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William was to become known as the second Duke of Normandy and as the size of his weapon suggests he also inherited the stature of his father Rolf the Ganger. While it is said his father was forty years a viking pirate before he became a prince his son would have had a very different upbringing in Rouen and it is claimed that as a young man he asked his father if he could become a scholar in a monastery.
He would have been about thirty when he inherited the land around Rouen from his elderly father who had maintained a close loyalty to his over-lords the West Frankish kingdom. In the West of Normandy however the viking settlers were not ready to lose their identity and felt the prince had gone too native for their tastes.
Early in the reign according to Dudo of St Quentin they rebelled under Count Riulf of Brittany and sent an envoy to William demanding control of all the land west of the Risle valley. Longsword offered them a share of the land but they responded by marching an army across the Seine and camping outside Rouen where the prince tried to placate them further by offering them control up to the Seine. But they became greedy sensing Williams weakness and wanted more. The prince was left with no further choice but combat and one night led his troops out of the besieged city and fell on Riulf’s camp driving them into flight.
In 933 William met the West Frank King Ralph and on pledging loyalty received ‘the land of the Bretons on the sea-shore’ which may have given him the chance to take control of West Normandy in the Contenin and Avranchin including the Channel Islands, but it would be many years before the area was to become united.
Longsword was conscious of having to please both sides and had his son Richard taught, by his old tutor Botho the Dane, in Bayeux where he could still hear Norse spoken. He also had to play one side against the other outside of Normandy.
The fifteen year old Louis IV D’Outre Mer succeeded King Ralph in 936 and soon a war erupted with Otto King of the East Franks when Lotharingian nobles revolted. Many nobles such as Hugh the Great and Herbert of Vermandois sided with Otto and over the next few years there was a great deal of jockeying for position.
William did not have his father’s loyalty to the West Frank monarchy and instead tried to follow which way the wind was blowing. This took the form of marrying Herbert’s daughter Luitgarda and joining in the siege of the King’s Archbishop at Reims while at the same time ‘committing himself to the king’ when he met Louis at Amiens.
It was to be near Amiens that William was to meet his doom. Despite not having taken a very active role in the Frankish civil war he had been involved in a bitter dispute with Arnulf the Count of Flanders as a consequence of raids in 939 which developed into a dispute over the control of Ponthieu, a region between the two of them. William received messengers from Arnulf asking that if he wished to settle their dispute to come to a meeting on an island on the Somme at Picquigny. The trusting prince arrived to be murdered by Arnulf’s followers.
It is said that when the prince’s body was put on display at Rouen Cathedral it could be seen that he wore a rough sackcloth shirt under his fine clothes and that he had died as he had wished to live as a young man.