Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (12 page)

On the morning of his execution, he was told that the King had shown mercy and would, rather than hang, draw, and quarter him, have him beheaded on Tower Hill. He replied,
“God forbid the King shall use any more such mercy on any of my friends.”

After his death, his elderly wife, Lady More, was turned out of their house. His property and effects were settled by Henry on his own infant daughter, Princess Elizabeth, who kept it throughout her reign.

Further Reading

Minney, R.J.
The Tower of London.
Prentice Hall, 1974.

Monarchy: The N
ormans
—
William Rufus and Henry I

by Debra Brown

T
he Normans that followed the Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror, provide an interesting historical story. William left Normandy to his eldest, whom he considered to be too generous and easy-going to manage England. England he left to his second son, William, called William Rufus for his red complexion. He was crowned on September 26, 1087.

Rufus came to be known as cruel, ruthless, greedy, and crude. He was always looking for ways to obtain more money, and when he couldn’t get it from the Norman barons or the English townsfolk, he taxed the Church heavily.

When the Archbishop of Canterbury Lanfranc died, the irreligious Rufus did not replace him, but kept the revenues normally allotted to the post for himself. He did the same when other bishops and archbishops died. When fearing death, he finally replaced the Archbishop with a Benedictine monk, Anselm of Bec, but upon recovering, he exiled him to Rome and seized his assets. This was a very different method of rule than that of his famously pious Norman predecessor as well as the English kings Alfred the Great and Edward the Confessor.

Rufus built the Great Hall of Westminster according to his grand scale ambitions. It was the largest secular space north of the Alps, used for feasting and entertainments. He would sit on an elevated plane, crowned, robed, and enthroned. The choirs would sing in Latin, wishing him long life and victory.

The gap between rich and poor increased, and those with money began to dress extravagantly. Men wore flamboyant, puffed-up tunics and curved, pointy-toed shoes. Women wore more and more extravagant jewelry. Rufus himself, or William II, surrounded himself with “half-naked”, long-haired young men according to contemporary accounts.

England’s French-speaking barons often owned estates both in England and Normandy—thus, they owed some of their allegiance to William’s older brother, Duke Robert. Robert was staking his claim to the English throne, and some of the barons united in his support just a year after William’s coronation.

William crushed the revolt, and in 1090, he invaded Normandy to subdue Robert. He also repelled attempts by Malcolm III of Scotland and an uprising by barons in Northumberland.

William, like his father, loved hunting. William I had taken over huge areas of countryside, 90,000 acres, for his own use; Rufus took 20,000 more and made the rules of the oppressive Forest Law even harsher. Killing a deer was punished by death. Men were maimed just for shooting an arrow at one. The punishment for simply disturbing a deer was blinding. These rules were considered un-English and were a constant reminder that William Rufus was a foreigner, ruling and oppressing England.

After only thirteen years of rule, in a superstitious age, it appeared that Rufus received punishment for his ways. While out hunting deer in the New Forest with a party which included his younger brother Henry, he was hit by an arrow and died “without repentance”. His body lay neglected for several hours and was finally carried to Winchester in a charcoal-burner’s cart. He was buried there beneath the cathedral tower. Imagine the thoughts of the superstitious people who hated this king when a year later the tower came tumbling down!

Who killed William Rufus? It has never been proved.

One account says that he accidentally killed himself. Others state that a Norman lord named Walter Tirel shot him. Tirel fled the country but always maintained his innocence.

Interestingly, as soon as the king was dead, his brother Henry seized power with suspicious ease. He wasted no time mourning his brother. He rushed to Winchester, secured the treasury, seized the royal crown and rode off to London to have himself crowned. His claim to the throne was dubious. Rufus and his older brother Robert, still Duke of Normandy, had agreed to be heirs to each other. Robert was known to be on his way home from the Crusades with a reputation for chivalry and a young wife who could bear him sons. There was no time to waste.

Henry turned to the English people for support. He was “born in the purple”, the only one of William the Conqueror’s sons to be born in England while his father was the English king rather than just the Duke of Normandy. Unlike his father and brother, he could read, write, and speak some English.

Rather than just swear to rule justly, as was normal at a coronation, Henry had his promises written down and widely circulated. He promised to bring back the laws of Edward the Confessor. He would rule with consent, like an Anglo-Saxon king, and not with force and extortion. He vowed to remove the tyrannical rule of the oppressed people that his father and brother had practiced. He was crowned in Westminster Abbey on August 5, 1100.

Henry’s Charter of Liberty was followed by all the kings up until the Magna Carta in 1215, and was copied fairly closely therein. He also set up the
Curia Regis
, or King’s Council, to settle disputes between the monarch and the people. He married a Scottish princess, Edith, who was descended directly from Alfred the Great and Edward the Confessor, which helped him to placate both the Scottish and Saxons to some degree. She did, however, adopt the Norman name Matilda, and their two children were named Matilda and William.

However, a problem arose. Galloping inflation set in when the silver money began to be mixed with tin. England’s stable currency had been the envy of Europe for three centuries. Henry arrested the one hundred and fifty men who had worked in the mint and put them on trial. Ninety-four of them were found guilty and were punished with barbaric severity. Even though these men were not Normans, but Englishmen of high status, the people were behind Henry in the matter. The coinage must be protected at any cost.

For Henry, the greatest problem of all was the death of his young heir William at age seventeen. William was returning to England from Normandy in a ship. It crashed against rocks because of the drinking on board, and though William was safely put into a boat, he insisted on returning to the area to save his illegitimate sister. The only survivor was a butcher.

William’s sister Matilda was, at the time, living as Empress Consort of the Holy Roman Empire in Germany.

King Henry is said to have never smiled again, and he was now faced with the need to choose a new heir to the throne. His nephew Stephen had no Saxon blood, something that had been important to Henry for his heir, and so he chose instead his daughter Matilda, a descendant of Alfred. We’ll see how well that went in the
next post
of the series!

Sources

Buskin, Richard.
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to British Royalty
. Alpha Books, 1997.

Monarchy with David Starkey
. Directed by David Hutt and Mary Cranitch. 2006. Acorn Media. DVD.

Ross, Josephine.
The Monarchy of Britain
. William Morrow & Co., 1982.

The Mysterious Death of King
William the Second

by Judith Arnopp

T
he New Forest is a timeless place, with many areas remaining unchanged since medieval times. If you venture away from the tourist spots you will find ancient woodlands, rusty-coloured streams, and vast areas of heath that seem to belong to another era.

As a child, I spent so much time in the New Forest that it became like a second home. Even now, forty-odd years later, the aroma of heather, the tang of the pine, the vague hint of the salty Solent evoke those wonderful days.

The tales of William Rufus and the “Rufus Stone” were familiar, repeated over and over until they became part of my psyche. I could easily imagine him riding out to hunt with the hounds baying and the pennants casting an unnatural splash of colour on the woodland.

A few years ago when I was looking around for ideas for my next novel, the name William Rufus seemed to jump from nowhere into my head, and I quickly determined that the New Forest would provide an ideal setting for my story, a story that was already embedded in the British consciousness—the mystery surrounding the death of William Rufus.

The early Norman period is very much neglected in fiction. Perhaps the events were too long ago for to us to properly engage with, or maybe publishers are just not prepared to take the risk of straying too far from their beloved Tudors.

As a lover of early British history, I think there is a place for fiction set earlier in the calendar and so I went ahead regardless.
The Forest Dwellers
is not just the story of Rufus, but the early Norman regime and the mysterious deaths of the Conqueror’s sons form the backdrop to the fiction of Ælf and Alys.

The Domesday Book tells us that in 1065, before the invasion, the villages cleared for the main part of the forest consisted of an estimated five hundred families, possibly two thousand men, women, and children. This estimate does not allow for slaves, personal retainers, or men working under villains; it only represents the landowners or occupiers. It is not a huge number when compared with devastation caused elsewhere by the conquering Normans but enough, I think, to generate a considerable amount of resentment.

The defeated Saxon population of England did not welcome the Normans; all over Britain there are accounts of uprisings and dissent. There were Saxons who fought and lost, those who retired into obscurity to die in poverty and want, and there were those that collaborated, pretended to accept Norman authority.

In the forest, new rules meant that making a living was impossible—punishment was harsh and frequent, but life went on. People lived and died in oppression while memories of the old way of life slowly faded. The thing that remained unchanged was hatred and resentment for the Norman interloper.

Like the Saxon kings before them, the Normans were lovers of the hunt, but whereas Harold and his predecessors were content to share the forest with the commoners, the Normans were less tolerant.

King William I had four sons: Robert (known as Curthose, later to become Duke of Normandy); Richard, who died young; William (known as Rufus, his father’s successor who became King William II); and Henry (known as Beauclerc, later to become Henry I). The king’s second son, Richard, should have inherited the English throne, but he predeceased his father. Records of Prince Richard’s death are scarce; most simply relate that he was killed during a chase in the New Forest.

Fatal hunting accidents were not uncommon, but losing his heir to the English throne was King William’s first major blow. The people of the forest would undoubtedly have seen it as divine retribution, and there would certainly have been no mourning or pity among the commoners. It occurred to me that, perhaps, twenty years later, the memory of the first royal death in the forest gave life to the more mysterious demise of his brother, King William Rufus.

According to William of Malmesbury, William Rufus was
“well set; his complexion florid, his hair yellow; of open countenance; different coloured eyes, varying with certain glittering specks; of astonishing strength, though not very tall, and his belly rather projecting.”

Not a very flattering picture and, all in all, William seems to have been a complex fellow.

He was popular among his companions but his relationship with his brothers was volatile and the church regarded the king almost as an anti-Christ. Rufus was a very luke-warm Christian and not above selling church positions to the highest bidder rather than filling them by appointment. He left many positions empty, depriving the church of revenue and pocketing the income himself.

The most recorded characteristics of the king seem to have been his love of hunting, his delight in rich cuisine (particularly eels), a predilection for young male companions, and excessive monetary greed. He was a man of eclectic tastes; his companions at court were reported as effeminate, adopting ridiculous fashions and wearing their hair long.

Some say he was homosexual, some that he was not, but there are no recorded offspring, either legitimate or otherwise. This does not mean that he did not father any children. A man like Rufus would be more than capable of ignoring his responsibilities. In
The Forest Dwellers,
which is a fictional tale, he is an amiable but selfish man whose sexual impartiality eventually leads to his downfall.

On the day of his last hunt, Rufus had been taken ill and the outing was postponed, but quite late in the evening the king, deciding he was well enough after all, called up the horses and the party rode off into the forest. The company consisted of many powerful magnates that were close to the king, among them his brother, Henry Beauclerc, and Rufus’ friend, Sir Walter Tyrell.

The Peterborough manuscript of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
states that
“on the morning after Lammas Day, the king William was shot with an arrow in hunting by a man of his”
(
Anglo Saxon Chronicle (E)
1099).

Another chronicler, Geoffrey Gaimer stated,
“We do not know who shot the king,
” and Gerald of Wales wrote,
“The King was shot by Ranulf of Aquis.”
Research into Ranulf of Aquis draws a blank. There is no clear indication of who he was, but what is clear is that Rufus’ death was as much a mystery then as it is now.

The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
goes on to say what a wicked fellow Rufus had been, but it must be remembered that the church had many grievances against Rufus. In fact, all contemporary accounts written of William Rufus are the work of those with an agenda against him, so the picture we have of him is distorted.

At the time there seems to have been little fuss made about who shot the fatal arrow. Rufus was dead, his body abandoned in the forest while his erstwhile companions fled to secure their holdings and their place in the court of the new king.

Tradition has it that Rufus’ body remained where it fell until it was picked up by a charcoal burner named Purkiss, and taken to Winchester for burial.

Rufus’ brother Henry, being in the right place at the right time, became the next monarch and perhaps had a reason for not pursuing the truth—perhaps he was complicit in his brother’s death, perhaps not.

Later historians and fictional representations of the tale point the finger at Sir Walter Tyrell, Lord of Piox de Picardie in France and friend of the king. The night before the hunt Rufus is said to have presented Tyrell with two rather splendid arrows with the words “
to the good archer, the good arrows.
” It was one of these arrows that was later found embedded in the king’s heart. Allegedly, Tyrell shot at a stag but the arrow deflected and lodged in the king’s chest. Tyrell, on seeing what he’d done, fled to France.

Tyrell was never pursued for his crime—perhaps it suited the new king that he was never found and questioned, perhaps he housed dangerous truths. Some say he was Henry’s man, paid well for his services, but, although Henry undoubtedly had the best motive, Tyrell spent his remaining years exiled in France, receiving no reward and never speaking out against the English king. Therefore, his involvement seems unlikely and one chronicler, Abbot Suger, maintained until he died that,

It was laid to the charge of a certain noble, Walter Thurold, that he had shot the king with an arrow; but I have often heard him, when he had nothing to fear nor to hope, solemnly swear that on the day in question he was not in the part of the forest where the king was hunting, nor ever saw him in the forest at all.

The fact remains that almost a thousand years have passed since that day and during those centuries, historians have been over and over the story, seeking a culprit, patching together fact and fiction, mismatching truth with legend until the real story is totally lost in speculation.

I suppose the main message I want to make in
The Forest Dwellers
is this: the forest was teeming with people that day—it could have been anyone!
The Forest Dwellers
is an action-packed adventure, peopled with plausible characters. You will find no “goodies” and no “baddies”, just complex humans, struggling to survive in an unkind world.