The complications of succession in the Norman period, and the lack of hard and fast rules — as they were understood in the later middle ages - meant that it was often possible to contest the possession of the throne. After the death of the Conqueror there were three serious contenders for the throne of England who spent years arguing and fighting for what they considered their rights. The first of the three was Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy from 1087 to 1106, who saw himself as deprived of his father’s crown by his younger brothers, and who made two serious attempts to assert his rights. Following his capture and enforced retirement in 1106, Robert’s claims were asserted and pursued by his son, William Clito, the Young Pretender of the twelfth century. Between 1087 and 1128 father and son posed a serious problem for successive kings of England, and offered would-be rebels a banner and rallying point for their dissatisfaction. Lastly there was the Empress Mathilda, who had been promised the succession to the throne by her father, Henry I, but found that on his death those promises meant little. The Empress Mathilda has perhaps the best claim to be considered the last of the Normans, but it was her fate to be considered more as the originator of the royal claims of the Angevin dynasty.
It is worth saying something about how succession actually occurred in the Norman period. The fact that only one person at a time could exert princely power over a recognised Christian realm had been established in the land of the Western Franks before the arrival of the Seine Vikings at the beginning of the tenth century. Once Normandy had been established as a Christian principality there was never in all its history an attempt to partition it between competing heirs, as if it were the simple estate of a baron, or a conglomerate principality like Blois-Chartres-Champagne. Similarly, the unified kingdom of England had become an indivisible political unit by the end of the tenth century.
Despite attempts at co-rulership such as that which happened between the rivals Cnut and Edmund Ironside in 1016. Succession to both realms was ideally from father to eldest adult son, but this did not always happen. Richard III of Normandy had a young son, Nicholas, but he was in fact succeeded by his ambitious and domineering brother, Robert I. The fate of a child on the premature death of a father depended on the ambitions of the senior males of the dynasty. Robert I of Normandy was himself succeeded by his small son, despite there being a number of uncles who might have brushed the boy aside but who chose not to do so. The regular succession of male children to their fathers was not an issue that was ever resolved in the central middle ages. John became duke of Normandy and king of England in 1199 despite the claims of Arthur, the under-age son of his elder brother, Geoffrey.
The seizure of the throne by Harold Godwinson in 1066 was a dramatic coup inspired by personal ambition, but it shows how a man with barely a shred of blood connection to the royal house could still attempt to establish himself as king in this period. Harold based his claim on the nomination of his predecessor and the acclamation of the English people. When Stephen laid claim to England and Normandy in 1135 he asserted exactly the same rights, although he could at least back them up by the fact that he was a grandson of the Conqueror. Still, in the view of Mathilda and her descendants, Stephen was a usurper. She was the lawful child of Henry and had on more than one occasion been confirmed publicly as his heir, even if father and daughter were estranged at the time of the old king’s death. Lack of a hard-edged custom of succession in the central middle ages therefore meant that here was plenty of scope for rivals and pretenders to trouble the kingdoms and principalities of north-west Europe. This is nowhere more clear than in the way that Robert Curthose was on two occasions sidelined over the right to the throne of England. The newness of the Anglo-Norman realm meant that it could not be regarded as a single and indivisible political unit, as England and Normandy severally were. There was plenty of scope for division of his lands when William the Conqueror died, and schemes of division were continually being proposed throughout the twelfth century. Robert Curthose lost out over England to his younger brother, William Rufus, in 1087, and to his youngest brother, Henry, in 1100.
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