Getting Ready for William the Marshall

Edward the confessor, King of England from 1042 to 1066, did not clearly settle the issue of succession. William the Bastard of Normandy thought he had been promised the crown. Harold Godwinson believed it was to be his. Harold was at hand when Edward died, so he grabbed the reins. Incidentally, centuries later when Edward’s tomb was opened, it was discovered that his corpse was still in pristine condition. It had not suffered decay. We don’t know why.

In late 1066, after Saxon king Harold had been up north fighting the the Norsemen, he had to immediately march his men back south to straight way, without having slept, face William and his Norman warriors who had landed with the intention of seizing the crown of England. Harold was defeated at the battle of Hastings by these descendants of Vikings, and William now became known as The Conqueror. William rewarded his men with grants of land confiscated from the Saxons, and so established the Norman rule over England. Rouen was to become primary over York and London as the capital of the expanding Norman empire. The Normans lorded it over their Saxon population for centuries. Although the populations started to blend, none of the Kings of England spoke English until Edward I, great-great-great-great grandson of the conqueror, and even then it was his third language. French was the language of the privileged, with Latin being used in ecclesiastical business. England was so peripheral to some of the later Normans, that one queen, Berengaria the wife of King Richard Couer de Lion, never even once set foot on English soil. Richard did though: England was an important tax base.

William was succeeded by his sacrilegious son, William Rufus. When he died, a sizeable portion of the younger generation of nobility had already perished in the sinking of La Blanche-Nef in 1120. This appears to have been a poor medieval example of a gay cruise vessel. Amongst the Normans, homosexuality did not have the same stigma as among the conquered Saxons, and to the Saxons, the sinking of The White Ship was God’s punishment upon the irreligious Normans.

The Conqueror’s fourth son, Henry, succeeded Rufus as Henry I, an able administrator (hence his name Beauclerc). He took to wife a Saxon princess, who has come down in history as Good Queen Mold. They had a daughter, Matilda, but no surviving sons, their son having died in the disaster of the White Ship. The laws of primogeniture were not followed in the realm in those days, and Matilda did not automatically inherit the crown. In fact, Henry had been negotiating with Stephen of the House of Blois to become his heir. Matilda went on to become Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, but eventually came back to England to cause huge troubles.

Funny….I set out to tell about perhaps the greatest warrior of history, William the Marshall, and wanted to first set the stage, but that took more than I was planning.

I intend to pick up the story soon…..