Although five years after the Conquest, 1071 was in fact the watershed year in King William’s life. This was not so much because it marked the king’s final and decisive moves against the English aristocracy, but because it was at the beginning of the year, in February, that his oldest and closest friend and supporter, William fitz Osbern, was killed while accompanying the army of King Philip of France in its invasion of Flanders. Earl William had been left in Normandy as King William’s faithful viceroy the previous year, when it became clear that England would occupy the king for a lot longer than he would have liked. The earl went to Flanders to represent his master in the host of France, which the young King Philip had raised in order to impose his will on the county as it debated the succession to Queen Mathilda’s brother, Baldwin VI (who had died in 1070). William fitz Osbern died when the French army was routed in a surprise attack by the Flemings at Cassel. His body was borne back to Normandy for burial, and the grieving king took responsibility for settling the family’s affairs. King William’s grief and anger are said to explain the poor relations which persisted between the Anglo-Norman realm and Flanders till the 1090s. And it was in settling the inheritance of his old friend’s estates that William unexpectedly reached a point of transition in his life.
The king was now in his mid forties. Although in full vigour of mind and body, a new generation of Norman nobles had grown up under him. He and his companions, who had fought the great battles against King Henry and Geoffrey of Anjou, were now the elder generation. This new generation, which included now his own adult sons, Robert and Richard, was to be the enemy of his latter years, not the English or the French. In 1071 the king partitioned William fitz Osbern’s inheritance between the earl’s two elder sons: William de Breteuil took his great Norman patrimony, while the younger son, Roger, was allotted a portion of his father’s English interests, an earldom based on Hereford, with further interests across the Wye in Welsh Gwent (of which Roger called himself ‘lord’). Roger proved to be a faithless subject, and the cause of the first major Norman rebellion against William for two decades. The reason why this was so was because he, unlike his father’s generation, did not identify with William’s ambitions and interests. William, in turn, did not identify with Roger’s generation, and very few among them ever penetrated his council, which led to further resentment.
One of the advances in medieval scholarship over the past few decades has been the discovery of this generational rhythm in medieval society, both within families and at court. We have already seen something of it in the clashes between the young William and his uncles after his marriage in 1051; we have seen it also in the way he later redefined the ducal family to exclude their influence. It was not always the case that the younger generation was antagonistic to the elder in the Norman dynasty (as Orderic Vitalis observed). It was a matter of individual disposition. Under Duke Richard II, his elder son Richard, and a number of his younger sons proved loyal and cooperative to their father’s will, but the second son, Robert, proved resentful and rebellious. Eleventh-century society possessed a culture of free-living aristocratic youth, a heedless way of life which had the potential to alienate the older generation from the younger: the one was established and in control of the family resources, and the other addicted to an expensive lifestyle but unable to pay for it. The social dangers in this tension were apparent to everyone. A writer from the abbey of St-Benoit-sur-Loire of around this time described Burgundy as being prey to gangs of armed and epicene youths ‘full of themselves in their youthful vigour and enterprise’ who rode the countryside with musicians at the head of their march, charmingly terrorising the neighbourhood in search of money for their pastimes.
Such violent young vagabonds were following a distinguished trail — as well as prefiguring the aggressive and hedonistic youth culture of the later twentieth century. The latter years of King Robert II of France (died 1031) were plagued by troubles with his sons. The elder, and associate king, Hugh (died 1025) grew up having the title of king from the age of ten, but ‘realised that apart from the food and clothing given him from the kingdom over which he had been crowned, he controlled nothing of his own’.12 So he gathered a band of youths of his own age and pillaged central France until his father came to a compromise. The same story was to be repeated fifty years later in the Anglo-Norman realm in the latter years of King William, and indeed in the next century with the children of King Henry II. William had become a father before the battle of Mortemer finally established him as unchallengeable in Northern France. His first child, whom he named Robert after his own father, was born at some time in or soon after 1052, and he was (being dose to adulthood) associated with his mother in the government of Normandy in 1066. He had a brother Richard, who was born before 1056, but who never lived to plague his father, for he had died in a hunting accident before 1074. Robert had been conceded the title of count of Maine by his father in 1063, a dignity which in time would have seemed a piece of irony without the power to go with it. By the mid 1070s, Robert was chafing at the constraints his determined father placed on him. By then, a third son, William (certainly born before 1060), would have joined him in his angry need for independence.
The loyalty and stability that had been so characteristic of the Norman aristocracy for two decades first trembled in the autumn of 1074. It began with a marriage alliance between the young Earl Roger of Hereford and another newcomer, Ralph de Gael (son of Earl Ralph the Staller), the new earl in East Anglia. Despite the king’s disapproval of the match, Earl Roger married his sister to the new earl. There was an expensive and luxurious wedding festival - celebrations which customarily went on for over a week - at the manor of Exning in Suffolk. Social gatherings of nobles were always places where plots might arise - tournaments were later to be just as notorious as conspiracy-beds. At Exning, with the king safely far away in Normandy, Earl Roger persuaded his guests that they should defy William and extort concessions from him. Earl Waltheof was with the marriage party, and he initially went along with the plot. We know, from the letters which Archbishop Lanfranc wrote to the earl, that the cause of Earl Roger’s discontent was the fundamental one that he did not have the same regional power that his father, William fitz Osbern, had exerted. In particular, the king had removed from him the oversight his father had had over the sheriffs of the south west. The king had been made aware of the earl’s complaints, and even suspended the sheriffs’ jurisdiction over Roger’s lands. But promises were not enough, so Earl Roger and his allies rebelled in 1075 as a consequence.
The nature of this rebellion should not be mistaken. When medieval magnates put their castles in defence against their king or lord, it was not generally from the sort of ideological reasons that the modern mind associates with rebellion; it was more of an aristocratic protest riot. In this sort of case, where a magnate felt he was not getting the respect and the privileges he regarded as his right, he was making an armed demonstration to bring home a personal protest. Sometimes this involved ‘defying’ the king, that is, formally returning his faith to him. If this was done, the magnate was not technically committing treason if the affair led to fighting. What might happen was confrontation, followed by negotiation and submission. Orderic Vitalis in his later account of the rebellion made out that the rebels sought to seize, divide and rule England. But Earl Roger and his allies could have had no thought at the beginning of overturning the king and seizing power; they just wanted their rights. Formal defiance was sent to the king - we know this was done since Archbishop Lanfranc mentions that William sent a reply to the earl offering some concessions. But when Earl Roger persisted, the king became less amenable. He mobilised his English viceroys (Bishop Odo and Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances) against the rebels with the aid of a baron, William de Warenne, and Archbishop Lanfranc laid them under interdict. Earl Roger was deterred from crossing the Severn, and forced back into Gwent, where he took shelter with the king of Glamorgan. Earl Ralph and his large Breton military household were likewise confined to East Anglia by a mixed army of Norman and English loyalists. When no aid came from home or from the Danes to whom he had appealed, Ralph fled the country, leaving his wife under siege in Norwich, and the castle soon surrendered.
Worried by the possibility of a Danish army arriving in England, William returned to his kingdom in autumn 1075 for the first time since the summer of 1072. The Danes, when they came, led by King Swein’s son Cnut, settled for looting York and left soon after. The king then sat in judgement on the rebels, many of the lowlier of whom were blinded and emasculated. The king let Earl Ralph’s family and household leave to join him in Brittany. Earl Roger gave himself up, but forfeited his lands and liberty (which was the appropriate punishment for a man who had formally ‘defied’ his lord and become his enemy). Earl Waltheof, however, who had in fact given himself up to Archbishop Lanfranc before the rebellion got serious, was treated with severity. He was tried at Winchester and the court sentenced him to the English penalty for treason, which was beheading. He was executed in May 1076 on a hill outside the capital of Wessex, the last earl of native lineage until the elevation of Patrick fitz Walter fitz Edward to Salisbury around the year 1144. Waltheof’s estates were given intact to his widow, the Conqueror’s niece. Many writers, French and English, thought that in the end Waltheof did quite well out of his punishment. He was treated by many as a martyr, and his tomb at Crowland abbey became a popular shrine, his miracles proclaiming that God had received him guiltless directly into the company of saints. The next generation of Anglo-Normans reckoned that it was William’s remorselessness to Waltheof which deprived his latter years of success and brought continual troubles on him.
Troubles continued to multiply for the king, despite his crushing of the rebellion of 1075. Next to vex him was his own son, Robert. The troubles he stirred up were indirectly related to the troubles stirred up by Earl Roger, because Robert the king’s son likewise felt excluded from power. They were also directly related, because the king decided to invade Brittany in autumn 1076, where the exiled Ralph de Gael had based himself in the city of Dol, just across the border, so as to continue his attack on King William. The king moved to try to expel Ralph, but his bad fortune continued when King Philip, still only in his mid twenties, joined with Count Hoel of Brittany, took William unawares and drove him away from Dol with the loss of his army’s baggage. William suffered something that looked very like a military defeat, a rarity for him so far in his career; not only that, but he was worsted by the young and relatively inexperienced king of France. So the end of 1076 found William dealing with a revival of the Capetian war that had subsided at the death of King Henry in 1060. Philip - whom his father had named in hope after the great hero-king of Macedon - proved indeed to be a formidable opponent on the battlefield and off. Already in 1075, he had invited Edgar atheling to cross over to France from Scotland and take charge of the important castle of Montreuil between the counties of Ponthieu and Boulogne, to use it as a base to harry William in Normandy. Although the scheme failed, Philip was clearly willing to assist anyone who had a reasonable chance of destabilising the Anglo-Norman realm.
Robert, son of King William, however much his father may have loved him, was a great gift to King Philip, who used him to inaugurate a strategy that was to be used by subsequent generations of Capetians until the fall of Normandy in 1204: supporting the disgruntled heir to England against the reigning king and so weakening both. William was not blind to the strategy being used against him, and turned to diplomacy. He seems to have attempted to neutralise Count Hoel by suggesting a marriage alliance between the count’s son, Alan, and his daughter Constance. In 1077 he was able to reach a temporary peace agreement with King Philip. He may have already realised the danger that his eldest son was becoming, for that same year William - with the consent of King Philip - had Robert formally invested with the duchy of Normandy. Robert was labouring at this time under a grievance, although it is hard to say whether frustration with his father or rivalry with his brothers was the source of the problem. At the end of 1077 relations between the king and his son finally collapsed. Orderic Vitalis puts it down to an incident at Laigle on the southern Norman border, as the king was preparing an army to overawe the count of Perche, another new and unwelcome enemy. The king’s younger sons, William Rufus and Henry (still only a boy), taunted their elder brother by occupying the upper floor of his lodgings, while he was downstairs. They held a dice party and amused themselves by urinating on their brother and his military household below. A riot ensued as Robert and his men attempted to storm the upper room, which brought the king and his knights to the scene to separate the brothers.
The next day, Robert and his household left the army and attempted to seize Rouen, doubtless as a preliminary to raising his sympathisers in the duchy against his father. When this coup failed, with the king now out against them, Robert, his knights and those barons who had supported him fled for the borders and took refuge at the castle of Chateauneuf-en-Thimerais, in the French March. Open war along the southern and eastern borders of the duchy followed on inevitably. Robert was supported by William fitz Osbern’s eldest son, William de Breteuil, a great southern Norman lord, and by the turbulent and charismatic warrior Robert de Belleme, son of Roger de Montgomery. The generational shift within the Norman ruling class can be seen most clearly in the way that the old king’s principal friends and supporters produced sons who were his principal adversaries and the allies of his rebel son. Although the king managed to dislodge him from the southern frontier, Robert then resorted to his uncle, the count of Flanders, and was inevitably caught within the net of King Philip of France. Philip gleefully took the opportunity of increasing King William’s embarrassment by establishing Robert at the marcher castle of Gerberoy, on the French Side of the Norman border opposite Gournay on the Epte. Philip was repeating the strategy he had attempted in 1075 when he had tried to persuade Edgar atheling to harass William from the marcher fortress of Montreuil.
In January 1079, the king was forced to besiege his son in Gerberoy, or suffer a catastrophic loss of face amongst the barons of the Norman March. In the event, what happened was even worse. King Philip moved into the Beauvaisis. When the besieged Normans and the French combined against William in a battle outside the walls, William’s army was soundly defeated. Robert Curthose nearly achieved the Freudian ambition of destroying his father. He himself is credited with unhorsing King William and wounding him in the arm; only sparing him when he recognised that the bulky warrior he had brought down was shouting for help with his father’s rasping voice. The king’s household was cornered and many of them forced to surrender. Some idea of the ferocity of the combat can be found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s report that the English nobleman, Toki son of Wigot of Wallingford, was instantly killed by a crossbow bolt at the king’s side as he struggled to bring up a horse on which William could escape. The young William Rufus was wounded alongside his father, but he too was allowed to ride away. King William had to resort in the end to a peace conference at Gerberoy with King Philip in return for his release. Although the terms of their settlement are unknown, it seems likely that he was obliged to undertake to receive back Robert Curthose with a firm undertaking that Robert would have Normandy after his death.
The reconciliation took time to arrange, and may only have been ultimately possible through the intervention — moral and financial - of Queen Mathilda, who seems to have transferred huge sums of her own money to her eldest son. King William was usually patient under his misfortunes, but there is no doubting the fury and humiliation that churned away beneath his pragmatic handling of his defeat. During 1079 the surviving intimates of his generation, his wife, various holy men and even the pope himself, all worked hard to assuage the king’s embarrassment and, by their fervent petitioning, to remove some of the sting of concession, by making him appear gracious. At Easter (12 April) 1080, father and son were finally reunited in a spirit of cooperation, and together crossed over once again to England, from which the king had been absent for around four years. As often happened in medieval society, a series of great public events was staged in order to efface the memory of the humiliation. Glittering courts were held in England at the principal ecclesiastical feasts, and in the space between them military manoeuvres were held on the borders of the realm, against opponents who were unlikely to put up much resistance. In the summer of 1080 Robert Curthose and Bishop Odo of Bayeux led a great Anglo-Norman host to intimidate King Malcolm of Scotland and the northern English thegns. In the summer of 1081 the king himself with his son Rufus marched across south Wales as far as St David’s, to intimidate and impress the feuding Welsh rulers. The only concrete results seem to have been new Norman castles at Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Cardiff, but it was at least an effective demonstration of the power of the king of England, for those who might have chosen to doubt it.
Rather than demonstrating the undamaged power of William the Conqueror, these campaigns of 1080-81 may have advertised just the opposite; that the internal dissensions within the royal family had undermined the confidence of the realm it ruled. With the king and Robert Curthose uneasily allied, the realm was in reality impregnable to outside aggressors and to would-be dissidents within. But how long would the truce between father and son last; what about when the king died? Robert had demonstrated a real military talent and a political volatility which could only unsettle the whole Anglo-Norman condominium, despite the long and uneventful peace between 1080 and 1084. Some further symptom of perceived weakness may be seen in the sudden demand that came from Rome from Pope Gregory VII that William should acknowledge that he held his crown as a dependency of the see of Rome. The demand seems to have been made by cardinal legates in the aftermath of William’s forced reconciliation with his son in the summer of 1080, at a time when the pope and his ambassadors had judged the king to be at a low point. The claim depended on the tribute, called ‘Peter’s Pence’, paid Rome by England since the eighth century, and by the appeal for support for his claims to Pope Alexander II by Duke William in 1066. William flatly rejected the pope’s claim, and that was the end of the matter, as Pope Gregory was soon overwhelmed by troubles of his own, but his very claim was revealing about the current perception of William’s kingship.
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