William II died in 1100, in as swift and sudden a fashion as he had lived. The story goes that, on the night before his death, he had a dream in which he was being bled by his leeches; his blood surged upwards and covered the sky, turning day into night. He woke up in great fear, and called out to the Virgin Mary; then he ordered lights to be brought into his chamber. There is another story of his last night on earth. The account of a dream or vision, granted to a monk from the abbey at Gloucester, was brought to him. In the monk’s dream the king was seen to attack the crucifix, and gnaw at the arm of Christ; but Christ kicked out at him, and left him sprawling on the ground. It is a vivid image, but not so vivid as to overawe William Rufus. He is reported to have laughed, and ordered that the monk be given 100 shillings.
Another source records that it was the abbot of Gloucester who sent news of the monk’s vision in a letter to the king. William’s response is interesting. ‘Does he think that I act like the English,’ the king is supposed to have asked, ‘postponing their travels and business because of the snores and dreams of little old women?’ The English were indeed noted for their superstitious credulity as well as their piety; William might very well have made a remark of that kind, with its implicit contempt for his subjects.
He had decided to spend the day of 2 August 1100 hunting in the New Forest, one of the large stretches of land devoted to the king’s sport. As he prepared himself for the hunt, a blacksmith presented him with six arrows; the king kept two for himself and gave four to a companion, by the name of Walter Tirel. He sat down to eat before riding out, and drank more than was good for him. Then he and Tirel set off, separating from the others so that they could shoot at the deer that were being driven towards them. The king shot first, and wounded a stag. Walter Tirel then aimed at a second stag, but by accident hit the king in the chest. William staggered forward, and then fell on the arrow. Tirel, in panic fear, fled from the scene of the king’s death.
That is the accepted version of William’s end. In truth there is no reason to question it. None of the chroniclers seems to doubt that the death was accidental. Hunting accidents happen. Many of the great events of history are simply accidents. But the death of a king arouses suspicions. His younger brother, Henry, was a member of the hunting party. Could he have hoped to succeed to the throne? Or could a foreign court have been at work, using a Norman accomplice? Or was there perhaps some private enemy, taking advantage of the king’s presence in the forest? The ancient philosophers have said that truth lies at the bottom of a well.
There is another, kinder, story about his death. It has been reported that in his final agony he called out for the Eucharist to be administered to him. No cleric, or communion bread, could be found in the forest. So one of the hunting party put flowers and herbs into his mouth, as a form of natural communion.
William’s end forcibly impressed his contemporaries. It made such a deep impression, in fact, that his death is the only event of his reign that has stayed in the consciousness of the English. He had come and gone like the lightning flash. He had behaved as a king. He had exploited the realm entirely for his own benefit, and had attempted to extend it as a measure of his own power. He pushed the boundaries further back. He had achieved very little else but, in a period of factional violence, it was perhaps enough that he had kept the country united – even if it was only united in suffering.
His body, bleeding profusely, was taken in a horse-drawn wagon to Winchester, where the canons of the Old Minster took charge of the proceedings. It was said that his corpse resembled that of a wild boar pierced by a hunter. William Rufus was buried, without much ostentation or show of grief, under the tower. The tower crumbled and collapsed a few years later. A black pillar, known as the Rufus Stone, marked the place in the New Forest where he fell. It still stands.
Some of William’s own monuments also survive him. He completed the White Tower and built Westminster Hall, largely with gangs of pressed labour groaning under the exaction. He rebuilt London Bridge, but a flood washed away much of its structure. Westminster Hall survives, albeit in altered form, as the most appropriate token of William’s might. This dark and solemn building, of thick walls and huge pillars, was unimaginably large to the people of the time. But it was not vast enough for William. When it was finished, he declared that it was not half as great as he had intended. ‘It is’, he said, ‘big enough to be one of my bedchambers.’ Listen to the indomitable arrogance of the Norman kings of England.
The last of them, Henry, came down quickly like a wolf on the fold. As soon as he heard the news of his elder brother’s death, he rode to Winchester and seized the treasury there. Three days later, on 5 August 1100 at the age of thirty-two, he was crowned as Henry I at Westminster. He had been alternately bribed and bullied by his two elder brothers, as they all fought over lordship of Normandy, but the possession of England was a greater benefit. He was more reserved and cautious than William Rufus, and proceeded to handle his prize with circumspection. He was called ‘Beauclerc’ or ‘the good scholar’; he was literate, and spoke Latin. But he also had other accomplishments; he fathered over twenty bastards.
In his coronation charter he promised to undo the wrongs committed by his predecessor. He invited Anselm to return to Canterbury, a polite request that the cleric accepted. He gained the loyalty of the principal magnates by the judicious use of patronage. He extinguished private wars between barons. And he married Edith, the niece of the new king of Scotland; more importantly, perhaps, she was linked by blood with the line of Anglo-Saxon kings and was a direct descendant of Alfred the Great. The Norman dynasty was thereby sanctified in the eyes of the English. She did, however, abandon her English name and was known as Matilda; this was the name of Henry’s mother.
Henry was intent upon consolidating his dominion. Forty years after the Norman invasion and conquest of England, the English invaded and conquered Normandy. Henry led his troops into the duchy and, at the battle of Tinchebray, captured his elder brother; Duke Robert was taken to England, and spent the rest of his life in prison. It was a signal victory for the new king, having reunited the lands of his father. For all but the first two of his thirty-five years as monarch, the country was at peace. He set up a ferry service between Southampton and Dieppe. One other innovation of the realm deserves to be mentioned. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the rabbit was introduced to England.
Henry maintained the borders with Scotland, but did not choose to enlarge them. He built upon his brother’s conquests in Wales by a policy of encouraging Anglo-Norman settlement and of conciliating various Welsh princes; a Welsh chronicler declared that Henry ‘had subdued under his authority all the island of Britain and its mighty ones’. That was not entirely true. The eastern and southern parts of Wales had come under the control of Norman lords, with their panoply of castles and of courts and of burgeoning towns, but the central and northern areas of the country were still governed by the native princes. When many Flemings migrated to the east coast of England, on account of the floods in their own region, the king settled them in Pembrokeshire, where they maintained their own language and culture until the end of the eighteenth century.
He was a strong sovereign, then, but not necessarily a benevolent one. He was concerned only with his own immediate interest, and the government of England became a form of estate management in which all of the available assets of the land were exploited. That was the Norman way. Throughout his reign the monks from Peterborough Abbey lamented ‘manifold oppressions and taxations’. An extraordinary series of bad harvests also undermined the ability of the people to withstand his exactions. ‘God knows’, an Anglo-Saxon chronicler wrote, ‘how unjustly this miserable people is dealt with. First they are deprived of their property, and then they are put to death. If a man possesses anything, it is taken from him. If he has nothing, he is left to perish by famine.’ The king did take care to protect his supporters. When the coinage was debased with tin, Henry’s soldiers complained that their pay was nearly worthless; he ordered that all of the coiners should be castrated and lose their right hands. He cultivated the interests of the magnates, too, by royal gifts and allowances; eulogists duly celebrated the harmony and loyalty of England. The aristocracy, in other words, could always be bribed and bought.