Probably every review of David Bates's William the Conqueror will begin, as this one does, by noting that there could be no be no better person to write what will, no doubt, be the standard scholarly biography of William for the next half century than Bates, author of, among other things, Normandy before 1066 (1982), an earlier biography of William intended for a general audience (1989), and editor of all of William's post-1066 acts (1998). Superseding the biography by David C. Douglas (1964), Bates brings to the work a remarkably wide canvas of the latest scholarship not only on Normandy, England, and surrounding areas, but on developments in “socio-cultural history [over] the last four decades,” including “histories of power, ritual, feud, socially constructed violence, and trust,” with emphasis on “trust—sociologically defined—[as] in many ways the cement that binds” (12).

Bates quotes approvingly Douglas's “aims … to eschew the controversies of the past; to bring French and English scholarship … into closer relationship; and … to base my study on the original testimony.” These, he says, “might almost feature verbatim as the mission statement for this book” (2). It is, of course, not possible to eschew all controversies since many aspects of William's life and actions have been variously interpreted in the past. Thus, Bates argues persuasively, against a tradition that he traces back to Orderic Vitalis, that William did not suffer “social disadvantage” (21) because of his illegitimate birth; moreover, his father's reign was not the chaotic period it has often been portrayed as being, and the horrors of the early years of William's rule as duke have been exaggerated: turbulence was restricted primarily to the period between about 1040 and 1042, and even then “the previous political equilibrium was compromised rather than overthrown” (54). He concludes that William's marriage to Matilda of Flanders occurred in 1053, rather than the usually accepted date of about 1050, and he minimizes the degree of dispute with the papacy over the marriage. He has no doubt that Edward the Confessor offered the succession to the English throne to William in 1051.

One of the consistent themes of this work is that William was “uncompromisingly convinced that he had a right to succeed” to England (11) and that his ambition to do so was a factor in northern French politics for the decade and a half between Edward's promise and the Norman conquest of England. Bates attributes William's victory at Hastings “arguably” to “superior generalship, both at a tactical and strategic level” (234). It evinced the “intelligence and thorough preparation which meant that it was not until 1076, when he was approaching his fiftieth birthday, that William suffered any significant military setback” (247). All the same, he notes as another theme of the book “William's consistent readiness to treat enemies and opponents ruthlessly in a way that sometimes went beyond contemporary norms” (185). “In terms of the ongoing debate about the ethics of William's methods … the scale of state-sponsored violence that all this involved is arguable deeply shocking” (322). That last statement, made in the context of the discussion of William's actions in England in 1068–70, including the harrying of the north, expresses Bates's more general conclusion about the consequences for individuals of many of William's actions, elsewhere described as “human misery” (140). In sum, “The mixture of fear, awe, trust, and acquiescence that he inspired was centrally important” to his rule (507).

The approach here is consistently chronological. In the context of the narrative Bates considers many thorny issues of the interpretation of sources, and there are illuminating discussions of many more points that are indicated above. For the reader wishing to follow the story of William's life from beginning to end, this is a breathtaking achievement. For the researcher wishing to consult the book on some particular point—and I am thinking here of, among others, the advanced undergraduates in my recent seminar on the Norman Conquest—the exclusively chronological method will cause problems. The book never stops to give a topic or theme an extensive discussion. If, as with Domesday Book, the date is known, no problem. Many important aspects of William's rule either are not securely dated or spread over many years, however. On such matters a researcher will need to use the index to find what Bates has to say; and the index, I regret to say, will sometimes be of little help. For a specific example, I took the paragraph in which Bates mentions “the famous royal writ which requir[ed] that ecclesiastical cases should not be heard in the hundred courts” (384). The index has no entry for “hundred,” much less “hundred court.” It has no entry for “ecclesiastical” or “jurisdiction” or “courts.” The entry for “writs, English” lists only five references, none of them to this page. The entry for “church, English,” has fifteen undifferentiated references, again none of them to this page. In his edition of William's acts, Bates dates this writ to 1071/5 × 1085. Short of reading through nearly two hundred pages of the book, how would one find this? A more global example is the tenurial upheaval that followed the Conquest in England as William replaced native lords, secular and ecclesiastical, with his French supporters. This subject comes up repeatedly, as one or another Frenchman gets an estate or a prelacy; but Bates never stops to consider the phenomenon as a whole—the word “fief” is not in the index, and “feudal revolution, the” garners two references, both to Normandy. Indeed, the profound consequences of William's conquest of England—for England, for Normandy, for France, and for the world as we know it—are not canvassed here. The section of the book entitled “The Long Term,” though it claims that “William's conquest [was] a landmark in a long history and not a phenomenon that can be analyzed in a narrow isolation from it” (508), is less than six pages long. This is a biography, pure and simple.