2) William II (1087-1100)

Pre-reading task: Why did the Church dislike William II?

THE SECOND Norman king of England was stout, like his father, with auburn hair and a florid face that earned him the nickname of 'Rufus', meaning 'the Red', He had the Conqueror's love of hunting and his fondness for money, but the greater qualities of William I were not passed on to William II. Contemporary chroniclers were shocked by Rufus's debaucheries; and Archbishop Lanfranc was at first reluctant to perform the sacred ceremony of coronation for so unworthy a king. Eventually, how- ever, the Conqueror's will was carried out, and on 26 September 1087 King William II was crowned in Westminster Abbey.

He soon became unpopular with almost every section of English society, including the Norman barons. Many of them now had estates on both sides of the Channel, and were thus bound to two different overlords - Duke Robert in Normandy, and his brother and rival King William in England. Some attempted to resolve this conflict of interests by rebelling against William, in the hope of uniting duchy and kingdom under Robert; but they had given their support to the weaker brother. For all his faults, William Rufus did not lack skill in war-making. He put down rebellion with a firm hand, and in his turn manoeuvred to oust Duke Robert from Normandy. By 1096 he had obtained virtual control of the duchy. In return for a payment of 10,000 marks Duke Robert agreed to go far away, on a crusade to the Holy Land, in support of Pope Urban II.

For his own expenses, as well as for this kind of diplomatic bribery, William was in constant need of money. His court lived luxuriously; where once his father had 'kept a great state', with stern dignity, Rufus now enjoyed a round of bawdy, drunken merry-making. He may have been homosexual; certainly he never married, showed scant interest in mistresses and had no acknowledged bastards, yet was castigated for possessing unspeakable vices. To the monks who wrote the records of the time, Rufus was a lecherous, blasphemous tyrant, who gave free reign to 'everything that was hateful to God and to righteous men'.

With Rufus's loose living went an open contempt for the Church. He made a profit­able practice of failing to appoint new bishops and abbots, so that he could take the Church funds due to them for his own use. After the death of the good and wise Lanfranc, in 1089, the English had no Archbishop of Canterbury for four years. William did, however, fill the position of Bishop of Durham - he gave it as a reward to the man who helped him in his unscrupu­lous financial dealings, an ambitious cleric named Ranulf Plambard.

Ungodly as he was, William Rufus experienced a brief religious conversion early in 1093, when a sudden bad illness brought him close to death. Among other penitent measures, he at last appointed an Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm of Bee, who was later canonised. The king's fit of faith passed with the illness, however, and eventually William succeeded in driving Anselm into exile, leaving the English Church leaderless once more.

In a superstitious age, when an earth­quake or the appearance of a comet in the sky was sure to be greeted as an omen, the manner of William Rufus's sudden, violent death was seen by many as a punishment for his life. On the morning of 2 August 1100, while out hunting deer in the New Forest, Rufus received an arrow in his heart and died, 'in the midst of his sins, without repentance'. His body, having lain neglected for several hours, was carried to Winchester in a humble charcoal-burner's cart, and buried beneath the cathedral tower.

Who shot William Rufus has never been proved. One account suggested at the time that the King had accidentally killed himself, while others stated that a Norman lord named Walter Tirel loosed the fatal arrow. Tirel fled the country, yet he always main­tained his innocence, and the evidence points to another's guilt: as soon as Rufus was dead, the youngest of the Conqueror's three surviving sons, Henry, seized power with suspicious ease and swiftness. If there was a plot to murder William Rufus, it would seem that Henry I was behind it.

Few mourned William Rufus. His most enduring foundation, which still stands today, was Westminster Hall, used by English monarchs ever since for ceremonial occasions such as coronation banquets and lyings-in-state. A successful soldier, he recovered for Normandy the disputed territories of Maine and the Vexin, which Duke Robert had lost, and he led English troops into Scotland and Wales with some success.

But his evil reputation largely overshadowed his achievements - and it was another sign for the superstitious when, a year after his burial at Winchester, the tower above his remains tumbled down.

(from “Kings and Queens of Great Britain” by Josephine Ross, L. 1982)

It is 1087. The new King of England is William Rufus, or, as Churchill writes, William the Red.

C+ Under his son William, dubbed Rufus, the Red, it [the feudal system, based on land ownership] was not less harsh [than it had been under William the Conqueror], but also capricious. Moreover, the accession of the Conqueror's second surviving son to the throne of England did not pass without dispute. William I's decision to divide his English from his Norman lands brought new troubles in its train. The greater barons possessed property on both sides of the Channel. They therefore now owed feudal allegiance to two sovereign lords, and not unnaturally they sought to play one against the other. Both Duke Robert and William II were dissatisfied with the division, and their brotherly ties did not mitigate their covetous desires. During the thirteen years of the reign of William Rufus the Anglo-Norman realms were vexed by fratricidal strife and successive baronial revolts. The Saxon inhabitants of England, fearful of a relapse into the chaos of pre-Conquest days, stood by the King against all rebels.

William Rufus became king, partly because his dying father wished it and partly, and importantly, because one of the two most influential men in England, Archbishop Lanfranc, approved. Lanfianc was an Italian who had arrived in Normandy at the monastery of. Bec in 1042. He had been responsible for the education of the Conqueror's suns so, more than anyone, Lanfranc understood William Rufus. Lanfranc's authority came from the Conqueror himself who made him Archbishop of Canterbury. It was he who rebuilt the great Kentish Cathedral. Almost no important political decision was taken in England without his approval. However, as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports although Lanfranc had his way, this was hardly an easy time for the new King.

*In this year [1088] there was great commotion in this country and treason was everywhere, with the result that the most powerful Frenchmen in the land plotted to betray their lord and king, and make his brother Robert king, he who was Duke of Normandy. The leaders in this conspiracy were Bishop Odo, Bishop Geoffrey, and William Bishop of Durham. Earl Roger was also of that foolish conspiracy, and very many others too, all Frenchmen. As soon as Easter came, then they set out to harry and burn, and laid waste to the King's farms, and devastated the lands of all those men who owed allegiance to the King. Bishop Geoffrey and Robert of Mowbray went to Bristol, and harried, and brought the booty to the castle: thereafter they sallied forth and ravaged Bath and all the surrounding countryside. The chief men of Hereford, with the men of Shropshire and a great force from Wales came and burnt in Worcestershire. The Bishop of Durham did as much damage as he could everywhere in the north. Bishop Odo, who was the instigator of diese troubles, went to his earldom in Kent and his men laid waste the lands of the King and the Archbishop, and all the spoil was taken into his castle at Rochester.

The King promised new and fair tax laws, he promised new hunting rights and almost anything else he could think of. Although there was no way he could, or would, keep diese promises, he managed to get a large army on his side and he besieged Rochester Castle. But Odo had escaped, ironically to Pevensey where the Conqueror, his half-brother, had landed in 1066. But, eventually, the King won the day. Bishop Odo and the rest went into exile in Normandy. Odo never came back. He died at Palermo on his way to take part in a Crusade.

This English rebellion was not simply land grabbing, or the dislike of the King. It was just one episode in the conflict between the sons of the Conqueror. Robert fought William. William fought them all. And Henry was sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other.

England at this time was a society governed by ruthlessness, greed and poor kingship. When Lanfranc died, in 1089, there was no longer any restraint on the treacherous instincts of William Rufus. But the sons of the Conqueror deserved each other, even if the people deserved something better. This was a family so much at war that at one point, Robert and William joined against their young brother Henry. But events far from Normandy and Winchester were once more to divert the flow of rivalries.

In 1096 Robert decided to go on a Crusade, an expensive business. So William played pawnbroker and Robert hocked Normandy to him for 10,000 silver marks.

C+ The Crusading spirit had for some time stirred the minds of men all over Western Europe. The Christian kingdoms of Spain had led the way with their holy wars against the Arabs. Now, towards the end of the eleventh century, a new enemy of Christendom appeared 1500 miles to the east. The Seljuk Turks were pressing hard upon the Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor, and harassing devout pilgrims from Europe through Syria to the Holy Land. The Byzantine Emperor appealed to the West for help, and in 1095, Pope Urban II, who had long dreamt of recovering Jerusalem for Christendom, called on the chivalry of Europe to take the Cross. The response was immediate, overwhelming and at first, disastrous. An itinerant monk named Peter the Hermit took up the cry to arms: So powerful was his preaching that in 1096 an enthusiastic out undisciplined train of 20,000 men, most of them peasants, unskilled in war, set off from Cologne for the East under his leadership. Few of them ever reached the Holy Land. After marching through Hungary and the Balkans the majority perished by Turkish arrows amid the mountains of Asia Minor The so-called People's Crusade thus collapsed. But by now the magnates of Europe had rallied to the Cause: four armies, each numbering perhaps 10,000 men, and led by some of the greatest nobles of the age. The Byzantine Emperor was embarrassed. He had hoped for manageable mercenaries as reinforcements from the West. Instead he found, camped around his capital, four powerful and ambitious hosts.

Thirty-two years after the battle or Hastings Robert or Normandy, one of the Conqueror's sons, and Edgar the Aethling, the great-nephew of Edward the Confessor, joined forces against a common enemy: the Turks at Antioch. Robert led his warriors on land and Edgar commanded a grand fleet. This is really nothing more than an aside, but it is a reminder that history is not simply a string of dates: some characters, who at the time appear to have little more than a walk-on part can, and often do, turn up again later in pivotal parts.

C+ In August 1100 he [William Rufus] was mysteriously shot through the head by an arrow while hunung in the New Forest, leaving a memory of shameless exactions and infamous morals, but also a submissive realm to his successor. While the rough hands of Rufus, chafed and bruised the feudal relationship, they had also enforced the rights of a feudal king.

Prince Henry, the youngest of the royal brothers, had been a member of the fatal hunting parry in the New Forest. There is no proof that he was implicated in the death of his brother, but he certainly wasted no time in mourning He made straight for the royal treasury at Winchester.

William of Malmesbury wrote that the day before he died, Rufus dreamed that a surgeon was letting his blood and the stream flowed so high that it clouded the daylight. A monk warned that he should not hunt the next day, but Rufus, having drunk a great deal, did go into the forest. Then came the, apparent, accident. An attendant called Walter Tirol shot the King with an arrow. William of Malmesbury reported that a few countrymen recovered the body and took it on a cart to the Cathedral at Winchester, the blood dripping from it all the way.

(from “This Sceptred Isle” by Christopher Lee, L. 1990)