridge, which he built.

The most laudable foreign enterprise which he undertook was the sending of Edgar Atheling, three years before his death, into Scotland, with a small army, to restore Prince Edgar, the true heir of that kingdom, son of Malcolm, and of Margaret, sister of Edgar Atheling; and the enterprise proved successful.

It was remarked in that age, that Richard, an elder brother of William's, perished by an accident in the new forest; Richard, his nephew, natural son of Duke Robert, lost his life in the same place after the same manner; and all men, upon the king's fate, exclaimed that, as the Conqueror had been guilty of extreme violence in expelling all the inhabitants of that large district to make room for his game, the just vengeance of Heaven was signalized in the same place by the slaughter of his posterity.

William was killed in the thirteenth year of his reign, and about the fortieth of his age.