It is a great honour to be asked to give this lecture and a privilege to be able to do so in my own University. The Battle Conference is now so much an established institution that it is important to remember how radical and exciting Allen Brown’s foundation of the conference was for all of us who were around when the first one was held in 1978. My own first Battle Conference was in 1981 and, although I have not been as regular an attender as I would have liked in the last decade, I have always been present in spirit. My personal gain from the friendships and collaborations formed as a direct result of the Battle Conference is an inestimable one and one which I would wish to acknowledge publicly. More broadly, the good fellowship and intellectual contacts which have formed among those who have been present at the conferences have been of immense importance for the subject which Allen held so dear. We are all profoundly in his debt.

I was reminded at the conference by John Gillingham that William of Poitiers’ portrayal of the youthful William armed and ready for the fray was one of Allen’s favourite passages and one which he quoted frequently. It is for this reason particularly appropriate that I devote this year’s Memorial Lecture to the Conqueror’s adolescence. Before turning to my subject, however, I must also put on record the curious coincidence, drawn to my attention by Archie Duncan, that this Memorial Lecture was given in the room which was once the History Class Room of the University of Glasgow – it is now the Senate Room – where the young D. C. Douglas would in all likelihood have given his earliest lectures as a University teacher.

Approaches to the Conqueror’s childhood and adolescence have of course changed since Freeman wrote that William ‘came to his Duchy with every disadvantage. At once bastard and minor, with competitors for his coronet arising at every moment, with turbulent barons to hold in check and envious neighbours to guard against …’ Yet ideas of the kind which the quotation epitomises remained deeply influential throughout the twentieth century.