Once in England, the king and the duke marched north to confront King Malcolm of Scotland, who had spent the early summer plundering the north of England. Malcolm was protesting that Rufus had withheld from him the northern estates conceded to him by the Conqueror. The brothers organised what was to be a spectacular combined-operations Force of cavalry and sea-borne infantry to penetrate Lothian and devastate the coastal, flatter and more valuable parts of Malcolm’s kingdom. Unfortunately, in the last week of September, a sudden easterly squall sank most of the fleet on the rocks of Coquet Island off the coast of Northumberland, and severe weather inland played havoc with the cavalry columns. In the end, Rufus was forced to negotiate. Duke Robert took the lead, using his exiled friend Edgar atheling as an intermediary at the Scottish court, and in October Malcolm was restored to his property, in return for a formal act of submission to Rufus. Robert got no credit for this act of kindness and fraternal support. In the end, he left England empty-handed - along with Edgar - on 23 December 1091. The ‘joint government’ suggested by Rufus seems only to have been intended to be effective in Normandy. Rufus spent much of the next year strengthening the fabric of English lordship in the north. He took and refortified Carlisle, and expelled the Anglo-Scottish governor of Cumbria. He established new castle-based lordships in Cumbria and across the Pennines. He even attempted some ethnic adjustment in the north by colonising the Carlisle area with southern English peasants, who were more likely to be loyal than the indigenous British-Scandinavian population. It was a tactic that he would also encourage in south Wales over the next few years.
In 1092-93 William Rufus’s priorities shifted to the fringes of his kingdom in Britain, to Northumbria and the Welsh March. Why he abandoned his concern with Normandy at this point is not entirely clear, unless it was that he had been happy with what he had managed to achieve in 1091, and saw the power of Malcolm III of Scotland and the Welsh kings Rhys ap Tewdwr of Deheubarth and Cadwgan ap Bleddyn of Powys as having grown too intrusive to overlook. It is revealing of William Rufus’s attitude to England that he had such a concern with its frontiers, taking up where Harold of Wessex had left off nearly thirty years before. It was not something that had much bothered his father. At the beginning of March 1093, Rufus was at the manor of Alveston in Gloucestershire, clearly en route to the Bristol Channel crossing into south Wales. He was mobilising an army to extend Anglo-Norman lordship along the coastal plains of Gwent and Glamorgan. This was to be carried out under the command of his friend, Robert fitz Hamo, lord of Gloucester and Bristol. But in the event, Rufus himself was put out of combat by the onset of a sudden, painful and very severe illness. His household rushed their ailing king up the Severn to Gloucester, and summoned the doctors and clergy, each to offer what support they could to a man who was apparently dying.
The severe illness of 1093 had little permanent effect of William Rufus in terms of the moral amendment hoped for by his bishops, but it was important for the future of the English Church and its relationship with the monarchy. At that time Abbot Anselm of Bee was in England. Anselm was already an ecclesiastical celebrity. A man of great sanctity, theological originality and fearless determination, he had assumed control of the great Benedictine house of Bec-Hellouin in 1078 after the death of its founding abbot, Herluin. He had little affection for William Rufus, but circumstances had brought him into contact with the king’s inner circle. In 1090 he had confronted and faced down the king’s friend, Robert of Meulan, over his claims to rights over Bee as lord of neighbouring Brionne. Late in 1092, he arrived in England partly at the entreaty of another of the king’s friends, the earl of Chester, to found a monastery in his comital city. He had come reluctantly, forced to cross the Channel to set the abbey’s English affairs in order by a unanimous resolution of his monastic chapter. When the king fell ill Anselm was travelling in the neighbourhood of the court in the Severn valley, apparently marking time till he could arrange an interview with Rufus over the business of Bee. The king’s envoys found him somewhere in Gloucestershire or Wiltshire, and bundled him off to Gloucester to administer the last rites - as a suitably saintly and authoritative figure - to a less than pious king.
Anselm came to the king’s bedside on 6 March 1093 promptly and with quiet authority. The royal chaplains had prepared their lord to make the necessary confession which would precede absolution, and even the bishops present willingly made way for the great and famous abbot to administer the rite. Anselm naturally insisted that the king must undertake to make amends for his misdeeds, and Rufus promised much the same amends as his father had done; he ordered writs to be sealed releasing political prisoners, forgave debts and pardoned all his enemies. He also promised that, should he recover, he would much improve his rule of his realm. The clergy and nobles in the crowded bedchamber were much impressed at the king’s resolution to make a Good end. Pious ejaculations and wholesome suggestions flew in on him from all sides, not least that he should appoint a new archbishop for Canterbury, vacant since the death of Lanfranc, Anselm’s old master, in 1089. And the king promptly appointed Anselm, much to the abbot’s horror.
Eadmer’s description of the turbulent scenes in the crowded and darkened royal bedchamber is vivid. Anselm was rigid with shock while the bishops present were in transports of subdued delight. He was so struck with the stress of the moment that he burst a blood vessel in his nose. When they finally understood that Anselm was refusing the nomination, the bishops knelt before him in entreaty at the king’s suggestion. He knelt too in prayer, to deflect the symbolic assent of the Church to his promotion. But he was in the grip of a particularly devious king, who — even though weak and sick — knew how to get what he wanted. Since he wanted to live, and had convinced himself that he was damned to aeons of purgatorial torment if he did not appoint a worthy primate for the English Church, Rufus exploited the anxiety of his bishops that Canterbury should be occupied by a figure of international authority and repute. He got them to implore Anselm, to try to force a pastoral staff into his clenched hand, and finally to manhandle him to the nearby abbey and consecrate him while the archbishop-elect himself shouted; ‘It is of no effect! No effect!’ (indeed he had to go to church again to be properly consecrated in December). When he returned to the king’s bedside, Anselm assured him that he would recover and that, when he did, he had better undo what he had just done.
Anselm had good reason to object, although in March 1093 his objection was to the administrative burdens which would take him from his scholarship. He would have objected even more had he realised that the king had in his devious way succeeded in compromising him. Anselm some years later subscribed to the programme of the late Pope Gregory VII: that the powers of Church and the world be separate, and that the Church should rule its own affairs. One of the things that Gregorians objected to was the investiture of bishops and abbots with the symbols of their office by princes, a practice outlawed by Rome since i078.« Rufus had arranged that this very thing be done to Anselm all unwilling, and followed it up by writing the necessary letters to secure his release from his abbacy and from his obedience to the duke of Normandy. Rufus also appointed his friend Bishop Gundulf of Rochester - a former colleague of Anselm’s at Bee, who had been minding the diocese of Canterbury — to supervise the new archbishop’s household and daily routine. There was to be no escape for Anselm, but it seems that by August 1093 he had reconciled himself to his new condition. He wrote to his restive chapter at Bee telling them that they had to let him go and elect a new abbot.
The king of course recovered, and as soon as he was in good health he revoked many of the charitable acts of his supposed deathbed. When advised by Bishop Gundulf to reflect on his future life after his escape, the king is supposed to have scotfed: ‘By the Holy Face of Lucca you may be sure, bishop, that God will never find me become good in return for the evil he has done me.’9 We hear in this comment a genuine echo of the pragmatic culture of hall and camp: disinterested moral introspection was for monks and priests, soldiers were loyal only to those who were loyal to them. Holy names were for taking in vain. Rufus immediately set about reclaiming what he could from his generosity when he appointed a new archbishop, by setting Ranulf Flambard in September 1093 to open up expensive lawsuits against Anselm. In the meantime, the situation on the Marches of England improved dramatically in his favour. By the end of 1093 large new areas of Wales were subjected to Anglo-Norman power and Malcolm III had fallen to the sword of Earl Robert of Northumbria in a catastrophic Scottish defeat on the River Alne. Whatever the discontent of his subjects. King William Rufus could reasonably claim to have reclaimed much of the lost authority of the king of England over his wider tributary realm in Britain.
World History
