William I Quotes

A French bastard arriving with armed banditti and establishing himself the King of England against the consent of the natives is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original and certainly has no divinity in it…. If the succession runs in the line of the conqueror the nation runs in the line of being conquered and ought to rescue itself

I was born William. My father was William. I came from a big family, I hated being called Billy. Willem's a nickname; it's a Dutch name, very common in the Netherlands.

When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world.

The king of England, though in certain respects he is not as religious as we would wish, still shows himself to be more acceptable than other kings... he neither destroys nor sells the churches of God.. and he bound priests by oath to dismiss their wives.

Whoever desired to enjoy money, lands, or even life itself, was under the necessity of obeying the kings nod in all things. Alas! How much it is to be lamented that any man, who is but a worm and dust, should … arrive at such a height of pride as to trample on all the rest of mankind.

For Prince William, I focused more on doing a bad impression of a romantic lead than on Prince William himself.

Consequently, the value and importance of the monarchic idea cannot reside in the person of the monarch himself except if Heaven decides to lay the crown on the brow of the heroic genius like Frederick the Great or a wise character like William I.

King William and the chief men loved gold and silver and did not care how sinfully it was obtained provided it came to them. He did not care at all how wrongfully his men got possession of land nor how many illegal acts they did.

None of his bishops, abbots or great men, dared to disobey his will on any consideration; but all things divine and human depended on his nod.

In his anger William ordered that all crops and herds... and food of every kind should be brought together and burned to ashes, so that the whole region north of Humber might be stripped of all means of survival.

William the Conqueror had so great an abhorrence of the English language, that he commanded all the laws and law-proceedings to be in French; and even the children in school were taught the first elements of grammar and letters in French and not in English.