• BIOGRAPHY
  Tancred is fortunate in gaining an immortality he did little to deserve. He was a provincial baron, commander of a modest ten knights in the militia of Duke Robert of Normandy; from the little we know of him, he does not even appear to have been particularly remarkable---unless it was for his determined and persistent fecundity.
  
  Writing towards the turn of the century Geoffrey Malaterra, a Benedictine monk whose 'Historia Sicula' is our principal source for the early beginnings of the Hautevilles, tells us that Tancred's first wife was Muriella, a lady 'splendid in morals and birth', by whom he had five sons---William, Drogo, Humphrey, Geoffrey and Serlo. On her death he married again, for reasons Malaterra finds it necessary to explain in some detail: 'Since he was not yet old and could not therefore maintain continence but, being an upright man, found dishonourable intercourse abhorrent, he took to him a second wife. For, mindful of the apostolic words: to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and further: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge, he preferred rather to be content with one legitimate wife than to pollute himself with the embraces of concubines'.
  
  The eager Tancred therefore married the lady Fressenda 'in generosity and morals not inferior to the first', who presented him in swift and apparently effortless succession with seven more sons--- Robert, Mauger, another William, Aubrey, Tancred, Humbert and Roger--- and at least three daughters.