Written by Jean Plaidy

William was born in Normandy, the bastard son of his father's relationship with a
tanner's daughter. He was often taunted about his birth, which infuriated him.
Upon becoming an adult, a marriage was arranged for him with Matilda of Flanders. At their first meeting, Matilda said she would not marry him because he was a bastard and William responded by throwing her into the muddy street.
That incident promptly persuaded Matilda to change her mind.
In England, the remaining of the Danes and Saxons struggled to keep control of the country. The Danes were relatives of William's family (Edward the Confessor was William's father's cousin) and when Edward was nearing death, he proclaimed that William should be his heir and unite Normandy and England.
When Edward dies, Harold Godwinson has himself proclaimed King - setting in motions William's invasion of England in 1066.
Uploader's note:
Digitised from cassette. Files 7-13 have a speed anomaly. The tape sound kept speeding up even though the playback speed on the tape player was at the slowest speed. It was recorded this way originally. I split up this tape file into 7 segments and slowed the speed down at different rates until I got a reasonable
voice from the narrator. However, you might notice the voice speed up slightly from beginning to end within each segment. I could have split the files into smaller segments for more tweaking, but reasonable was good enough for me.
Also a few of the segments have a glitch that sounds like word is dropped or clipped off. This was how the tapes were recorded originally.