TIME Picks A Person Of Each Century, From 1000 To 1900 William The Conqueror

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

He was, contemporaries advise us, "great in body...but not ungainly." He had a harsh voice, but his speech was always appropriate. His chroniclers lauded his ability to "appraise the true significance of events" and make good "the fickle promises of fortune." They also remarked that he was "too relentless to care though all might hate him." William the Conqueror was a man--or, more important, a monarch--for a new age.

Europe entered the century as a study in disintegrated empire. Rome had long since fallen. Charlemagne had briefly laid claim to its authority, but his heirs could not sustain a continent-wide order. Christendom was a Babel of weak and squabbling kings, aristocrats whose holdings sometimes exceeded those of royalty, and a church that would spawn two competing Popes.

It was a chaotic era, and William of Normandy, born around 1027, was the child of chaos. The illegitimate son of Robert, Duke of Normandy, he was known for most of his life as William the Bastard. Robert eventually recognized him, but only as he departed on a fatal pilgrimage to the Holy Land, leaving his seven-year-old a target for usurping barons. One by one, William's guardians and advisers were cut down. The boy escaped assassination only by a desperate flight to his mother's estate.

The retreat was temporary. The strapping redhead won his first battle at age 13. At 20 he defeated the usurpers. He fought successfully for and against the French King. He made a dynastic marriage, over papal objections, to the daughter of the powerful Count of Flanders. (William was 5 ft. 10 in. tall, his Matilda barely 4 ft. They had at least nine children.) By 1065 he was absolute lord of a consolidated Normandy. Then he looked northward.

On the Bayeux Tapestry, the astonishing embroidered storyboard of the Battle of Hastings, one can see Edward the Confessor of England dying in January 1066 and Harold Godwinson, an earl, enthroned. A woolen comet (Halley's) streams across a linen sky, auguring bad luck. William, who believed the English crown had been promised him, lost no time. Five hundred vessels eventually ferried 7,000 men and their 2,000 mounts. Contrary winds delayed the force on the French side of the English Channel for 15 days--just long enough for Norway to launch its own 300-ship attack on the north of England. When Harold, having defeated the Scandinavians, rushed south again with 7,000 troops, William was outside Hastings. "For God's sake, spare not," he told his men. His well-deployed knights and archers eventually overwhelmed the exhausted Anglo-Saxon infantry. "The living marched over the heaps of the dead," wrote an early historian. By nightfall, Harold was slain.

William was crowned that Christmas morning. Had he merely conquered, England would still have been pulled from its semi-Scandinavian orbit and into the ferment of Western Europe, and English would still have been transformed into a different language, one with words that came by way of France, words like different and language.

But he was not just a conqueror. He was also a controller, and his recasting of England has reverberated for centuries. It was not enough to transfer lands owned by Anglo-Saxon nobility to his own supporters; he required these men to provide him with military service in return for their land and to owe him ultimate loyalty. He convened juries of locals to find fact and give a collective verdict under oath in land disputes. He commissioned a monument to centralized power: the Domesday Book, an invasive audit of the wealth of England. William has been credited with the emergence of the bureaucratic state in Europe; certainly his utter domination of a compact kingdom became a model for monarchs of the next 800 years.

But Norman order was cruel, and the systematic cronyism William installed bred a rapacious class of official epitomized by Robin Hood's Sheriff of Nottingham. When the grossly obese King died in 1087 (of a riding injury sustained while torching the city of Mantes), some of his servants rushed off to secure their properties; others stole his silver and furniture. His body broke in two while attendants tried to force it into a coffin; the stench cut the service short. In death, he lost control. But he had set in place a new order.

--By David Van Biema