THE WHITE SHIP
Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream
Charles Spencer

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Charles Spencer 2020

Cover design by Jo Thomson

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Charles Spencer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Maps by Martin Brown

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Source ISBN: 9780008296803

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008296827

Version: 2020-08-25

Dedication

For Christopher Dixon, who taught me forty years ago, and who inspired me to write.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Maps

Prologue: A Cry in the Dark

PART ONE: TRIUMPH

1 Conquest

2 Youngest Son

3 Out of the Shadows

4 Opportunity

5 Consolidation

6 The Heir

7 Kingship

8 Louis the Fat

PART TWO: DISASTER

9 Contemplating Rewards

10 The Sea

11 Bound for England

12 Reaction to Tragedy

13 The Empress

PART THREE: CHAOS

14 A Surfeit of Lampreys?

15 Stephen

16 Unravelling

17 Anarchy

18 Order

Picture Section

Footnotes

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Charles Spencer

About the Publisher

List of Illustrations

William the Conqueror (Getty Images / Fine Art)

William’s flagship portrayed in the Bayeux Tapestry (Getty Images / Heritage Images)

Sea monster marginalia, from St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 863, p. 47, Pharsalia Libri Decem ( https://www.e-codices.ch/en/list/one/csg/0863)

Manuscript image of Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont (Getty Images / Ann Ronan Pictures)

Archbishop Anselm (Alamy / The Picture Art Collection)

The Death of King William II, from Royal 16, G. VI, f.272, Les Chroniques de Saint Denis (© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)

The Coronation of King Henry I, from MS 6712 (A.6.89) fol.115v, Flores Historiarum (Bridgeman Images)

Family tree showing King Henry I, Queen Matilda and William Ætheling, from Royal MS 14 B V, Genealogical Chronicle of the English Kings (© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)

The Battle of Tinchebray (Alamy / Art Collection 2)

Effigy of Robert Curthose at Gloucester Cathedral (Alamy / Angelo Hornak)

The hanging of thieves, from MS M.736, f.19v, Miscellany on the Life of Saint Edward (The Morgan Library and Museum)

The four kings, from Royal 14 C. VII, f.8v, Historia Anglorum (Alamy)

The Battle of Brémule, from BnF, MS. Fr.2813, f.201v, Grandes Chroniques de France (Bibliothèque Nationale de France)

William Clito

Louis VI of France (Alamy / Chronicle)

The White Ship sinking, from Cotton Claudius D. II, f.45v (© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)

The Blanche Nef (Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020)

Henry I in mourning, illustration from Royal 20 A. II, f.6v, Chronicle of England (Bridgeman Images)

Adeliza of Louvain, illustration from Lansdowne 383 f.14, Shaftesbury Psalter (© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)

The wedding banquet of Henry V and Matilda, from MS 373, f.95v, Chronicle of Ekkehard of Aura (The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)

Henry I during a stormy Channel crossing, from MS 157 p.383, Worcester Chronicle (Bridgeman Images)

Queen Matilda holding a charter, from Cotton Nero D. VII, Golden Book of St Albans (© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)

The remains of Reading Abbey (Charles Spencer)

King Stephen at the Battle of Lincoln, illustration from Arundel 48, f.168v (© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)

Hangings at Bedford Castle, from MS 16, f.64r, Chronica Majora (The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)

King Henry II arguing with Thomas Becket, illustration from Royal 20 A. II, f.7v, Chronicle of England (© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)

Maps

PROLOGUE
A Cry in the Dark

Looking back on this, a night whose repercussions would change Europe’s history for ever, some claimed to remember nothing more than a distant noise. It had skimmed across the surface of the icy sea, the sound waves amplified by the stillness of the water, their notes hammered taut by the frost of a late November night.

It caught in the northerly wind, and perhaps reached the ears of those awake on King Henry I’s ship, a dozen nautical miles ahead in the voyage across the Channel. Those who claimed to have heard it in the dark would admit that they had no idea what it was. It was shrill and short-lived, like the distant squawk of a passing gull.

The same noise had made it back to shore – only a mile away – in a clearer form. Some in the Norman harbour of Barfleur heard it. They were near the point where they had earlier watched the port’s finest vessel, the White Ship, cast off into the night. Her departure had attracted a crowd – some present were related to those on board, and had come to say their farewells, while others were intrigued by the glamour and power of those putting out to sea.

These passengers included Henry I’s sole legitimate son, William, the seventeen-year-old heir to the kingdom of England and to the duchy of Normandy. Two of the king’s many illegitimate children, who were openly acknowledged and loved by him, were also aboard the White Ship. With the trio of royal children sailed much of the flower of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, as well as leading bureaucrats who made Henry’s realm run smoothly and celebrated knights who kept the peace while protecting its borders.

The distinguished passengers had spent much of the afternoon and evening in the harbour, drinking hard and encouraging the crew to join in the revelry. Those in Barfleur who heard the noise assumed the merriment was reaching a crescendo on the White Ship, out at sea, and headed for the warmth of home, unsurprised and unconcerned by the cry in the dark.

In fact, what these witnesses to history had heard, at sea and on land, was a collective scream for help. The passengers of the White Ship had gone from wild festivity to dire panic in an instant, when they realised the crunch that had brought the vessel to a grinding halt was a rock – a rock that had pierced the timbers, leaving a gaping hole and allowing water to pour in. This caused the White Ship to heave to one side, making her spill her human cargo into the shockingly cold sea.

Perhaps the lowliest of those on board was Berold, a butcher from Rouen who had pursued his social superiors onto the ship, determined to get outstanding bills settled. Berold clung to part of the White Ship’s mast. Then, despite the weight of his saturated goatskin tunic, he hauled himself from the freezing waves onto this lifesaving perch. Next to him clambered Geoffrey de L’Aigle, a nobleman who was one of the king’s illustrious knights. The unlikely pair had rescued themselves from drowning, but now they lay vulnerable to the extreme cold. They shivered uncontrollably.

In the moonlight they watched as their companions cried out and thrashed in the water, desperate for life. Berold would later note William, the prince, getting safely away, in the White Ship’s small boat. The quick-thinking royal bodyguards had bundled him into it and were rowing hard for land, aware that their sole duty in this unfurling disaster was to preserve the life of the king-to-be. They had even left the royal treasure chest behind, in the White Ship’s hold.

As William headed quickly to safety, Berold and de L’Aigle watched with mounting horror as the tragedy around them played out.

PART ONE

TRIUMPH

ONE
Conquest

In the year of grace 1066, the Lord, the ruler, brought to fulfilment what He had long planned for the English people. He delivered them up to be destroyed by the violent and cunning Norman race.

Henry of Huntingdon, English historian and archdeacon (c.1088–c.1157)

The youth in the boat embodied the dynastic hopes of his royal father. King Henry I was in his fifties at the time that the White Ship was pinned on the rocks outside Barfleur. Unlike his son, who had been born as the undisputed heir to the throne, Henry had started life as a junior member of the royal family, seemingly destined for well-bred obscurity. But he had seized his chances to become one of the most powerful men in Europe.

Two decades earlier Henry had pounced on the English throne when it unexpectedly fell vacant. This he had done after leaving his elder brother on a forest floor to stiffen in death, rather than lose time tending to him. On that summer’s afternoon in 1100, Henry kicked his horse on into a gallop, his ruthlessness and speed enabling him to seize the royal treasury before any rival even knew the crown was in play.

Six years later he had stolen the dukedom of Normandy from his eldest brother. Henry crushed him in battle before casting him into prison, where he would remain, without hope of freedom, for the rest of his exceptionally long life.

Henry, English king and Norman duke, established strong rule over his lands by overcoming dangerously powerful enemies among the Anglo-Norman nobility. He was focused and uncompromising, clear in how he wanted to rule and determined that his way would prevail. Contemporaries noted that Henry had a face that looked friendly and open to humour, but people knew he could be harsh, and they heeded the steely intensity of his gaze. This was not a man to be trifled with, and his various rivals for power knew as much.

Apart from a hard-nosed drive, Henry also possessed subtlety. He was canny enough to deprive his enemies of diplomatic advantages. He ruled at a time when tensions over religious investiture were at their peak. Since the 1070s a succession of reforming popes had attacked the customary right of lay rulers to appoint bishops and abbots, key officers in the Church hierarchy. So closely fought was the contest that rival popes (‘anti-popes’) were set up and supported, while emperors and kings risked excommunication, or even being deposed.

In what became, for Christian leaders, one of the great questions of the age, Henry had insisted on maintaining his crown’s ancient rights, in the face of papal stubbornness that matched his own. But he was realistic and pragmatic enough to find compromise, long before the question would eventually be settled between pope and emperor. By doing so, he headed off the dangerous possibility of his many enemies harnessing papal power to their cause, which could in turn fatally undermine his position.

Contests for territory and power were a standard part of medieval statecraft. Many of Henry’s neighbouring rulers were also his relatives, through marriage or common ancestry: three of his wife’s brothers would, in turn, become kings of Scotland, and he maintained peace with each of them; while his bloodline sprang from the competing forces that lay off England’s southern flank.

Henry’s father, William the Conqueror, was the most celebrated Norman of them all. Henry’s mother, Matilda, was the daughter of the count of Flanders, a powerful figure from a land made wealthy by commerce: the fine reputation of its woollen cloth had been established in Roman times, and Flanders’s busy seaports traded with England and Scandinavia, before dispersing goods to France and Germany along inland arteries, principally the Rhine.

Henry’s mother was also, on her maternal side, a niece and a granddaughter of French kings. He was, therefore, a second cousin of the monarch who would prove to be his most persistent enemy, Louis VI of France: at the time of the wrecking of the White Ship Henry and Louis had spent much of the previous twelve years at war.

The France of the early twelfth century formed a different outline to the republic of today: it included what is now Belgium, while the Roman Empire controlled Burgundy in the south-east and Lorraine in the east.[fn1] The area that Louis truly dominated was more modest again, comprising as its core the Île-de-France. This royal heartland was surrounded by a constellation of other territories that enjoyed various levels of independence from its nominal overlord: the king of France claimed feudal superiority to his neighbours, but his scope for enforcing it was limited.

To the far west lay Brittany, a Celtic land that had seized its freedom in the ninth century and had remained self-governing ever since. To the east of Brittany sat the county of Maine, which had Anjou to its south. Maine and Anjou both extended eastwards to abut the county of Blois. Blois, in turn, bumped up against the western border of Louis VI’s axis of power. Meanwhile, when Louis looked to his north-west, he saw the imposing duchy of Normandy, whose capital, Rouen, covered a greater land area than his principal city of Paris.

Several generations of French kings had viewed Normandy as something of a pirate state. But in 1066 it transformed itself from the status of troublesome, subordinate neighbour to that of deadly rival. This was thanks to the gamble of one man, of Viking stock and persuasion, who had built a fleet to transport his army across the Channel and capture the kingdom he claimed by right.

In 799, speedy, shallow-draughted longships arrived on the French coast from Scandinavia, carrying marauders who had come to attack and plunder. These invaders were known as ‘Normanni’ – Northmen. The persistence and the savagery of their assaults succeeded eventually, in 911, in peeling off what became known as Normandy as a formal concession from Charles the Simple of France. In return for this tract of land that lay between the River Epte and the sea, the Norman leader, Rollo, swore three things: loyalty to the French king, protection against other raiders, and a willingness for he and his men to convert to Christianity.

He did well with the first two and gave his third commitment a good go. But on his deathbed Rollo’s true pagan leanings emerged for a farewell flurry. He had his Christian servants sacrificed to his ancestral deities: to Odin, the one-eyed god of wisdom, poetry and death, and to Thor, the fierce, hammer-wielding god of thunder.

This uncompromising warrior trait remained strong in the Norman genes. Henry of Huntingdon, a twelfth-century archdeacon who wrote the history of England from its earliest Anglo-Saxon roots up until his own time, recorded that the Normans ‘surpassed all other people in their unparalleled savagery’.[1] Abbot Suger, a French statesman and chronicler also writing in the twelfth century, said: ‘Being warlike descendants of the Danes, the Normans are ignorant of the ways of peace and serve it unwillingly.’[2]

Rollo’s successors certainly shared his instinct for warfare and ruthlessness. Rollo was followed by William Longsword, a son by one of his Christian lovers, who subscribed to his mother’s religion while aggressively adding new territory to his inheritance. Longsword’s marriage to the daughter of a powerful count cemented his place in the senior aristocracy of France. His bloody career was ended just before the Christmas of 942: while attending a peace conference on an island in the River Somme, he was ambushed and assassinated by order of the count of Flanders, a diehard enemy of the Norsemen.

Longsword’s son, Richard the Fearless, succeeded his father at the age of ten. The boy was taken into custody by Louis IV, the French king, as a first step towards retrieving Normandy for France. But the Normans were having none of it, capturing Louis and forcing him to give back their young duke. Richard would rule Normandy for more than half a century, during which time he opposed the Carolingian dynasty that was clinging to the French throne and helped his brother-in-law Hugh Capet to supplant it. He also reversed some of the devastation caused by his Viking forebears, restoring ravaged abbeys, resurrecting the archbishopric of Coutances and establishing a monastery at Mont Saint-Michel.

The house of Normandy’s influence extended further during Richard the Fearless’s lifetime. Two of his daughters became, respectively, duchess of Brittany and countess of Blois; while, in 1002, his eldest daughter, Emma, married Æthelred the Unready, King of England. For Æthelred, the match was a way of ending damaging Viking raids on his south coast, which emanated from Normandy.

Emma had three children with Æthelred, including the future king, Edward the Confessor. After Æthelred’s death she married Cnut, the man who eventually conquered her husband’s kingdom. She continued as queen of England, while also gaining the crowns of Denmark and Norway. The tide of Viking influence had now risen so high around Europe that its waves were washing back to Scandinavian shores.

Richard II succeeded to his father’s dukedom in 996 and held it for thirty years. Again, his prime duties were military: ruthlessly crushing a revolt by the Norman peasantry, seeing off an invasion from England and supporting his overlord – the French king – in campaigns against powerful Burgundy. Richard II’s rule saw Normandy become wealthy and stable, and he pushed ahead with reform of the Church. In return the grateful bishops and abbots gave strong support to the duke’s authority.

But Richard II left discord in his wake by splitting the Norman inheritance. While he consigned the bulk of his territory to his eldest son, another Richard, he left a county to his younger son, Robert. Dissatisfied with the size of his bequest, Robert rebelled and captured the castle of Falaise, the duke’s main power base in central Normandy, before being defeated. But Richard’s sudden and unexpected death soon after victory convinced many that he had been poisoned at his brother’s command.

Robert ‘the Magnificent’ – so-called because of his generosity – became duke of Normandy in 1027, aged twenty-seven. Soon afterwards he was said to have spied Herleva, an eye-catching resident of Falaise, as she bathed in a river. The daughter of a tanner, Herleva became the duke’s lover, bearing him two children out of wedlock. The elder of these, born perhaps in 1028, was called William.

In 1035 Robert announced that he was going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in penance for having seized Church properties when younger. Norman nobles insisted their ruler could not undertake such a dangerous expedition while without an heir. Robert countered by presenting them with the illegitimate William as his successor. He left his son in the guardianship of a handful of trusted aristocrats and courtiers, the most important of whom was Alan III, Duke of Brittany.

Robert reached Jerusalem successfully, but he died on the return journey. William, perhaps aged eight, was recognised as duke by many of his people and by his overlord, Henry I of France. Despite this, his life was in constant danger from those relatives of his late father who felt their claims, as members of the wider ducal family, born in wedlock, outshone that of the boy they called ‘William the Bastard’. One by one, his powerful guardians were murdered by cliques eager to control or replace the boy-ruler. William even awoke one morning to find his chamberlain in the bed next to him, his throat slashed open in silent assassination.

One of the young duke’s more powerful enemies was Guy of Burgundy, a cousin and former friend of William’s, whose rebel faction attempted to assassinate the teenaged duke during a hunting expedition in 1046. William escaped to safety alone, on horseback, before riding on to Henry of France, to demand the help the king owed him as Normandy’s feudal overlord.

The following year, the duke’s small force and the troops of the French king defeated the vastly superior numbers of Guy of Burgundy at Val-ès-Dunes, south-east of Caen. A freewheeling succession of cavalry skirmishes ended in utter defeat for the rebels, and many thousands of Guy’s men were cut down as they fled, while a great number of others were corralled into the Orne river. In an age when very few knew how to swim, they drowned. It took a further two years of siege warfare before William captured Guy of Burgundy and the castles that had underpinned his power.

In the struggle to impose his authority William acquired a ruthless streak. When the town of Alençon, on Normandy’s southern frontier, declared its support for the rival count of Anjou, William laid siege to it. Some of Alençon’s inhabitants, confident that their defences were impregnable, draped animal hides from the tops of the town walls in mocking reference to William’s mother’s humble roots as the daughter of a tanner. This was a mistake. When William eventually took Alençon, he ordered the hands and feet of those who had insulted Herleva to be cut off.

It took William more than twenty years to establish himself securely as ruler of Normandy. In 1053 he put down a revolt led by William of Arques, an uncle who had long challenged his illegitimate nephew’s right to rule. William of Arques had his Norman lands confiscated and was sent into exile.

Duke William gradually asserted control over his neighbours. Maine proved to be a hard-won prize, William only receiving its count’s submission in 1062 after laying waste to much of the land. He brought Normandy’s old rival Brittany to heel in 1065, after the surrender of its duke, Conan II. When Conan died suddenly, late the following year, it was accepted that he had been assassinated at William’s command. The fatal weapons were believed to be his own gloves, which had been laced with poison: when Conan took them off and wiped his mouth with his hand, death soon followed.

A devout Christian, William saw to it that Normandy embraced the key reforms that the papacy was starting to encourage: he outlawed the buying and selling of clerical offices, and barred priests from marrying. His changes were supported by a younger half-brother, Odo, who he made bishop of Bayeux when Odo was a teenager: in an era when the power of Church and state was intermingled, it was common for men of high birth to commit relatives to influential positions at court and on the battlefield, while others were sent to scale the peaks of ecclesiastical high office. The crossover between the various branches was fluid: Bishop Odo remained a counsellor and a warrior for the rest of his life (the Bayeux Tapestry shows him wielding a mace in battle), while continuing in his churchly duties.

From his earliest days, William would have been aware of the figure of Edward the Confessor at court. Edward was William’s first cousin once removed. He and his siblings had been exiled from England after Cnut overran half of England. The children had been welcomed in Normandy by their maternal uncle, Duke Richard II. In 1035 Cnut died, and his son Harold Harefoot claimed the throne while Cnut’s true heir, Harold’s half-brother Harthacnut, was distracted by rebels in Scandinavia.

Hoping the moment was right to reclaim his family’s crown, Edward the Confessor’s brother Alfred landed in southern England with an army of Norman mercenaries. Outside Guildford, thirty miles south-west of London, he was greeted by the powerful Earl Godwine, who declared his backing for Alfred. But it was a ploy. Godwine suddenly turned, taking Alfred prisoner and massacring his troops. The earl had Alfred’s eyes put out during the hundred-mile journey north-east to the monastery of Ely, where the royal prisoner was committed to the care of the monks. But Alfred never recovered from the brutality of his blinding, his life ending after months of agony in early 1036.

After five years’ rule, Harold Harefoot died in 1040, aged twenty-four, just as Harthacnut was poised to invade England from Denmark. Harthacnut desecrated Harold’s tomb and had his corpse decapitated before consigning the mutilated remains to an anonymous marshland grave. Yet the new king’s rule was briefer still: the last Scandinavian to rule England dropped dead at a wedding, in June 1042, while toasting the bride. This could have been the result of a stroke, caused by Harthacnut’s excessive drinking, or perhaps by poison, presumably authorised by Edward the Confessor.

Edward now sailed to England with a retinue of Norman aides to take the throne. He owed his elevation to the support of three powerful noblemen, the most significant of them Earl Godwine.

Edward cemented a pragmatic alliance with this kingmaker by marrying his daughter, Edith of Wessex. But by 1051 there was no child of the marriage, and Godwine and his formidable sons had fled abroad after a failed rebellion against the king. William of Normandy visited England during this interlude, when Edward was free from the overbearing Godwines. The Confessor appears to have invited William to become his successor at this time.

A year later the Godwines returned to England in force, but Earl Godwine died soon afterwards. His most able son, Harold, slowly took on his mantle as indispensable royal supporter, and by 1057 he and his brothers controlled the earldoms of Wessex, East Anglia and Northumbria. Harold twice led armies to crush uprisings in Wales. Edward, who had no instinct for battle, devoted himself increasingly to his twin passions, prayer and hunting, while occasionally displaying flashes of decisiveness in matters of foreign policy.

In 1064 or 1065, Harold set off on a mysterious voyage from Bosham, near Chichester. It ended in shipwreck on the coastline of Ponthieu. Guy I, Ponthieu’s count, was known to enslave, imprison and torture those washed up on his shores. But William went in person to demand that Harold be handed over to him, the count’s feudal superior. Harold was shown the respect due a great lord from a neighbouring land, and he repaid the compliment by fighting for William against Brittany: he is shown in the Bayeux Tapestry saving two Norman knights from drowning in quicksand on the flats near Mont Saint-Michel. William would always claim that Harold swore to acknowledge him as rightful heir to the English throne at this time.

After a series of strokes, the childless Edward the Confessor died on 5 January 1066. Harold lost no time. He declared that on his deathbed Edward had selected him as his successor. The next day he both buried the king and had himself crowned in the recently built Westminster Abbey. News of the coronation provoked William into preparing for an attack, his men felling the woods around the Norman coast for timber that could be shaped into warships. The great lords and bishops of Normandy found themselves urged to pay for as many vessels as they could, their subscriptions underwriting their duke’s aggressive intent.

William’s wife, Matilda of Flanders, ordered a magnificent ship to be built for her husband secretly, in the port of Barfleur. It needed to be a vessel worthy of William’s dynastic dreams and ambitions, as he prepared to risk all in the gamble of a lifetime. Matilda called her the Mora. The meaning of this name is unknown, but it may well be nothing more than an anagram of ‘Amor’, the Latin word for love, for the Flemish princess and the Norman duke’s dynastic marriage had blossomed into a romantic triumph. ‘The wife of my bosom’, William called Matilda, ‘whom I love as my own soul.’[3] She was the mother of all the duke’s children – there would be at least nine of these, including four sons. Unusually for the time, the duke appears to have had no mistresses and to have fathered no illegitimate offspring.

The Mora served as William’s flagship, sailing at the head of the huge invasion fleet that, with support vessels, numbered several hundred strong. This he led across the Channel in late September that year. The Mora was skippered by Stephen FitzAirard, the natural son of a nobleman. Also with William on his ship were his right-hand men – his commanders, advisers and key household officers – and the knights who had been handpicked by the duke to land beside him on the English soil that he claimed as his own.

The Mora had been built to advertise the importance of the leader she carried, as well as the military imperative of his cause. The royal lion carved onto her rear, its tongue rippling out from open jaws, roared defiance. The flagship had a mainsail of red and gold, and atop the mast fluttered the square papal banner: white with a blue border and emblazoned with the golden cross of St Peter. It had been sent by Pope Alexander II from Rome as confirmation that he – and therefore God – supported William’s cause. Also high on the mast hung a lantern to guide the following fleet in night-time. The ship’s figurehead, according to the twelfth-century monk and chronicler Orderic Vitalis, was ‘the image of a child, gilt, pointing with its right hand toward England, and having in its mouth a trumpet of ivory’.

The Bayeux Tapestry shows FitzAirard’s ship longer, stronger and built to be faster than the rest of the fleet: she had nineteen oars on each side, while many of her escorts had twelve, and others extended to sixteen. The Latin words on this panel of the tapestry, when translated, read: HERE DUKE WILLIAM CROSSED THE SEA IN A GREAT SHIP AND CAME TO PEVENSEY, immortalising the Mora, and the place in southern England where the invading army landed.

At first the winds were against William’s invasion fleet, and it seemed possible the expedition would disintegrate before it could set out. William’s father, Robert the Magnificent, had suffered similarly a generation before, his ships unable to cross the Channel, so he had turned his soldiers around and attacked Brittany instead. But there was good fortune for William in the bad weather. Commanders of the Anglo-Saxon fleet on the south coast felt it marked the end of the fighting season and sent their ships into hibernation. Then, while the Normans were forced to bide their time on their side of the Channel, Harold and his army were called away to fight elsewhere.

Harold’s younger brother, Tostig, had disgraced himself through his cruelty when serving as the earl of Northumbria, and had been declared an outlaw. Having failed to secure the aid of his brother-in-law, the count of Flanders, or of William of Normandy, Tostig had eventually persuaded the warrior Norwegian king, Harald Hardrada, to join him in an invasion of England. Ten thousand Norsemen sailed up the Humber in three hundred ships, defeating an Anglo-Saxon army at Fulford before occupying York.

Harold marched north at once, surprising the invaders at Stamford Bridge with a bold attack early on 25 September 1066. The Anglo-Saxon army won the hard-fought contest, with Hardrada and Tostig in the mounds of enemy dead: fewer than a thousand of the invaders managed to get away, although Hardrada’s son Olaf was among them, spared by Harold. The euphoria of crushing victory soon evaporated. News arrived that William and his Norman army had landed at Pevensey. The Anglo-Saxons wheeled round to meet the invaders, and marched 260 miles south as quickly as possible, gathering whatever reinforcements they could as they went.

The Battle of Hastings was fought on 14 October 1066, just nineteen days after Stamford Bridge. For much of the day it proved an even struggle. The two armies matched one another for bravery and military skill, and their infantry units locked together with discipline and grit, neither side able to gain the advantage. However, when some of the Normans appeared to flee the battlefield, the Anglo-Saxons broke ranks in pursuit. They then found themselves exposed to William’s waiting cavalry, which cut them down.

There were very few prisoners taken that day, Harold and his men choosing to fight to the death in defeat, as was the Anglo-Saxon custom. William of Jumièges, a Norman monk writing very soon after the battle, recorded Harold falling in the final clash of the day, ‘covered in deadly wounds’. The Song of the Battle of Hastings, a Norman celebration of the victory that was also written at the time, reported Harold being dispatched by four knights, including Duke William, who deliberately rode at the point where Harold’s banner flew.[fn2]

Some of the English wanted Edgar Ætheling[fn3] to be their king. The fifteen-year-old was a great-nephew of Edward the Confessor and a grandson of Edmund Ironside – a celebrated king whose staunch resistance to Danish invaders explains his nickname. But many of the fighting men who might have supported Edgar’s claim lay dead on the battlefield at Hastings. While he was proclaimed king by the Witan – the gathering of the most powerful nobles and churchmen in England – Edgar would never be crowned.

The victorious Normans pushed north, claiming London after some resistance around Southwark, before Anglo-Saxon leaders submitted to William in Wallingford and Berkhamsted. On Christmas Day 1066 Westminster Abbey witnessed its third momentous royal ceremony of the year. William was crowned king of England by Ealdred, Archbishop of York, the English Church endorsing the validity of his claim as the pope had done beforehand.

At the height of the ceremony the congregation was asked by Archbishop Ealdred (in English), and by Geoffrey, Bishop of Coutances (in French), if it accepted William on the throne. The Anglo-Saxon leaders present bellowed their loud approval, as was their tradition. But Norman soldiers standing guard outside the abbey mistook the clamour for the launch of an uprising. They started to torch the surrounding buildings. The congregation and most of the priests fled in terror, leaving William to complete the service with ‘only the bishops and a few monks and clergy’ on hand. It was noted how, with all the drama unfurling around him outside, the new warrior-king shook with fear.

Fear was an emotion that William was more used to provoking in others than experiencing himself. He began establishing his rule in the wake of Hastings by culling what remained of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. In its place came his own lords, knights and prelates, whom he rewarded with captured territories that they could control and grow rich from. Even Stephen FitzAirard, the captain of the Mora, received his share: he was granted lands in Berkshire.

Castles sprouted up across the kingdom, tightening William’s hold on England and helping to guard the borders with Wales and Scotland. The Anglo-Saxons had some strongholds, erected on the sites of Roman ruins, but these were basic when compared with the Norman motte and bailey castles,[fn4] which were easy to erect and hard to overcome.

By the end of the Conqueror’s reign, in 1087, there were thirty-six major castles (including first-rate ones, partially made of stone), as far afield as Rochester in the south-east, Corfe in the south and Bamburgh in the north-east, as well as a thick thread of lesser fortresses draped across the land. At their fulcrum stood the Tower of London, constructed on the site of a Roman fort. Together these garrisons placed a chokehold on Anglo-Saxon resistance to Norman rule so successful that, Henry of Huntingdon recorded, ‘there was scarcely a noble of English descent in England, but all had been reduced to servitude and lamentation, and it was even disgraceful to be called English’.[4]

Anxious that Scandinavian forces might cross the North Sea again, seeking to overthrow his rule, William decided to deprive any future invaders of food and supplies, other than those they could stow in their warships. So, in the winter of 1069–70, he took his armies to lay waste to the north. The entire population of England at this time was perhaps 1.5 million to 2 million, and of these roughly 100,000 now perished, as the Normans destroyed villages and farms in a scorched-earth policy.

So thorough was the destruction that it was still clearly evident in 1086, the year when royal officials finished Domesday Book – a record of ownership, resources and wealth in William’s England, laid out parish by parish. Its pages show that the north remained devastated, sixteen years on from the Conqueror’s shattering aggression. The greatest chronicler of this age, William of Malmesbury, writing half a century after ‘the harrying of the north’, found evidence of its prior desolation. The continued scarcity of resources in the region so long afterwards is testimony to the ruthlessness of the Conqueror: nothing would be allowed to threaten his dynasty. He wanted his descendants to remain the undisputed rulers of England and Normandy for generations to come.

TWO
Youngest Son

The Normans are an untamed race and, unless they are held in check by a firm ruler, they are all too ready to do wrong.

Orderic Vitalis, Anglo-Norman monk and chronicler (1075–c.1142)

Henry I of England’s life story starts with unanswerable questions. He is generally believed to have been the youngest child of the Conqueror (there were four sons and five or six daughters), and he was probably born in northern England. Tradition suggests Henry’s birthplace was Selby, in Yorkshire, but there is no written record to support this. We do not know the day (or even the year) of his birth but, from references to a birthday tribute four decades later, it is likely it was in the last few weeks of the year. It seems probable, through a process of elimination and an understanding of key moments in his later life, that the year was 1068, but 1069 is possible too.

We do know for certain that Henry was much the youngest of the Conqueror’s four sons: although these royal children’s birth dates are similarly unrecorded, with Robert being born in 1052 or 1054, Richard in 1054 or 1056, and William Rufus at some point between 1056 and 1060.

As the only son of the Conqueror to appear after his triumph at Hastings, Henry was alone in being born ‘in the purple’ – that is, after his father began to rule as a king. Henry was as mindful of this differentiation as his brothers were dismissive of it. He felt it set him apart in importance from the older children, calling on a tradition with roots that extend back to the ninth century at least.

The Conqueror’s eldest son, Robert, was, according to William of Malmesbury, considered ‘a youth of proven valour’, by the year 1066. We know the names of three of his childhood tutors: Raturius, who served as ‘an adviser on children’; Tetbold, ‘a teacher of literature’; and, later, Hilgerius, ‘a master of boys’.

While being groomed to rule, Robert was teased at home. He received the nickname ‘Curthose’ from his father, on account of his short legs. We know, from examination of the single thigh bone that survived a sixteenth-century desecration of his grave, that William the Conqueror stood probably five foot ten inches tall. Robert may have inherited his more truncated form from his mother: Matilda of Flanders was five foot, which was two or three inches shorter than was average for a woman at the time. Robert Wace, a reliable chronicler from the Channel Islands, writing in the second half of the twelfth century, recorded of Curthose that: ‘He was a small man, but burly, with short legs and big bones.’[1] Others picked up on these features, calling him ‘Gambaron’, or ‘Fat Legs’.

The second son, Richard of Normandy, was good looking and popular. His father planned to give him the Norman title of count of the Cotentin when he came of age but, ‘to the great grief of many’, it was recorded, he died ‘when a youth who had not yet received the belt of knighthood’.[2]

Richard met his premature end while hunting in the New Forest, crushed between the branch of a hazel tree and the pommel of his saddle. He died a week later. While his brothers’ exploits are well known, Richard’s brief life remains an indistinct footnote to history. Born ten or twelve years before the Conquest, he died at some point in his late teens and he was buried in Winchester – a Norman princeling, committed to the soil of the ancient capital of Wessex.

William, the third-born son, was known as ‘Rufus’, probably on account of his ruddy complexion, or because, as a child, he had inherited the red hair of his father. William Rufus’s turned blond as he grew older, and he wore it with a centre parting, framing his forehead in an inverted ‘V’ above flecked eyes. Rufus was also of a robust build, which would extend to a protruding belly as he grew older and began to run to fat. Daring, energetic, loyal and fun-loving, Rufus would be his father’s favourite son.

All the boys inherited the bull-like physique of William the Conqueror, whose strength was such it was said that, in archery, he could fully draw back bows that others simply could not bend. With this muscularity went Christianity: William ensured that all his children were raised from their earliest years with piety at the centre of their existence. Daily Mass became a feature of the royal court from the Conqueror’s time onwards, and he liked to conclude his day with the evening service of Vespers.

Despite their rigidly Christian code, the men in the royal family formed a dysfunctional unit. We see an example of the Conqueror’s three surviving sons falling out in the Norman town of L’Aigle, in the autumn of 1077. The teenaged William Rufus and the child Henry were up in a gallery, rolling dice with soldiers, when they saw the adult Robert with some of his friends below. As a prank they tipped a chamberpot full of urine over them, and Robert stormed upstairs to sort out his infuriating younger brothers.

The ensuing rough and tumble was broken up only when the Conqueror appeared and tried to calm things down. But Curthose felt far from appeased. The following night he left his father and rode to Rouen, intent on taking control of the ducal castle there. In this he failed, but it was the start of open hostility between the Conqueror and Curthose, after years of simmering resentment.

William had long had a difficult relationship with his eldest son. Robert Curthose attracted an entourage of ‘factious young knights, who incited him to rash undertakings’,[3] according to Orderic Vitalis, and who expected to profit from his generous handouts: these ‘jongleurs and parasites and courtesans’[4] had already consumed what resources Curthose had, and were living off a diet of promises from their highborn benefactor.

Eager to satisfy his followers’ greed, Curthose demanded his father give him control of Normandy. He had long been recognised as the duke-in-waiting, a charter of 1063 declaring him his father’s heir there, and he had been appointed co-regent of the dukedom – alongside his mother – in 1067.

But with that official status had come no increase in authority or wealth. William was outraged by Curthose’s cheek. ‘My son,’ Orderic Vitalis reports him as having said, ‘your demands are premature. Do not try to snatch recklessly from your father the power which you ought to receive from him in due time, with the acclamation of the people and the blessing of God, if you continue to deserve it.’[5]

Curthose stormed out. His Norman hangers-on began to be joined by powerful supporters from abroad, who were only too happy to sow some discord in overmighty Normandy. Disaffected members of the nobility from Anjou, Brittany and Maine came to him first. Robert then approached his uncle, Robert I, Count of Flanders, who was known to contemporaries as ‘an active man and a very daring knight’.[6]

Crucially Curthose also persuaded his mother’s cousin, Philip I of France, to take his side against his father. In 1078 the French king gave Curthose the important castle of Gerberoy as a base for his military operations. This impregnable fort, thirty-five miles east of Rouen, stood menacingly on the frontier between France and Normandy. Curthose garrisoned Gerberoy with unruly knights who used it as a platform from which to launch wild forays into his father’s lands.

During the winter of 1078–9 William arrived at Gerberoy to deal with the son whose men were damaging his interests and undermining his authority. In the ensuing siege the Conqueror found it impossible to force a victory. A battle followed. William received a wound in an arm and was toppled from his dying warhorse by Curthose who, on recognising his father’s distinctive guttural voice from behind the helmet, gave him a fresh mount on which to ride away. William of Malmesbury would later rank Gerberoy as the worst humiliation of the duke’s military career.

The conflict between father and son became a serious contest for control of Normandy. The Conqueror was understandably appalled and infuriated to learn that his wife, Matilda of Flanders, had been sending large sums of money to Curthose secretly, as her son battled the continuing poverty caused by his financial incontinence. In vengeance William ordered one of his wife’s messengers, a man from Brittany called Samson, to suffer blinding – the same fate that had befallen his biblical namesake. Warned of the duke’s intentions, Samson escaped the Conqueror’s reach by becoming a monk, a move that gave him immunity.

Matilda of Flanders had not aimed to meddle in politics and warfare, but to establish peace in her family. She helped to engineer a partial reconciliation between her husband and eldest son in 1080. But three years later Matilda died, leaving nobody in her place capable of patching up the differences between the generations. The Conqueror and Curthose remained bitterly at odds, despite the Norman barons’ attempts to appease the pair.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Orderic Vitalis record that Henry was knighted at Westminster at Whitsun (which fell on 24 May) in 1086. He was perhaps seventeen years old. In a society that needed military excellence as its cornerstone, knighthood took on grave importance, and its exponents were glamorised.

Orderic Vitalis noted the accoutrements handed over during the ceremony: ‘The future King Henry I of England received investiture with hauberk,[fn1] helmet and sword-belt on coming of age from Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury.’[7] He will have had a fine horse as well: in the Similitudo Militis, written in the early twelfth century, the author records the horse as the knight’s ‘most faithful friend’. It was also one of his more valuable possessions.

Despite his official entry into the adult world of knighthood, Henry’s status remained humble when compared to that of his older brothers: they were referred to as ‘counts’ during the Conqueror’s life, while he was not. It seems possible that Henry was being prepared for high office in the Church rather than in the lay world: his education appears to have been overseen by Osmund who, in the easy medieval crossover between state and Church power, had been the Conqueror’s chancellor before, in 1078, becoming bishop of Salisbury. Henry is recorded as being in Osmund’s company on many occasions between 1080 (when the extremely wealthy Osmund built Devizes Castle) and 1086. There are other hints of religious intent in Henry’s upbringing. In 1084, while the Conqueror took Robert Curthose and William Rufus on campaign with him, Henry was ordered to spend time at the ancient Benedictine monastery of St Mary’s in Abingdon.

It may well have been during these years with the bishop of Salisbury that Henry received an education in the classics, which gave him the ability to read. This level of literacy, being a rarity among his family – or the upper reaches of the aristocracy as a whole at that time – contributed to his being regarded as something of an intellectual. There was some truth in this verdict: certainly, during his later life, Henry showed enthusiasm for mixing with learned men, challenging and enjoying their new ideas. Nicknamed ‘clerc’ by some during his lifetime, three centuries after his death Henry was being referred to as ‘Beauclerc’. His reputation for scholarliness had grown through the Middle Ages, but it should be kept in perspective: while he was able to read, there is no evidence that Henry could write.

Henry found his father’s rugged, soldierly illiteracy embarrassing. He once said, within the Conqueror’s hearing, that an illiterate king was no better than a crowned ass. William remained uncompromisingly Norman till his dying day. He tried to learn Old English, but his efforts fell away when confronted by its endless intricacies and irregularities, as well as by the other demands on his time. Henry, meanwhile, understood the language of the country of his birth, even if Franco-Norman was his first tongue.

In 1087 William – by now unrecognisable from the vigorous figure of his youth, after gaining significant weight throughout middle age – crossed the Channel for the seventeenth time in his twenty-one-year rule and prepared to fight once more. The Vexin was a strategically important county on the eastern flank of Normandy, which lay between Rouen and Paris. It was in dispute, Philip of France having swooped on it a decade before when its ruler retired to a monastery. Philip had declared half of it to be naturally French territory. From this ‘French Vexin’ he had launched raids into Normandy. The Conqueror led his army in a revenge expedition, defying his obesity to ride into action during an assault on Mantes, thirty miles west of Paris. But in the turmoil of sacking the town his horse faltered and William was struck hard in his stomach by the pommel of its saddle, causing a serious internal wound.

Clearly gravely injured, William was taken to be treated in the priory of St Gervais, on the outskirts of Rouen, the city that was the administrative, legal and trade fulcrum of Normandy. There was no hope of recovery. It was obvious that the man who had won a kingdom overseas was going to die in this, the hub of his Anglo-Norman realm. Less easy to discern was how his great inheritance would be divided.

Orderic Vitalis noted how, in contrast to their elder brother, ‘William Rufus and Henry … were obedient to their father [and so] earned his blessing, and for many years enjoyed the highest power in the kingdom and duchy.’[8] Henry may well have had expectations of a sizeable inheritance, as a result of his father’s favour and his mother’s legacy: it was common for the property of a royal or aristocratic mother to be passed on her death to younger sons. Matilda of Flanders had owned estates in Buckinghamshire and Gloucestershire, which would have provided Henry with a substantial income of around £300 per year.[fn2]

Robert Curthose was still at war with his father as William lay dying. The Conqueror wanted to disinherit him, but he was persuaded by his lords to leave Normandy to his eldest son, in common with the dynasty’s custom since the death of William Longsword. Besides, in happier times, the Conqueror had twice insisted that his leading men swear to acknowledge Curthose as the legitimate heir to the dukedom.

Primogeniture would not be recognised in England until the end of the twelfth century, though, and the Conqueror felt free to leave his English throne to William Rufus. This was reward for his favourite son’s unfailing loyalty, but the Conqueror appreciated too that Rufus was a brave and charismatic soldier, capable of keeping control of this hard-won prize that attracted covetous looks from across its various seas, and which had Scottish and Welsh enemies on its northern and west fronts.

‘And what, Father, do you give to me?’ Orderic Vitalis quoted Henry as asking William on his deathbed: ‘The king answered to him, “I give you five thousand pounds of silver from my treasure.” To which Henry said, “What shall I do with treasure, if I have no place to make my home?”’[9]

After encouraging Henry to accept his two elder brothers’ seniority to him in the line of succession, the Conqueror said: ‘You in your own time will have all the dominions that I have acquired, and be greater than your brothers in wealth and power.’[10] Ever practical, and aware that the limited inheritance left him by his father was vulnerable to his brothers’ whims, Henry had his silver carefully weighed to see it was all there, then took it away for safe storage.

Henry was by his father’s side on his final day, 9 September 1087. As soon as the Conqueror died and the grandees had left the room, his attendants fell upon his belongings in an orgy of self-enrichment. Even his robes were despoiled, and his hulking carcass was left all but naked on its deathbed. His remains were taken by boat to Caen. But the stately progress of the dead ruler, designed to give all a chance to bid farewell to their great duke, was undone when a fire broke out in the city, prompting onlookers to flee for safety.

Of the three surviving sons only Henry attended the Conqueror’s funeral, at the Abbey of Saint-Étienne, in Caen. With the service underway a man in the congregation stood up and launched into an astonishing tirade, claiming the church had been built illegally on land that rightly belonged to him. An even greater commotion blew up when the time came to lay William to rest in his stone sarcophagus. It had been carved when the duke was younger and slimmer, and it proved too small for his immense body. After much effort by the monks to squeeze him into the tomb, his guts burst open in a putrid cascade. The stench surged through the abbey, assaulting the nostrils of the congregation, causing widespread nausea. The abbey was quickly vacated, and the burial of one of the greatest men of the eleventh century was attended only by those clergy prepared to brave the foul smell of his rotten flesh.

This was the start, for Henry, of more than a decade of insecurity that would often tip over into real personal danger. During this time, he would be seen as an accoutrement of the royal and ducal family, but not as a central figure in it. His status stemmed from his royal parentage, but he had neither the title nor the lands required for real power and wealth.

On his deathbed the Conqueror had committed his English crown, sword and sceptre to Rufus, together with a letter to Archbishop Lanfranc confirming his wish that his second son succeed him in England. The coronation was performed by the archbishop of Canterbury in Westminster, on 26 September – ‘Michaelmas Day’ – 1087, just seventeen days after the Conqueror’s death. ‘William Rufus crossed the sea, was crowned and reigned for thirteen years,’ recorded Robert Wace succinctly.[11]

But Wace’s description fails to point out what a difficult time Rufus often had during those thirteen years. His succession was contested, despite his father’s unambiguous directions. Within months of being crowned, Rufus faced a serious rebellion in England in favour of Robert Curthose. It was led by two of the Conqueror’s half-brothers, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, and Robert, Count de Mortain, and supported by a clutch of leading bishops and noblemen.

After decisive military action Rufus pulled out the roots of the revolt by promising to be a strong and fair ruler, uphold the laws of his predecessors as kings of England, stamp out unjust taxation and respect the people’s rights in the forests. But Curthose remained determined to displace his younger brother from the English throne that he was convinced was his by right.

Curthose’s hopes of military gain were compromised by his extravagance. He heaped gifts on his supporters, and was so bad with money that he was said to pay whatever outrageous sum was requested, whether for a horse or for a hound. Within six months of inheriting Normandy, he had gone through all the treasure left to him by the Conqueror. By contrast Rufus’s English wealth seemed infinite.

Curthose became so financially hobbled that, in 1088, he accepted a payment from Henry of £3,000 in return for the rights to the land of the Cotentin. This was the peninsula in the north-west of Normandy that included Barfleur, a favoured crossing point for ships heading to the southern coast of England. Henry became count of the Cotentin, in practice and probably in name, taking the rank that had been planned for his brother Richard during his brief life. He was around twenty years of age at this stage, and starting to establish himself as a man of importance.

Henry must surely have sworn homage to Curthose on assuming his duties. While the revenues and the castles of the Cotentin were now his, so was the responsibility of serving his eldest brother as peacekeeper there. Henry expanded his control, and his new power base included the monastery-fortress of Mont Saint-Michel and the counties of Avranches and Coutances. He remained on the south side of the Channel for nearly all of the next seven years. The one trip to England that we know of during this period of his life took place in the second half of 1088. It was a failure, for he was unable to persuade William Rufus to hand over those properties that, Henry remained adamant, their mother had left to him. More disappointment and frustration followed: when Henry returned to Normandy Curthose imprisoned him in Bayeux. So toxic was the relationship between the two older brothers that Curthose was convinced Henry had been sent by Rufus to undermine him. Henry remained a prisoner for six months, being released only after paying for his freedom.

Shorn of much of his wealth, Henry seemed to face a modest future. He appears to have inhabited a desolate no man’s land while his brothers fought one another across a broad front. Because of his rootlessness and limited resources, Henry remained at the mercy of whichever one of them temporarily showed him favour, as and when they required his help. On his release from Curthose’s prison in Bayeux Henry sought a place in Rufus’s court, but was rebuffed. Feeling he had nowhere else to go, Henry felt compelled to swallow his pride and offer his services to Curthose, despite having so recently been his captive.

It was humiliating, but Henry bided his time, waiting for an opportunity to step forward into a role suited to his drive and ambition. Soon enough his chance seemed to come along.

In 1090 William Rufus secretly sent money to leading citizens of the Norman capital of Rouen who were unhappy with Curthose’s rule. When this disaffected group plotted a riot on Rufus’s behalf, Henry rode to Rouen Castle to help Curthose deal with the uprising.

Open fighting broke out on 3 November, Curthose and Henry leading their men out of the castle to meet the rioters. What followed was brutal, and in the bloody mayhem Curthose was persuaded by courtiers to slip away to safety rather than risk his life in a street fight. He lay low in a church in Rouen’s suburbs while Henry led his soldiers into the heat of the action. Henry was eventually joined by the troops of Gilbert de L’Aigle, a nobleman from the south-east of Normandy, who had penetrated Rouen from the south. Their forces fought through to unite, and began to put the rebels to the sword with gusto. The survivors faltered, then scattered, pursued by Henry’s men who were eager for bloodshed and plunder, as well as ransom from the richer prisoners.

They quickly captured the leader of the rebellion, who Curthose ordered to be taken away in chains. But Henry insisted the prisoner be brought to him at once. The man turned out not to be a powerful aristocrat, but a rich merchant by the name of Conan. Henry found the lowly status of the rebel particularly maddening: by breaking the homage he had sworn to Curthose, Conan had shattered the social conventions of the time. Such oaths formed the glue of feudal society, and their infringement was seen as being beyond the pale.

Wace explained the gravity of such treachery: ‘No one could do worse [than he] who betrays his liege lord. No man, for any reason, should fail his earthly lord; he should protect his life and limb and uphold his earthly honour.’[12] Henry decided Conan should pay for his unforgivable transgression immediately.

He ordered the prisoner to accompany him and his men as they went up the stairway of Rouen Castle’s great tower. While Conan followed, no doubt becoming increasingly terrified, Henry is said to have given a goading commentary of the sights opening up to them as they ascended the steps: ‘Admire, Conan, the beauty of the country you tried to conquer. Away to the south there is a delightful hunting region, wooded and well stocked with beasts of the chase. See how the River Seine, full of fishes, laps the wall of Rouen and daily brings in ships laden with merchandise of many kinds. On the other side see the fair and popular city, with its ramparts and churches and town buildings, which has rightly been the capital of Normandy from the earliest days.’

Panicked by the barely controlled fury of his captor, Conan misread his man. He hoped for some way out of his predicament and he trusted that it might lie in bribery on a colossal scale. ‘My Lord,’ he conceded, ‘I deserve condemnation for my own guilt, but now I ask mercy for the sake of God who created all things. For my ransom I will give my Lord all the gold and silver that I can find in my own and kinsmen’s treasure-stores, and in compensation for my treachery I will give you faithful service until I die.’

‘By my mother’s soul!’ Henry countered with contempt. ‘There shall be no ransom for a traitor, only swift infliction of the death he deserves.’[13]

Conan, realising that his life was over, begged for time to confess his sins, believing he could purify his soul before meeting judgement in the afterlife. But Henry’s patience was shot. He was said to be ‘trembling with anger’ when he seized the merchant and hurled him from a high window. Conan plunged to his death, and his broken corpse was tied to the tail of a horse, which dragged it through Rouen’s streets in a grisly circuit of shame.

Contemporaries and chroniclers applauded Henry’s delivery of such instant and fitting justice. William of Malmesbury wrote of this episode: ‘The punishment of a man who turned traitor after swearing loyalty and doing homage ought never to be deferred.’[14] Conan had broken the sacred bond that tied him to Robert Curthose, his duke, and he had paid for his treachery with his life.

The contrast between Henry’s bold conduct that day and that of his eldest brother could hardly have been more vivid. Henry, fighting hard, then dispatching the defeated rebel leader with apt ruthlessness, was considered to have behaved admirably. Meanwhile Curthose’s decision to quit bloody hand-to-hand combat for the sanctuary of a church was viewed as humiliating. As a result, even though Henry had put down the dangerous rebellion he received no gratitude from Curthose. Instead, soon afterwards, his brother forced Henry to leave Rouen, his status yet again that of a wandering knight without a cause.

The tit for tat between Curthose and Rufus continued. Having failed to remove Rufus from the English throne, Curthose found himself attacked from across the Channel. But in a move as sudden as it was unexpected, in 1091 Rufus and Curthose agreed a peace treaty, witnessed by twelve barons on either side. They recognised each other as one another’s heir, in the event that either should die before fathering a legitimate son. At the same time Rufus was fed various slivers of Normandy: Cherbourg, the county of Eu, the abbeys of Fécamp and Mont Saint-Michel, and those castles that had repudiated their loyalty to Curthose and already come over to him. Henry had no role in their plans, except as victim: the two had also agreed to turn on their younger brother, and to deprive him of his lands.

Henry looked to one of his father’s most faithful supporters, Hugh, Earl of Chester, to help him defend against the imminent attack. But Hugh had weighed his affection for Henry against the combined strength of Curthose and Rufus, as well as the loyalty he owed to his anointed king. The earl was among those who, in the words of Orderic Vitalis, ‘deserted the noble prince [Henry] in his military need, and handed over their castles to the king’.[15]

Although Hugh of Chester felt compelled to surrender rather than face the inevitable consequences, he remained quietly supportive of Henry. He advised Henry to assemble his forces and take a stand at his most promising defensive position. This was Mont Saint-Michel, the monastery that stands in a bay joining Normandy to Brittany, which Rufus was now claiming as his own. Mont Saint-Michel has significant natural protection: a craggy rock, it becomes an island at high tide. Hugh suggested that Henry should add to this some man-made fortifications of his own.

Wace wrote of Henry: ‘He did not leave [for Mont Saint-Michel] without companions, taking a large number of men with him; he took with him the brothers and sons of the most noble and high born and they all served with him very willingly, for they put great hope in him.’[16] Bolstering this force of enthusiastic adventurers, who chose to believe in Henry’s potential, came a body of mercenaries from Brittany who were confident that Henry would find the money to pay for their services. Further help arrived from an unlikely quarter: Mont Saint-Michel’s religious foundation. John of Worcester, writing in the late 1090s till 1118, noted how some of the monks assisted Henry as he dug in, preparing to fight.[17]

After Henry fell back to Mont Saint-Michel, William Rufus and Robert Curthose soon followed, besieging him there from March 1091. Frequent skirmishes took place on the same sand flats in front of the monastery where the man who would briefly rule England, Harold, had fought in support of Henry’s father, William, a quarter of a century beforehand. These small engagements cost Rufus and Curthose many casualties, of which Rufus was nearly one. According to William of Malmesbury, Rufus launched a singlehanded attack against some of Henry’s knights, during which his horse was mortally wounded. It galloped on, with Rufus’s ankle wedged in a stirrup, until slowing up, collapsing in death and leaving him sprawled out on the sand.

One of Henry’s knights stepped forward, raised his sword and was about to smite the life out of the helmeted figure lying defenceless before him when a distinctive voice bellowed up from the ground: ‘Hold, wretch! I am the king of England!’ Recognising Rufus for who he claimed to be, Henry’s men shrank back, shocked that they had been about to dispatch a man who (in common with the beliefs of the time) they took to have been transformed by holy anointment at coronation from mere mortality to the status of God’s regent on earth. They put aside their weapons and offered Rufus one of their mounts.

As the king swung his leg up over the saddle, he asked the soldiers which of them had unhorsed him. The man responsible stepped forward, admitting that it was him. Fearing punishment, he nervously explained that he had mistaken the king for one of his knights. Rufus, who loved courage in another as much as he enjoyed magnanimity in himself, voiced his favourite oath, ‘By the face of Lucca!’, then promised: ‘From now on you shall be my man and, being placed on my muster list, you shall be well rewarded for your gallant deed.’[18] It was a typical gesture by Rufus, who was a soldier’s soldier. Robert Wace recorded that the king ‘was brave, and very generous. He did not hear of any knight whose prowess he heard praised and then fail to mention him in his register and give him some … reward.’[19]

As the siege dragged on through Lent, Rufus departed, leaving operations under the complete command of Curthose. William of Malmesbury recorded how Henry sent a messenger to his eldest brother at this point, saying that he and his men were dying of thirst. While Mont Saint-Michel’s main strength lay in the protection of the surrounding sea, its weakness was an inability to access fresh water. Henry challenged his brother to allow him and his men something to drink, so that any victory gained could be fairly and gloriously won, and not come about through something as banal as the defenders’ lack of supplies. Curthose sent what was requested – and is reported to have thrown in some good wine too, for his brother to enjoy.

When he found out what Curthose had allowed in his absence, Rufus was furious: ‘This is a fine way indeed to run a war, allowing the enemy all the water they need! How shall we ever conquer them if we indulge them with food and drink?’ Curthose is said to have replied: ‘Indeed, should I condemn my own brother to die of thirst? And if we lose him, where shall we find another?’[20]

Exasperated by Curthose’s softness, Rufus refused to continue the fight in Normandy, and the two older brothers went their separate ways. But Henry failed to profit from the falling out: after a six-week siege, he was still obliged to surrender Mont Saint-Michel, on terms that guaranteed his liberty. He had now lost all the land that he had purchased from Curthose with the money left to him in their father’s will. Henry of Huntingdon recorded: ‘When Robert had sold Henry part of Normandy in return for this treasure, he took the land away from him. This was very displeasing to God, but He deferred vengeance for a time.’[21]

Allowed safe conduct from Mont Saint-Michel, Henry paid off his mercenaries with his remaining money. Banished from Normandy by his brother, he set off for Brittany before arriving in France. So began the start of a reduced life, when Henry was forced to learn ‘to endure poverty in exile’.[22] The next year, from 1091–2, is a mystery; this man, who was to become a titan of medieval history, simply disappears from view, a dispossessed younger son, deceived and degraded by his brothers, seemingly condemned to a life of obscurity and dependence.

With him went a retinue of five men – a chaplain, a knight and three servants. Wace has Henry spending some of this time serving the king of France. In his account Henry was eventually spotted in Paris by a supporter called Haschier, who was travelling through France in a disguise that seems to have comprised nothing more than a plaster placed over an eye. Haschier is credited by Wace with persuading Henry to leave his life of Parisian poverty for hope of greater things in Normandy.

Wace’s version, written decades after the events, is hard to verify. It remains part of Henry’s myth in a period when he is otherwise unaccounted for. One thing the chroniclers agree on, though, is that this time of want instilled in Henry an eagerness to help the poor and an understanding of the need to account for resources in a thoughtful manner. Both would be notable traits during his later years of power.

THREE
Out of the Shadows

Robert, Duke of the Normans, told his brother King William the Younger through envoys that he would no longer keep the peace which they had both agreed. Furthermore, he called him faithless and deceitful unless he discharged fully the terms of the agreement they had made in Normandy.

John of Worcester, English monk and chronicler (d. 1140)

When Henry reappears for sure, it is in mid-1092, at the invitation of Domfront, a fortified Norman town fifty miles south of Caen, which sat at a point where Normandy met Maine and Brittany. The inhabitants of Domfront could take no more of the vicious rule of their lord, and invited Henry to come to their assistance by taking his place.

Their tormentor was Robert de Bellême, a powerful aristocrat who had been knighted by the Conqueror as a youth. At the time of Domfront’s rebellion de Bellême was in his mid-thirties. The tall and strongly built de Bellême came from impressive stock. A distant cousin of Henry’s, he was the eldest surviving son of Roger de Montgomery, one of the Conqueror’s closest advisers. Roger seems to have helped govern Normandy at the time of the invasion of 1066 before crossing the Channel to assist in the administration of the captured kingdom. William gave him land in eleven English counties, including nearly all of Shropshire and a large section of what is now West Sussex. In making Roger de Montgomery one of the half-dozen greatest landowners in England, William was relying on him in turn to counter the Welsh, and to protect a key stretch of the south coast.

At the time that Domfront turned to Henry for salvation, Robert de Bellême had yet to receive any lands from his father. But he had already become a major Norman aristocrat thanks to his inheritance from his mother, Mabel, a significant force in her own right. On her death she passed to Robert the lordship of Bellême, which was vitally important to the dukes of Normandy as a protective buffer against Maine: Bellême lay thirty-five miles north-west of Maine’s capital, Le Mans. Robert de Bellême was also the lord of Sées and of Alençon, and owned a scattering of other significant castles, of which Domfront was one of the more important.

The diminutive Mabel was judged to have passed on to her eldest son not just her portfolio of power, but much of her daunting character. Orderic Vitalis (whose monastery suffered from some of the de Bellême family’s excesses) described her as ‘small, very talkative, ready enough to do evil, shrewd and jocular, extremely cruel and daring’. Mabel tried to poison a member of the eminent Giroie family, with whom the de Bellêmes were locked in a feud, but her own brother-in-law, parched after a long ride, downed the lethal goblet of wine before he could be stopped, and died in place of her intended victim. Yet Mabel persevered, and got her man next time, after bribing one of his servants to administer the fatal brew.

Mabel had little respect for religion. She once brought her large retinue to a monastery that she knew was obliged to provide all who came to its doors with food and lodging. She did this in the knowledge that it would impose financial strains on her hosts that they would find crippling. When admonished by the abbot for her thoughtlessness, she replied that next time she would descend on him with even more mouths to feed.

Mabel focused on further enriching her family at the cost of its rivals. This she did once too often, seizing the stronghold of Peray, twenty miles south-east of Alençon, which was the inheritance of a nobleman called Hugh Bunel. It provoked Hugh, who was reported to be ‘frenzied with grief’,[1] into gathering together some of his male relatives for vengeance. Breaking into Mabel de Bellême’s home one December night in 1077, they found her relaxing on her bed, having just emerged from her bath. Before she could escape, Hugh decapitated her with his sword.

Mabel’s epitaph acknowledged that she was:

To some neighbours dear,

To others terrible; she died by the sword,

By night, by stealth, for we are mortals all.[2]

Robert de Bellême perpetuated the consternation that his mother had sown among her neighbours, using his maternal inheritance – of castles and cruelty – to cast a largely malevolent shadow throughout his decades of influence. Orderic Vitalis called him ‘proud and evil in every way’, and said de Bellême ‘committed innumerable crimes’.[3]

De Bellême had been one of the young and unruly supporters of Robert Curthose during the latter’s years of armed opposition to the Conqueror. Captured in 1079, de Bellême was spared punishment by William, but never again trusted by him. The Conqueror saw to it that de Bellême’s potential for troublemaking was negated by billeting his household troops on the young man’s garrisons.

De Bellême was on his way to pay his respects to the duke in 1087 when he heard that the old warrior had died. His first reaction was to order all of William’s troops to quit his castles. He quickly imposed some of his own men on the garrisons of his weaker neighbours in an opportunistic appropriation of power. The neighbours either agreed or had their fort destroyed.

De Bellême soon became a leading participant in Curthose and Rufus’s contest for power. In 1088 he arrived in Rochester, thirty miles south-east of London, to bolster Odo of Bayeux’s revolt against Rufus’s reign. But it quickly became clear that Rochester would fall to Rufus, and when de Bellême and his accomplices started negotiating for their lives and freedom in return for their surrender, the king insisted the rebels be hanged. It was thanks to Roger de Montgomery, and other powerful fathers whose sons had fought for Curthose, that the men holding Rochester were eventually allowed to lay down their arms without also forfeiting their lives.

Before long, de Bellême patched up his differences with Rufus, and he fostered a friendship with Henry. He accompanied Henry back to Normandy, but was arrested alongside him, thanks to Curthose’s suspicion that they had come to cause him trouble.

Bishop Odo encouraged Curthose to strike against de Bellême’s power base, while he was imprisoned. Curthose made good progress, capturing de Bellême’s castle of St Cénéry, east of Sées, mutilating some of the garrison and blinding its commander. But, typically, Curthose failed to push home his advantage by making further inroads. He followed the example of his father and of Rufus, releasing the dangerous de Bellême to continue on his path of self-interest and destruction.

In a cruel age, he became a byword for particular viciousness. At a time when the fear of God persuaded many to respect (or at least bear in mind) the concept of mercy, and divine retribution, de Bellême seems to have been devoid of religious belief or conscience. He chose not to ransom his prisoners – then normal practice, since it was lucrative – because he preferred to keep victims on hand for torture and mutilation.

The chroniclers are unanimous in their condemnation of this curiously sadistic aristocrat. Orderic Vitalis told of how those who fell into his clutches ‘groaned and wailed as they were torn by his iron talons’.[4] The historian-monk recorded how, one Lent, rather than repent of his sins, de Bellême chose to let three hundred prisoners starve and freeze to death while chained in his dungeons.

Henry of Huntingdon noted that de Bellême enjoyed thinking of excruciating ways to inflict pain on captives of both sexes: ‘He impaled men and also women on stakes. To him the most horrible butchering of men was pleasant nourishment for the soul.’[5] William of Malmesbury recalled de Bellême’s rage when upset by the father of a boy he was holding hostage. Even though de Bellême was the child’s godfather, he tore out the boy’s eyes with his fingernails. We read too of de Bellême carrying off the son of a defeated rival and, contemporaries were sure, poisoning him.

Wace called him ‘a baron whom people considered very treacherous, but who was on very good terms with the king. Robert de Bellême was a traitor and knew many forms of treachery and evil; he was an expert in treacherous games and feared on account of the harm he did.’[6]

Despite his outrages de Bellême remained a favourite of William Rufus, who approved an advantageous marriage that had been arranged for him in the final year of the Conqueror’s life: de Bellême’s wife, Agnes, was heiress to the powerful count of Ponthieu, whose brother had distinguished himself at Hastings, being in at the kill when Harold was dispatched. But being married to de Bellême was far from easy: Agnes was kept locked up in one of his castles until she succeeded in escaping and found refuge with the Conqueror’s youngest daughter, Adela, Countess of Blois.

When the inhabitants of Domfront rebelled in 1092, anyone must have seemed a better choice to be their lord than the depraved Robert de Bellême. But the loss of Domfront infuriated de Bellême. It would be the starting point of a personal hostility between him and Henry that, apart from one brief rapprochement, proved impossible to overcome. Domfront’s powerful fortress provided Henry with a base from which to build his reputation and grow his influence. He swore to respect and uphold the laws and customs that the townspeople had in place, and he gave his word that only he would be their lord, for as long as he lived. Henry offered security, in place of de Bellême’s savagery.

As Henry began his ascent to prominence and power, his two brothers’ animosity towards one another rekindled. By late 1093 Curthose was threatening to end the peace between them, because he was tired of Rufus’s relentless untrustworthiness. Meanwhile Rufus prepared for renewed aggression by bribing some leading Normans to join his cause.

But when hostilities resumed Curthose was able to rely on the support of Philip I of France. Philip laid siege to the key frontier castle of Argentan, thirty-five miles south-east of Caen. He took it in a day, and in the process captured 700 royal knights and 1,400 squires.[7] At the same time Rufus found himself fighting a bitter war from England with the Welsh. He needed Henry’s support now more than ever. Henry of Huntingdon noted how Rufus ‘sent his brother Henry to Normandy with a great deal of money, to attack it on his behalf with daily raids’.[8]

From 1095 Henry and Rufus were as one against Curthose, and in the process Henry’s star rose. From political and territorial irrelevance four years earlier, he had now achieved a firmer grip than ever on the Cotentin: Rufus had been forced to confirm him in his authority there as part of the price of his crucial support. In return Henry brought his military ability and energy to bear against Curthose. While leaving the fighting in Normandy to Henry, Rufus tackled his enemies in Britain. After much ravaging of the western counties of England, he led an expedition into Wales at the end of 1094.

Curthose also found himself under considerable pressure, since his inheritance lay in total disarray: ‘For at that time there was exceptional unrest among the magnates of Normandy and a great stirring of evil throughout the land,’ remembered Orderic Vitalis. ‘The law of the strong was to rob and ravage. The whole country was devastated by fire and plunder, which drove many of the inhabitants into exile and left whole parishes destroyed and churches abandoned as the priests fled.’[9]

Given the pitiful state of the Church in Normandy at the time, it was ironically the papacy that seemed suddenly to offer Curthose an exit from the chaos.

At the Council of Clermont, held in November 1095, Pope Urban II summoned an impressive gathering of prelates and aristocrats. He had recently received urgent requests from the emperor of Byzantium, the head of the Christian faith in the East, for mercenaries to help fight the Turks. Urban took the opportunity to ramp things up to an altogether greater level. He announced a great Christian undertaking, to retake Palestine and drive out Islamic people from the Holy Land.

Fulcher of Chartres is considered the most accurate of the chroniclers present at Clermont. He recorded Urban as saying: ‘I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ’s heralds to publish this everywhere, and to persuade all people of whatever rank – foot-soldiers and knights, poor and rich – to carry aid promptly to the Christians [in the East] and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends. I say this to those who are present, and to those who are absent. Moreover, Christ commands it.’[10]

One of Pope Urban’s many reasons for calling Christians to arms, against an enemy whose threat he hugely exaggerated, was a wish to bring about greater peace in western Europe. He had already tried to initiate the concept of the ‘Peace of God’, to protect non-combatants from the rolling bloodshed of endless wars, and he had brought in the ‘Truce of God’, marking out fixed days in the year when no fighting was allowed.

Pope Urban insisted that private wars cease during the life of the Crusade, exhorting ‘Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians.’[11] This looked attractive to the hard-pressed Curthose, who was buckling under the pressure of fighting against his brothers and their supporters in Normandy.

The pope also guaranteed that all those pilgrims who answered his call would not only be assured of a place in heaven, they would have their possessions protected while they were serving God far away from home. Curthose could remove himself from the disgrace brought about by his being ‘a weak duke … sunk in sloth and voluptuousness … who feared the vassals in his own duchy more than they feared him’,[12] and garner some much-needed prestige as one of the leaders of an enterprise that was divinely blessed, and hugely popular.

Curthose arrived in England in the spring of 1096 to make peace with Rufus and to ask the king to fund his role in the Crusade. The brothers agreed that, in return for three years’ control of the dukedom of Normandy, Curthose would be paid ten thousand marks of silver. Rufus raised some of the enormous sum needed for this most Christian of endeavours by plundering his churches of many of the gold, silver and bejewelled treasures given them by previous generations of kings and aristocrats. That September the king accompanied the money raised in this way to Normandy, and Curthose set off on the Crusade soon afterwards.

Having gained control of his family’s ancestral lands at such expense, Rufus set about making good his investment. He realised he could best achieve this by placing strong and loyal lieutenants throughout Normandy to bring it back under control. The king had pressing requirements in Britain and, according to John of Worcester, after Easter 1097 he ‘set out a second time for Wales with an army of horse and foot with the intention of killing all the male population’.[13] Unable to direct operations in Normandy, Rufus gave the military governorships of Coutances and Bayeux to Henry. These lay, respectively, at the western and eastern bases of the Cotentin which Henry already controlled, and so considerably increased his hold over the western part of the dukedom.

In the campaigns of 1097 and 1098, Henry proved one of his brother Rufus’s leading commanders in Normandy, fighting to gain control of the French Vexin and to regain control of Maine, which had been occupied by Fulk IV, Count of Anjou. The retrieval of Maine held great importance for Rufus because of the county’s long associations with his family. It had been given to his ancestor Rollo, Duke of Normandy, in 924, by the king of France. Normandy, to the north, and Anjou, to the south, had played a game of tug-of-war with it ever since. William the Conqueror’s brutal invasion of 1063 had succeeded in quietening down Maine for a while, reassuring him of safety on that troublesome flank when he set off for England. But the Normans had been overthrown in a rebellion in 1070, and Maine remained unsettled for the rest of the Conqueror’s reign.

With Curthose absent on Crusade, it was Rufus’s turn to fight for Maine. This he did vigorously, forcing Fulk IV to hand back Le Mans and all the castles that had belonged to Normandy during the Conqueror’s pomp. But Le Mans flared up again the following year, provoking the king to cross the Channel at astonishing speed and once again drive out the rebels from the city.

These were times of widespread and brutal warfare for Rufus across many fronts, Orderic Vitalis noting how, in the autumn of 1098, his forces ‘advanced rapidly into France as far as Pontoise [twenty miles north-west of Paris], burning, plundering, taking captives, and so destroyed all the wealth of that fair province’.[14]

Meanwhile Rufus had to cope with other dangers back in England, including the continuing possibility of invasion from across the North Sea. His father, William, had had to contend with various Viking threats, including a planned invasion by Cnut the Holy of Denmark, in 1085. The Scandinavian menace remained in Rufus’s reign, even if the protagonists had changed. After becoming king of all Norway in 1095, the aggressive Magnus Barefoot took control of a string of islands around the north and west of Scotland, moving on to the Isle of Man, then the Welsh coast, before landing on the island of Anglesey.

However, the chroniclers of England recorded how, for many of Rufus’s subjects, the great fear was not of invasion, but of a visit from the lawless royal household. The king let his men do as they wished, without punishment or restraint. Once it was known that they were approaching, people would flee with their families into the woods, abandoning homes and possessions rather than risk their personal safety. ‘When they could not consume all the provisions that they found in the homes that they had invaded,’ the contemporary historian and churchman Eadmer of Canterbury wrote, ‘many of them, intoxicated by their own wickedness, made the inhabitants take the remaining provisions to market and sell them for the benefit of the invaders; or else they set fire to the goods and burned them up; or if it was drink, they washed their horses’ feet with it and poured the rest on the ground … It is shocking to contemplate the cruelties they inflicted on the fathers of families, the indecencies on their wives and daughters.’[15] Henry of Huntingdon also wrote of how ‘the King’s friends robbed and subverted everything, even going unpunished when they committed rape’.[16] They were, he concluded, guilty of ‘unspeakable debauchery’.[17]

Orderic Vitalis portrays Rufus as the debaucher-in-chief: ‘He was generous to knights and foreigners, but greatly oppressed the poor inhabitants of his kingdom and took from them by force the wealth that he lavished on strangers.[18] Orderic was appalled by the identity of some of these royal hangers-on, calling them ‘effeminati’ – homosexual men who flaunted their ostentatious clothing and what the monk saw as their blatant immorality. ‘He never had a lawful wife,’ Orderic noted of Rufus, ‘but gave himself up insatiably to obscene fornications and repeated adulteries. Stained with sins, he set a culpable example of shameful debauchery to his subjects.’[19] It has never been established for sure if Rufus was homosexual. He had no wife, and there are no records of mistresses or illegitimate children. The consensus among his modern biographers seems to be that he was probably bisexual, and that he enjoyed frequent sex with an ever-changing cast of lovers of both genders.

It is unsurprising that so many of the chroniclers of the time wrote so scathingly of Rufus, for they were churchmen, and the Church suffered terribly during his reign. The income from the estates of the archbishoprics, bishoprics and abbeys of England was vast – Domesday Book had estimated that churches and monasteries held a quarter of the land value of the kingdom, in 1086 – and Rufus found it irresistible. He chose to leave senior ecclesiastical offices vacant so the revenue would fall to him. He even left the see of Canterbury unfilled, after the death of the Conqueror’s last archbishop, Lanfranc, in May 1089. At Christmas 1092 Rufus announced his intention to keep the see empty for the rest of his life.

Three months later, while staying at a royal hunting lodge in Alveston, in Gloucestershire, Rufus was struck by a life-threatening bowel condition. He was rushed to Gloucester, twenty-five miles away, so he could be treated by the monks there. Attending the king’s sickbed in Gloucester Castle, they persuaded Rufus that his affliction was divine punishment for his sins. ‘Thinking that he would die soon,’ wrote John of Worcester, ‘he vowed before God, following his barons’ counsel, to reform his way of life, never again to sell or tax churches, but to guard them with royal power, to annul unjust laws, and establish just ones.’[20]

But still Rufus remained critically unwell. His confession was taken by Anselm of Bec, a sixty-year-old Italian who was one of the most respected churchmen in Europe. When the sickness reached its most dangerous point Anselm administered the last rites to the king. Contemplating how to appease the God who he feared he was about to encounter, Rufus told Anselm he wanted him to become the new archbishop of Canterbury.

Problems quickly arose when William Rufus began to get better. Anselm seemed reluctant to take the position, citing his age and his poor health as barriers. Perhaps he was concerned about the demands of high ecclesiastical office, for Anselm was at heart a man of contemplation. Coming from the quiet of the Aosta Valley, in the modern-day Italian Alps, he had seriously considered life as a hermit, and a yearning for tranquillity was in his soul. His Christianity was earnest, but without personal ambition. It centred around a belief that he had answered God’s calling to serve Him. In turn it was his duty to persuade others to live as good Christians, so they could earn the reward of joy in the next life. He said he was keener to remain in Bec than to move to England.

Anselm eventually yielded to Rufus’s wishes, and agreed to become archbishop provided the king honour three stipulations. First, Rufus was required to recognise Urban II as the true pope, rather than contemplate supporting his rival, Antipope Clement III. Next, Rufus had to commit to returning all Church lands that he had wrongly taken for himself. The third point was more personal: the king must agree to receive his spiritual counselling from Anselm. The king reluctantly agreed, and Archbishop Anselm was enthroned at Canterbury in September 1093.

It was a relationship forged in a moment of panic. As Henry of Huntingdon wrote, Rufus had ‘promised to amend evil laws and to establish peace in the house of the Lord’, when in fear of his life. ‘But as soon as he recovered, he went back on this, and behaved worse than ever.’[21]

In 1094, with Rufus preparing to cross the Channel to fight Curthose once more, Anselm offered to bless the English fleet. The archbishop’s chronicler, Eadmer, recorded Rufus’s thoughts on the matter: ‘As to his blessings and prayers, I utterly abominate them and spew them from me!’[22] When Rufus’s campaign that year went less well than its predecessors, Eadmer was unsurprised.

After further arguments – over Anselm’s wish to travel to Rome to receive the symbol of his office from the pope, over doctrine, over the archbishop supposedly sending too few knights when the king raised an army against the Welsh – the relationship between Anselm and William Rufus disintegrated.

The king insisted the elderly archbishop submit to his authority, and not to the pope’s, or receive perpetual banishment. In 1097, Anselm chose exile. William Rufus allowed him to go but, in a fit of petulance, forbade him from making any part of his journey through Normandy, even subjecting Anselm to a final indignity before he sailed: the king’s men unpacked his bags on Dover beach, searching for supposed secret correspondence. There was none. Anselm set sail for Boulogne, and travelled on to Rome, remaining in exile for the remainder of Rufus’s reign.

Henry of Huntingdon summed up all that was wrong in the land, when Anselm departed: ‘Then Archbishop Anselm left England because the evil king would permit nothing right to be done in his kingdom. He harassed the shires through taxes which never ceased: for the building of the wall round the Tower of London, for the building of the royal hall at Westminster, and to satisfy the rapacious and aggressive habits of his household wherever they went.’[23]

William Rufus bequeathed to his successors a building that was, most likely, the largest in Europe. ‘He began and completed one very noble edifice,’ William of Malmesbury noted, ‘sparing no expense to manifest the greatness of his liberality.’[24] Westminster Hall was constructed a mile and a half to the west of London’s city walls, between 1097 and 1099. The king wanted to impress his subjects with the scope and majesty of this architectural masterpiece, and placed at the palace’s core his marble throne. When he summoned the first royal court to attend him there, in May 1099, his brother Henry was among those present.

Henry was viewed by many of the grander courtiers there as something of an eccentric adjunct to the earthy, irrepressible king. Few can have imagined how the following year would conclude for the Conqueror’s overlooked and underestimated youngest son.

FOUR
Opportunity

They went into the New Forest, intending to hunt stags and hinds; they set up their watch throughout the forest, but departed in great sadness. For the king, the knights and those who were his archers took up their positions and stretched their bows just as they saw the hinds coming.

Robert Wace, Jersey-born poet and historian (c.1110–c.1174)

William the Conqueror’s passion for hunting knew no bounds, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle noting that he:

… preserved the harts and boars

And loved the stags as much

As if he were their father.[1]

This obsession led to ruthless punishment for poachers who dared to interfere with his royal prey: ‘If anyone caught a stag or a boar, [William] put out his eyes, and no one murmured,’ recalled Henry of Huntingdon.

Not content with all the land available to him, which had produced ample hunting country for previous monarchs, William took advantage of his conquest of a new land to expand the territory devoted to his gratification. He eventually treated a fifth of England as park and forest where he and his companions could enjoy their sport. There was no law in these lands: they fell under the king’s pleasure, and so did their regulation.

The Conqueror carved out a huge, fresh area in the south for quarry to breed in without interference. ‘He loved the beasts of the chase,’ wrote Henry of Huntingdon. ‘On account of this, in the woodlands reserved for hunting, which are called the “New Forest”, he had villages rooted out and people removed, and made it a habitation for wild beasts.’[2] Two thousand inhabitants of thirty villages were turfed out of their homes so as not to infringe on the king’s hunting habitat, and the forest was expanded by twenty thousand acres. Some suggested the sacrilegious removal of so many religious sites, at the heart of the cleared communities, would surely result in divine retribution against the king.

William passed on his infatuation for hunting to his sons. This was to be at huge cost to them. We have seen how the Conqueror’s second son, Richard, died of injuries sustained while out in the New Forest, crushed between a branch and the pommel on his saddle.

In early May 1100 Richard, one of Robert Curthose’s illegitimate sons, also died in an accident in the field. A knight in the hunting party missed a deer with his arrow but struck the youth, killing him outright. His shocking loss caused consternation because, as Orderic Vitalis wrote, ‘Many had prophesied a lofty destiny for him.’[3] The guilty knight fled to the Priory of St Pancras, in Lewes, Sussex. He showed penance for causing the death, and in becoming a monk he avoided any penalty for his wayward shot.

A few weeks later the royal pursuit claimed its most celebrated victim.

On 1 August Fulchred, abbot of Shrewsbury, gave a fiery sermon condemning the disarray that had beset England under Rufus’s rule. The abbot referred to ‘the leprosy of villainy’, ‘unrestrained lust’ and ‘the sickness of evil’ that stalked the land. But, he told his congregation, he believed deliverance to be imminent.

‘Not much longer will effeminates govern,’ he was said to have warned. ‘Behold, the bow of divine anger is bent against the wicked, and the arrow swift to wound is taken from the quiver. It will strike suddenly; let every wise man avoid the blow by amending his life.’[4]

That same night, William of Malmesbury wrote, Rufus had a nightmare. In it he allowed his surgeon to let his blood, but the procedure took on a terrifying tone when the king began to see the blood form a steam that ‘clouded the light, and intercepted the day’.[5] Rufus awoke with a start and called out to the Virgin Mary for protection. He ordered servants to stay with him in his room for the remainder of the night.

The next day – a Thursday – the royal hunting party started out later than usual, reports soon afterwards claiming the hard-living William Rufus was suffering not only from the fright of the nightmare, but also from a hangover that had slowed the start of his day. The king was eating with his companions, which included his brother Henry, when a blacksmith came forward with six arrows for the day’s sport. Rufus is said to have kept four of these for himself while passing the other two to a French knight, Walter Tirel, with the words: ‘It is only right that the sharpest arrows should be given to the man who knows how to shoot the deadliest shots.’[6]

Before setting out Rufus was allegedly handed a letter from Abbot Serlo of Gloucester, in which he warned the king about dreams that had been troubling his monks at night. Their message seemed clear: the king was soon to be punished by God for his constant abuse of the Church. Rufus laughed off Serlo’s letter, then mounted his horse and steered it into the New Forest with huntsmen and companions falling in around him.

The details of what happened later that afternoon are not clear. Perhaps Walter Tirel fired the fateful arrow, though he swore even on his deathbed that he did not. But his name was quickly attached to the disaster, even after he insisted he was in another part of the forest when it occurred. ‘Many people say he stumbled, got caught up in his cloak and diverted the arrow,’ wrote Wace.[7]

Perhaps an arrow ricocheted off a stag or a tree. Certainly, though, William Rufus was struck by an arrow, flush in the chest. He instinctively snapped off its shaft in his hands, then fell to the ground, first onto buckled knees, before toppling forward without uttering a word. This impact drove the arrow deeper into him, killing him at once. ‘A little earlier [that day],’ Henry of Huntingdon reported, ‘blood had been seen to bubble up from the ground in Berkshire.’[8] The sudden death of a king was such a catastrophic event that, in the medieval mind, it demanded a supernatural omen as its herald.

Henry’s part in the day that changed his life for ever started with a humdrum piece of bad luck. On drawing back his bow, he had snapped its string. ‘Henry took the bow in his hand and rode quickly to a peasant’s lodgings in order to get twine or thread to mend his bowstring,’ wrote Wace. ‘While he was delayed over the mending of his bow, an old lady in the dwelling asked a youth who it was who was holding the bow and wanted to go hunting.’[9] When told it was Henry, she prophesied that he would soon be king.

Henry had returned to his brother and his companions by the time the lethal arrow struck. Stunned by what had occurred, the hunting party soon scattered. The period between the death of one king and the coronation of the next was a time of unique insecurity in the land, a vacant throne easily leading to a lawless state. Some of Rufus’s lords rushed from his side to secure their possessions. Others took advantage of the temporary vacuum in royal power, hoping to seize what they could while they could.

As shown by the disrespectful way in which William the Conqueror’s corpse was treated, death for a king took him from the peak of human power to the depths of undignified irrelevance at a stroke. William Rufus’s servants threw a cloak over him and escorted his body from the hunting field, slung over a horse ‘like a wild boar stuck with spears’, before placing it in a cart.[10] The humble funeral wagon trundled through the forest towards Winchester, where Rufus was buried ‘on the day after his perdition’.[11]

Henry and his attendants rode the same path to Winchester, but they were charging ahead, determined to reach the city before news of the royal tragedy got out. Winchester, the second city of England, was the home of the royal treasury, and Winchester Castle had been the repository of Norman kingly power since the year after the Conquest. Whoever controlled Winchester had one hand on the crown.

When Henry arrived, he revealed the death of his brother to incredulous ears. He stated his intention of taking the throne. William de Breteuil, an important nobleman who had ridden with him from the spot where Rufus was slain, was the only man who tried to block Henry’s entry into the treasury. De Breteuil, a religious man, felt compelled to remind the prince that both of them, along with the majority of Anglo-Norman barons, had sworn homage to Robert Curthose. Also, he pointed out, Curthose was even then on his way back from the Crusade, where he had fought valiantly for God: this was a further reason, de Breteuil claimed, for submitting to him as the rightful king.

Henry drew his sword and brushed de Breteuil aside. The royal coffers were his and, the following day, Henry was declared king by the barons in Winchester. The last thing they wanted was a delay for, as Wace wrote, ‘It is necessary for a kingdom to have a king, for it cannot exist without a king.’[12] The barons hoped the swift installation of Henry on the throne would bring about immediate peace and order.

Henry set off for London to be crowned in Westminster Abbey, in a ceremony combining mysticism and symbolism. Coronation was believed to confer on him the status not only of England’s leader, but also that of God’s representative on earth. It would make it extremely difficult for another – even his eldest brother – to challenge his right to rule. This transition, from minor princeling to anointed king of the English, was to be achieved within seventy-two hours of William Rufus’s death.

So great was the hurry that there was no time to summon the archbishop of Canterbury from exile in Burgundy, or the archbishop of York from Yorkshire. Henry was crowned by Maurice, Bishop of London, a former archdeacon of Le Mans who had been chancellor of England to William the Conqueror in the later years of his reign. The new king was, from the start, eager to connect his rule to that of his late father.

Henry obeyed the traditions of English royal succession by making promises to the country that had submitted to him. His ‘Coronation Charter’ was a compact with his subjects that he ordered to be read out at each of England’s county courts. It consisted of fourteen clauses, the thrust of which was to ‘establish a firm peace in all my kingdom’, to stamp out wrongdoing and to commit to the upholding of his predecessors’ laws. As the chronicler and statesman Abbot Suger noted approvingly from France: ‘He gladly restored order to the kingdom of England according to the law of kings of old. And to win the goodwill of his people, he confirmed by oath the ancient custom of the realm.’[13]

Eager for their support, the new king reassured his aristocrats that he would not exploit them as his late brother had done when their families were at their most vulnerable. Someone from a medieval landowning family had a life expectancy of a little over thirty years from birth. This rose to forty-five if they successfully ran the gauntlet of childhood diseases and reached the age of twenty-one. In an era of such short lives, when warfare, illness or perhaps hunting accidents could suddenly carry away even the most powerful, these were guarantees that the aristocracy craved, and felt comforted by.

Henry promised that, when an heir succeeded his father, he would no longer have to pay an exorbitant fee to the crown. Also, when the king stood as the guardian of an heiress, she would not be married off for royal gain. Instead, he promised: ‘When one of my barons or other men die leaving a daughter as heir, I will not give her in marriage except according to the advice of my barons.’[14] Equally, a lord’s widow would no longer be forced to take as her new husband a man chosen by the king.

Henry wanted to reconnect with the firm rule of his father, the Conqueror, who, remembered Henry of Huntingdon with a nostalgia so misty-eyed that it blurred into fantasy, ‘had created such a complete peace that a young girl, laden with gold, could travel unharmed through the kingdom of England’.[15] Henry promised to reassert similar peace in the land. He wanted quickly to set out his stall as a monarch who took the duties of kingship extremely seriously. Henry knew that Curthose would never accept being passed over as the ruler of England for a second time. He would surely soon challenge hard for the crown, so Henry needed to present a brand of kingship to his lords that would stand in contrast to Curthose’s dangerous incompetence in Normandy and Rufus’s past failures in England.

Henry of Huntingdon noted: ‘William was rightly cut off in the midst of his injustice. For in himself, and because of the counsels of wicked men, whom he invariably chose, he was more evil to his people than any man, and most evil to himself; he harassed his neighbours with wars, and his own men with frequent armies and continued gelds. England was miserably stifled and could not breathe.’[16]

Henry was determined to show that, now he was king, nobody would be above the law. He took immediate aim at Ranulf Flambard,[fn1] a son of a priest in Bayeux. Flambard had served as one of the compilers of Domesday Book, before rising to become the senior figure in Rufus’s corrupt rule. He was William Rufus’s chaplain, his leading administrator and (for a time) the main legal figure in the kingdom.

The all-powerful Flambard had pleased his royal master by extracting huge sums from rich and poor alike. Henry of Huntingdon wrote how Rufus’s rule was a time of ‘not shaving but skinning the English people with taxation and the worst exactions’.[17] Flambard had also seized wealth from the Church, and as a reward for his loyal service, Rufus had given him the wealthy bishopric of Durham. Now, in a clear indication that things had changed under the new king, the hated bishop, the embodiment of Rufus’s degenerate rule, was imprisoned for corruption in the Tower of London.

Henry, eager to secure Anselm’s backing for his kingship before he could support Curthose’s claim, urged the exiled archbishop to return from Lyons and resume his mission in England. Henry promised to right the wrongs of his late brother’s rule and renounced the ‘evil customs’ by which Rufus had helped himself to the wealth of the Church. Henry also promised to submit to the archbishop’s counsel. Crucially, though, nothing else was agreed between the king and the prelate.

When Anselm arrived back in England, he found himself in a more contrary position to royal power than he had been when he had entered exile. Urban II, instigator of the First Crusade, had issued a papal decree a few months before his death in 1099. In it he determined that any layman who oversaw the investiture of a churchman, or any churchman who accepted investiture from a layman, must be excommunicated. It was the formalisation of the thoughts that Urban had stated a few years earlier: ‘No priest shall perform homage to a layman, because it is unseemly that hands consecrated for God and hallowed by holy anointing should be placed between unconsecrated hands, which may belong to a murderer, or an adulterer, or one guilty of some other heinous sins.’[18]

During his time in exile Anselm had attended the papal councils of Bari and of Rome as an honoured guest, and he had fully absorbed Urban II’s message as it crystallised into dogma. On his return to England Anselm found himself awkwardly placed between a papacy keen to establish the Church’s independence from lay interference and a monarch who was very clear indeed about his rights. ‘Your holiness should be aware that as long as I live,’ Henry wrote to Urban’s successor, Pope Paschal II, ‘with God’s help, the privileges and uses of the kingdom of England shall not be diminished.’[19] It set the stage for an investiture contest in England along the lines of the one that had pitted pope against emperor for a generation.

But Henry had pressing needs at the outset of his reign which put off the moment when either side would confront such thorny issues. One of Henry’s prime duties, as king, was to produce a male heir. Another was to keep peace in his lands. The two obligations were interconnected: there could be no greater danger to harmony than a disputed succession, and no better guarantor of peace than an acknowledged ruler-in-waiting.

Henry had, by this stage, sired a dozen children out of wedlock. For his Norman ancestors, there would have been no barrier to a natural son succeeding his father. But the increasing influence of the Church in England and Normandy since the mid eleventh century had brought a renewed emphasis on the sanctity of marriage. William the Conqueror would be the last illegitimate ruler in Rollo’s direct line. Henry’s most urgent duty as the new king was to marry, before producing a legitimate male heir as quickly as he could.

Orderic Vitalis tried to put a heroic spin on Henry’s now opting for matrimony after a particularly hectic bachelorhood, saying the king’s decision stemmed from his ‘not wishing to wallow in lasciviousness like any horse or mule, which is without reason’. But Henry would, in time, father many more illegitimate offspring. He was marrying not because he had suddenly been swayed by the lure of sanctified monogamy, but because he had to establish his dynasty.

Henry chose as his bride a princess of Scotland. Born in 1080 in Dunfermline, she was one of two daughters (there were also six sons) of King Malcolm III of Scotland, who was known as Malcolm ‘Canmore’ – an anglicisation of the Gaelic for ‘Great Chief’. She had been baptised ‘Edith’ at a service where her godparents were Henry’s eldest brother, Robert Curthose, and their mother, Matilda of Flanders. But Edith would be known as ‘Matilda’ – a particularly popular name in royal circles at the time – when she was Henry’s queen.

Malcolm’s militarily incompetent father, King Duncan, had been killed in battle. His successor Macbeth, the earl of Moray, had ruled as king for seventeen years, with a wisdom and touch far removed from Shakespeare’s dark, fictionalised, neurotic. The real-life Macbeth was a devout Christian who attended a papal jubilee in Rome in 1050. Undertaking such an ambitious expedition showed great confidence in the security of his rule back home. He took significant wealth with him to Rome, impressing onlookers with the amount of alms he doled out to the poor. As king, Macbeth insisted on enlightened measures, such as the legal defence of widows and orphans. He governed with a firm hand that ensured order, and he led successful forays over the border into England. His strength of purpose and his vision helped to bring prosperity to his people.

But Malcolm Canmore successfully lobbied the papacy and the English to support him in his bid to become king. After three years of defensive fighting against Malcolm and his English allies, Macbeth was toppled at the Battle of Lumphanan, in north-east Scotland. With defeat certain, Macbeth made a last stand, before being overwhelmed. Near the battlefield is a rock, where Macbeth is said to have been dragged for beheading.

Malcolm Canmore would reign for thirty-five years, before the cycle of violence in Scotland eventually caught up with him. In 1091 he had submitted to William Rufus (just as he had to the Conqueror, in 1072). Two years later he advanced into England to ask why the conditions of his submission had not been honoured by the English king. Malcolm and his son Edward were returning north, still dismayed at Rufus’s deceit, when they were caught in an ambush at Alnwick, in Northumbria, and killed.

But, Malcolm’s lineage aside, it was Matilda’s mother, Margaret, who made her such an enticing match for Henry. Margaret was from the English, West Saxon, royal family that descended through Alfred the Great, all the way back to Cerdic, the sixth-century king of Wessex. Margaret’s great-uncle was Edward the Confessor, while her grandfather had been Edmund Ironside, king of England in 1016 until defeat by Cnut cost him half his territory, then – when accosted by an assassin while on his privy – his life.

Margaret’s father was Edward the Exile, so called because he was driven out of England after Edmund Ironside’s subsequent murder left the entire kingdom in Cnut’s hands. Edward was only a few months old when forced to leave. Margaret’s brother, Edgar Ætheling, was the teenager who had been proclaimed king by the English Witan after the death of Harold at Hastings. His hopes had come to nothing, though, when William the Conqueror was instead crowned at the end of 1066.

Margaret had been born in Hungary in 1045 during her family’s years in exile. She married Malcolm Canmore after her family was shipwrecked on the Scottish coast. The queen was respected for her deep personal piety, sustained in part by her gold-lettered copies of the Gospels. William of Malmesbury noted that Margaret would hear Matins three times a day during Lent, and he claimed that she could recite many of the Psalms from memory. She fasted frequently, gave alms to the poor, championed the protection of orphans and insisted that prisoners be treated humanely. Such Christian devotion would see her canonised two centuries later.

Margaret became gravely ill in November 1093, on hearing of the slaying of her husband and their son Edward. ‘Immediately summoning priests,’ recorded John of Worcester, ‘she went into church, confessed her sins to them, and caused herself to be anointed with oil, and to be strengthened by the holy viaticum.’[20] Then, broken-hearted, she died.

By the age of thirteen, Matilda had therefore been both an orphan and an exile. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle noted that Henry’s bride was ‘of the true royal family of England’.[21] The prospect of her marrying the king reminded people of the famous deathbed vision of Edward the Confessor. In it he had been warned by two ethereal figures that his kingdom would face great trials in the years ahead. England would only be healed, they said, ‘when a green tree, if cut down in the middle of its trunk, and the part cut off carried the space of three furlongs from the stock, shall be joined again to the trunk, by itself and without the hand of man or any sort of stake, and begin once more to push leaves and bear fruit from the old love of its uniting sap’.

One interpretation of this scene gained popularity: it was hoped that the recovery of England, after the protracted trauma of the Norman Conquest, would stem from the marriage of the princess with such an ancient English bloodline to the king descended from warriors of the renown of Rollo, Longsword and the Conqueror.

Although a dynastic marriage, the couple were eager participants. Eadmer observed that they were ‘in love’, while Orderic Vitalis wrote that Henry had ‘long adored’ Matilda’s ‘perfection of character’. Another commentator noted that Matilda was ‘not despicable in point of beauty’. But the choice of Matilda as royal bride had its difficulties. On being returned to England in her youth she had been educated at convents at Romsey – under the protection of her aunt Cristina, who was a nun there – and then Wilton. The question arose as to whether she had taken the veil while attending either religious house. If she had ever made her vows to God, she could never marry.

When Matilda understood that she might be blocked from becoming Henry’s wife, she appealed to Anselm for help. She explained that she had only worn ‘a little black hood’ at her aunt’s insistence, to protect her from the lust of marauding Normans. ‘And when I threw it off,’ Matilda protested, her aunt ‘would often make me smart with a good beating and a most horrible scolding’.

Archbishop Anselm ordered an investigation, the findings of which were to be considered by an assembly of leading churchmen and barons at Lambeth. Reports came back confirming that Matilda had not taken the veil, although she had worn one once – when the notorious Alan of Richmond had heard where she was and come to inspect her as a potential bride. To save her teenaged niece from Richmond’s unwanted advances, Cristina had disguised Matilda as a nun until he was safely on his way.

Anselm appears to have been sceptical about Matilda’s eligibility for marriage, but it was not an issue over which he was prepared to risk his budding relationship with the new king. The archbishop led the marriage ceremony of Henry and Matilda in Westminster Abbey at the end of 1100, less than four months after Henry became king.

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