Before we called him William the Conqueror, he had a much more ignoble nickname: William the Bastard. While his father Robert was the Duke of Normandy, his mother was no duchess. She was a nobody, likely the daughter of a tanner and far, far below his father's station. She and the Duke fell madly in love, and it seemed like their romance was something out of a fairy tale. But there were few fairy tales in Medieval Europe. Their love didn't have a happy ending.