The rule of William II of Normandy takes up more than half of the Troisième Partie, covering some 6100 octosyllabic lines out of a total of 11440; in terms of length, this is therefore the most important episode in the work. The rule of his son and successor Duke Robert Curthose, at under 1800 lines in length, appears by comparison as a rather half-hearted postscript, thus echoing (whether by design or by accident) the impact of the Arthurian section and its aftermath in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and in Wace's own Roman de Brut. However, William II of Normandy fails to attain the mythical stature of an Arthur, or even that of the more striking of his own forebears. The main reason for this lies in the fact that the material was too recent. From this point onwards, Wace has to tread carefully over what must have been a political minefield. He appears to have been under pressure from local families to include them in high-profile events such as the Battle of Hastings and omit them from accounts of unsuccessful rebellion; hence the presence of certain names in the Gesta Normannorum Ducum or other key sources unmentioned in Wace's narrative, and vice-versa. His favoured ‘ne sai’, which in the Roman de Brut and much of the preceding part of the Rou had been used as a device to set in greater relief the significance of what was being said through the very triviality of the information claimed not to be known, is increasingly used as a hedging device to avoid being drawn into taking sides. Of the hostility opposing Waukelin of Ferrières and Hugh of Montfort, at the beginning of the rule of young William, Wace coyly remarks: ‘ne sai ki out dreit ne ki tort’, ‘I do not know who was in the right and who was in the wrong’ (3256); and more forcibly, in the account of the battle of Val-ès-Dunes (4131–5):