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Updated: May 22, 2025
The siege of his castle of Sainte-Susanne went on from the death of Matilda till the last year but one of William's reign. The tale is full of picturesque detail; but William had little personal share in it. The best captains of Normandy tried their strength in vain against this one donjon on its rock. William at last made peace with the subject who was too strong for him.
He was fighting for William, Duke and king, against that castle of Sainte-Susanne in Maine which the Conqueror of Le Mans and Exeter could not take. In a skirmish below the castle a beardless-boy, sheltered behind a thicket, aimed an arrow which gave Richer a mortal wound. His comrades would have killed the lad; but Richer bade them spare him; his own sins deserved death.
The mind of William was just now mainly given to the affairs of his island kingdom. In the winter of 1083 he hastened from the death- bed of his wife to the siege of Sainte-Susanne, and thence to the Midwinter Gemot in England. The chief object of the assembly was the specially distasteful one of laying on of a tax.
But he thought as little of trusting the work to his own Normans. With the money of England he hired a host of mercenaries, horse and foot, from France and Britanny, even from Maine where Hubert was still defying him at Sainte-Susanne. He gathered this force on the mainland, and came back at its head, a force such as England had never before seen; men wondered how the land might feed them all.
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