The Mysterious Death in the Forest

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Welcome to Gone Medieval fromrom History Hit, a podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the Crusades We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were Gone medieval Today, we're going to meet a medval monarch whose behavior was so scandalous that monks couldn't even bring themselves to write down the full story A king whose court was described in cold classical Latin Not as a Palace of Majesty Brothel of male prostitutes This was the court of William Rufus, son of William the Conqueror and arguably the most transgressive king ever to sit on the English throne William Rufus came to power in ten eighty seven. aged around twenty seven, inheriting England from his father while his older brother Robert got Normandy Rufus had all his father's ferocity without any of the piety that medieval kingship was supposed to demand He fought, he taxed, he bullied the church And he ruled For thirteen years He never married, he fathered no children And behind the walls of his court Something was going on that sent the church into a state of barely suppressed hysteria As an example, in february ten ninety four, what the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury Anselselm witnessed at Rufus's court at Hastings left him apoplelectic His secretary, the monk Edmir, recorded the scene At that time, he wrote Nearly all the young men of the court grew their hair long like girls and used to go around every day grooming themselves and glancing about flirtatiously, with dainty steps and mincing gait. Hy me. chose his words with one very specific meaning in mind. Rufus is caught was a hotbed of male homosexuality Anansselm was so horrified that he'd preached a furious sermon at the start of Lent And some of the yous, Julie chastised cut their hair and tried to look respectable the King Rufus refused to let Anselm convene a council to tackle what the Achbishop called the Vice of Sodom, which has spread in this land and corrupted many And so the courtiers carried on and scandal sccandal And then On the second of august eleven hundred Rufus was killed by an arrow while riding in the new forest Was it an accident? or murder His younger brother Henry moved with suspicious speed to seize the treasury and claim the throne withithin weeks, down on the court' sexual freedoms had begun monks P that God's punishment historians still argue about To explore the courourt of William Rufus, the scandal, the suspicious death, and the remarkable rule breaking life of England's original Sin King I' joined by friend of the podcast Tom Lyysense, prorofessor of Medieval History and Literature at the University of East Anglia and director of the Center of East Anglian Studies Welcome back to Gone Medieval Tom Be here, Matt, thanks for having me back We're looking forward to this. William Riffus is one of those kings who's managed to slip underneath the gone medieval radar so far. We've not really tackled him, so and'd be good to try and get to grips with him. I wonder if you could start us off by telling us a little bit about who he is When is he born? Who are his parents? What's his situation into which he's born Yes, we William Rufus was the second, I should say third son, the second surviving son of William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders. His older brother, Robert was born around about ten fifty two Another brother Richard was born circa ten fifty five, and then Rufus was born sometime around ten fifty eight, ten sixty. We're not sure entirely when And he became king of England, in fact, on the death of William the Conqueror in ten eighty seven tweting his two other brothers Robert, the elder surviving brother and Henry, his younger brother, who was born around ten sixty nine beating them to the English throne, getting there very quickly and having himself proclaimed king in ten eighty seven. And then in ten eighty eight he faced a I think rebellion is probably the wrong word, a bid on the part of some very powerful Anglo Norman barons to put his older brother Robert, Duke of Normandy on the throne in his place And he managed to see that off very effectively and hang on to England himself and he held England for thirteen years until his own death in august eleven hundred in a hunting accident in the New forest where he was famously by an arrow. And if you go to the new forest today you can see the roof of stone and a great oak nearby supposedly marking the spot where he met his according to All Chroniclers rather ignominious end And one of the interesting things about him, I guess, he's one of the sons that's born before the conquest, so born the son of a duke but will grow up. later on as the son of a king. When he becomes King of England in ten eighty seven, what do you think we should and perhaps what we shouldn't make of that settlement by William the Conqueror of dividing Normandy and England? Should we see Rufus as Williams favorite. Or is this more to do with the way you just divide up an inheritance this projected division of an empire is not uncommon. We see a similar thing with Kunut in ten thirty five where Denmark goes to one of his sons, Harth England goes to another Hald, and Norway is still being held by Sweain at this point, a third son. So there are precedents for that. and it's not clear the extent to which William I had planned to divide his empire in this way. But it does seem, according to some accounts that William Jr. might have been his favourite son, might have been the son who is most consistently closest to the father William the Cqueror, it seems, didn't want Robert at his deathbed and Robert wasn't invited. The two sons who are there are William Jr and Henry. There is tension between William the Conqueror and his eldest son Robert, and it seems as though William Rufus is being lined up for the English throne. Certainly he gets it very quickly. And it's interesting that Archbishop Lanfrank, who in some ways you could see as William the Conqueror's political and religious enforcer was certainly a legal enforcer for William He gives his backing to William Jr very quickly and probably would have known better than anyone else William the Conqueror's mind and intentions So I think William Junror is being lined up for England And how then do we see William Rufus' rivalry playing out with his brother? So he's got older brother Robert who has inherited Normandy. He's got younger brother Henry who's had a bunch of cash. It seems quite often like those three are kind of pushing and pulling and it's always two against one but the two varies and the one varies depending on the circumstances Yes, that's a fair way to characterize the sort of triangle of their relationships There are a couple of interesting moments where we see William Junror collaborating with Robert So in ten ninety one, Robert comes over to England to help William Rufus against the King of the Scots, Malcolm who has been raiding down into Northern England and they go on a campaign together And then in ten ninety six, when Robert gets caught up in the wave of excitement around the preaching of the firstirst Crusade and wants to go off and make himself a hero in the Holy Land He pawns the Duchy of Normandy to William, who temporarily looks after it for him in effect and even extends his own interests beyond it into Maine. By the time Robert's back, he has a little break after the end of the first Crusade and comes back eleven hundred. byy that point, William's dead. Henry, meanwhile seems to be fairly close to William. They fall out here and there, but for the most part Henry is attached to the second surviving brother rather than to Robert. There are moments when Henry and Robert ally, but on the whole, and certainly by the end of the reign, Henry is looking to William really for his future rather than to Robert. Alth of course the death of William raises all sorts of interesting possibilities as to what might happen next and it's Henry again that seizes the throne. And Robert's been painted as a rather hapless figure notot least for having missed the opportunity twice to seize the throne as the eldest son of William the Conqueror. first in ten eighty seven when William II got it and then again in eleven hundred when Henry took it So Robert always seems to be missing out on these opportunities to become King of England although he has his adventures and becomes a hero in his own way on the crusades And it feels like we' never get very much of a sense of who William Rufus was as a king. So we get this stories around his coming to the throne, we get the stories about what happens at the end. I wondered if we could try and get a sense of what kind of king William Rufus was. So does he have priorities? Do we see him engaging in a foreign policy beyond fighting with his brother Robert I wouldn't say he's a king with a grand vision. he doesn't pursue any distinctive policy other than the policies pursued by his father and perhaps even predecessors to his father, in terms of holding his realm together and expanding it where he can, trying to deal with issues as they arise in Scotland and Wales, and of course making sure he has authority in Norm and the surrounding areas such as Maine by winning over magnates with promises and with money. There are all sorts of criticisms of him which we could get into And in terms of biography of William, it's been dominated by ecclesiastical historians in the twelfth century and even in more recent times who have been chiefly interested in his relationship with another large personality, although very different personality, Archbishop Anselm, who of course, is known as a famous Theologian who wrote Kur D's Homer whyy God became manan, trying to explain the nature of the salvation of Christ dying on the cross. A monk who was caught up in these very at the time important theological debates who fell out with Rufus at various points of the reign and ended up in exile. So that relationship with Anselm has dominated, I think, the way the reign has been discussed, plus the fact that William Rufus has been seen as the son of William the Cqueror, and therefore overshadowed by the father, and sandwiched between two reigns, which I think as you suggesting earlier have attracted much more historical interests. William the Conquor's reign, of course, and Henry I' reign, which is another long and important reign in other regards, so he's been, I think, cast as a sort of in between king who doesn't necessarily achieve very much. and who's a bit questionable in terms of his own predeilections and his approach to both the church and to his barons, because of course, he's also accused of extorting money. And all kings extort money. Some of them get away with it more than others, but it was one of the charges that was leveled at his door, particularly after he died in such circumstances And there's something very important about the manner in which a king dies. A bad death, such as the one William Rufus had, implies a bad person, a bad reign judgment on that person, if you like. This is the idea that a go dictates what happens. And if William was hit by an arrow and died subdtenly and prematurely, then he must have been a bad egg And so that idea has also lingered soown early on in the contemporary writers reflections on the rain and it lingers, I think still in the present historiography. although there has been in the twenty first century in particular a drive to rehabilitate Rufus and recapture something of the man as best we can see him I mean, it sounds from that kind of description as if he had a terrible relationship with the church and a terrible relationship with most of his barons, which doesn't feel like a great way for a king to be getting on No, and he didn't. So John Gillingham wrote a very fine short biography of William Rufus for the Penguin English mononarch series, in which he pointed out that Rufus had a sense of humour. The sense of humor is a very important thing for a king to diffuse tension that he was loved, in fact, by those of the military aristocracy who followed him, and this is reflected in some sources which have perhaps not received their due in the past, such as the twelfth century account of Geffrey Gymar William was a soldier's K king in Gaemar's eyes And as John has pointed out, William himself was a very credible soldier The contemporary epithet which was lost after he died, but is attested in two sources written during William's lifetime was William Longsword Now of course, there was an earlier Duke of Normandy called William Longsword, after whom William II, I think was also dubbed William Longsword But this epithet should be taken as a suggestion that he had a military reputation and that his military reach went a long way And he was a good fighter, a good campaigner. He did very well in ten eighty eight, both by land and sea, I should add, to deal with those who wanted to put Robert on the throne. And had he not died as he did, even his critic, William of Malmsbury says he would have gone on to greater glories, and who knows he might have conquered Rome this idea that, you know, he's a king with endless possibility and endless potential who nobody could second guess. So this stronger, more attractive figure has emerged more recently, as I said, partly through the work of John Gilliham, also a little bit through Ema Mason, and there's a bit of that also in Frank Barlow's nineteen eighties biography And the tables have been turned a little bit on Anselm you know rather than being portrayed as the suffering saint, which is how Anselm and his own contemporary biographer, Aadmmer would have liked to see him More recently, historians have questioned whether he's a bit of a difficult figure, the sort of person who's never pleased with anything and who would never have functioned very well in the role of archbishop and basically went into exile himself because he preferred to think about theological matters I think something more of Rufus's positive energy has emerged in the last twenty years or so. Can we consider to be some of the successes of his reign if there are any? I mean, it all sounds pretty negative, but are there significant successes that we should attribute to him? Well, yes, and I would agree with John in one of these in particular, which is simply managing to hold on to, maintain and further prosper his father's rule in England because as I was saying earlier, there's no guarantee even in ten eighty six that this new Norman kingdom of England is going to continue. And William II comes along and makes it seem like it was inevitable. And I think that's something that's often overlooked when people look at William as a sandwich king between William the Conqueror and Henry I. that actually it wasn't inevitable that Norman rule of England should continue. And William did a very good job in maintaining that He also settles with Scotland very effectively. By the end of the reign, William has installed a client king, Edgar over Scotland and established a very happy relationship with the Scots, Wales not so much. he goes campaigning in Wales but doesn't achieve very much there. And then it's also pointed out that his conquest of Lan was a great achievement, but really It was a rain where I think There was a lot more potential than was actualized. and it would have been interesting had Rufus had another Even five years or ten years to see where he might have gone And what should we think about, you know in the thirteen years of his reign? What should we think about as perhaps his significant failures? It feels like he's failed to bring the church and some of the barons along with him or he's actively alienated them Are there other significant failures that they're holding him back to Well, it's difficult to talk about failure because the church In the way that his reign was written up very shortly after he died by a brilliant historian Aadma and then those who built on Aadma such as William of Marstury, it becomes entirely Archbishop Ansselm and Archbishop Ansselm's struggles But there wass a lot more to the church in England than AnswA. I mean in fact most of the other prelates cooperated with William Rufus and got on rather well with them. I mean, this is something that again, John brings out rather well in his Aenguin English mononarchicss biography. And looks a little bit isolated if you put him to one side and they had his testimony William gets on rather well with most of his clergy. But there are those complaints even from the mid ten nineties that he is the church too much. and he scares some of the clergy too with his jokes. I mean, I say jokes The thing about Rufus is he's got this sort of devilish humor and you never quite know whether he's being serious. He jokes about perhaps converting to Judaism on one occasion, and he jokes about being skeptical of what the clerics claim about God, you even hinting that he might not believe any of it. He's got that edge to him, so you never quite know whether what he says is what he really means or what he doesn't, but he certainly rattles them He doesn't make any friends among the clergy when he forces them to come up with the funds to pay Stt Peter's pence, a tribute that England regularly sends to the papacy. But of course, pitting the papacy against your own clergy is a time worn tactic of kings playing divide and rule At the end of his reign, there are complaints about his taxation. Certainly we know complaints were put to Henry I, and Henry I in eleven hundred was forced to promise various things in his coronation charter, including that he won't levy fines and imposts for this, that and the other. But he goes on to break all those promises as all kings do when need requires it. I'm not sure William failed in any way his contemporaries would have recognized the story of his failure and his wickedness and his ill treatment of the church was one I think, constructed largely in hindsight through and again, you're referencing what John Gillingham wrote, a character assassination beginning with Edmmer of Canterbury and feeding into the accounts that came later Anel just had better PR than William Rfus did. But I also wanted to ask you about the significance of that in dynastic terms during his reign because you one of the primary roles of a medieval king is to marry, have a son, secure the succession so everybody knows what's going to happen next. And that's something that Rufus seems to make absolutely no effort to address which feels like destabilizing his own reign a little bit. Do people talk about that during his reign It is interesting, it is striking. It is unique William Rufus is the only adult king of England who never marries. And of course that has led to all sorts of questions whether perhaps he's got an arrangement with Henry, that Henry should succeed him. That's one possibility and therefore he chooses not to marry have sons for that reason. although there are all sorts of other political reasons and social and personal reasons why an individual might such as Rufus might choose to have a wife and children. So it seems rather odd to me that he should have forsaken those potential joys for Henry's succession It's also of course striking to me that he never marries and has an heir given what had recently happened in England, which is of course E the Cfessor had married, had been unable to father an heir, adopted a son in Edgar Eetthling. Yes, I mean a king without an heir in eleventh century England is not a king you want to be and it is very interesting that Rufus doesn't. go down that path and as far as I can see, takes no interest in looking at prospective brides. There is an interesting story about him visiting the nunnery of Wilton at a certain point inspecting a young nun there, possibly Edith, who was the daughter of Malcolm of the Scots, but this story is very late and confused and there are conflicting accounts of what actually happened So I can't offer you any evidence that Rufus at any point in his reign takes an interest in marrying? I should say also, in relation to his two brothers, Robert doesn't get married until he's forty seven Henry doesn't get married until he's thirty two. So they all leave it rather late and Rufus is of course aroundound about forty or forty two at the time of his death. The difference in Rufus's case is that he fathers no offspring outside marriage. Both Robert and Henry have offspring outside marriage. So we can see at least that they are having relations with women and fathering children But Rufus, as far as we know, doesn't. And so the bit that we want to really get into and discuss this a little bit further is around some work that you've done on the court of William Rufus as I wondered if you could paint us a picture of court. And I guess to start off with What are the sources that are telling us about William Rufus's court Well, this is a question that's interested historians back to the nineteenth century. Now the work that I did on Rufus's court, an article called Sex at the Court of William Rufus focusing on themes of sexuality and also gender non conformity because the two are very closely linked in the way people are looking at Rufus's court That highlights three contemporaries who commented on the nature of that court in no particular order. They are a foreign visiting monk called Hugh of Flaviny, an English monk called Aadma, who was a child monk at the mononastery of Canterbury born there circa ten sixty. And a comment by it seems an observer which was cited later by William of Malmsbury, all of them reflecting independently on the nature of William Rufus' is court Now If we start with Aadma Admer visited Rufus's court in february ten ninety four at Hastings in the company of the recently appointed Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury, Anselm having been appointed to the archipiscopy at the end of ten ninety three. so he's a relative newcomer to court And Aadmmer ten years after Rufus's death, I should add, paints a picture of a court Where there are lots of youths, by which he means young men sort of twenty to forty age range. who are presenting themselves in such a way as to make themselves sexually inviting He talks about the way they walk, the way they carry themselves. He paints a picture of them as being feminate in a negative way, but certainly he's painting a picture of men whose gender is ambiguous, whose gender does not conform to the usual sort division, at least usual the scene from a churchman's perspective between what a man should be and what a woman should be And there's a flirtiness in the way he depicts them, there's a sort of femininity in the way he depicts them. And he uses particular Latin terms, which go all the way back to ancient Rome to refer to men or people who play the receptive role in sexual encounters So when those people happen to be men, the terms are delicatus, tenir, these sorts of words which she is using sort of dainty, soft And he's painting a picture in a sense of a queer quord Now he underlines that very clearly then by saying that Anome's reaction was to preach a sermon against sodomy Now Sodomy is a term which is being increasingly used by churchmen in the eleventh century and given new and sharpened definition There's an Italian cleric in the ten forties, Peter Damian, who writes a treatise on Sodomy And sodomy is seen as a cluster of things. It's not very easily put into a box or labeled. But it is basically the mixture of for a man behaving in a way that doesn't conform to traditional masculine stereotypes and playing what was thought to be the woman's role in sex And in the church' thinking outlined by Staint Augustine and of thinkers subsequently, there is this idea that men and women play opposite roles. Their roles complement each other. It's a notion called the complementarity of the sexes and that the male is in sexual encounters is the penetrator and the female is the receptive one and that sex is for procreation So this is the model that and some and other churchmen, not all churchmen perhaps, but and some and other churchmen are using at this point And Anselm preaches against Sodomy which he sees to be a deviation from that model. It's where men take on a feminine role, if you like behaving sexually like a woman, that's basically what it is. So he preaches this sermon and supposedly some of the courtiers repent and they go back to behaving in more masculine ways And I should say that The problem with this dialogue is that it's written ten years after Rufus's death by A Admmer. Granted A Admmer was there at the time and observing it But it's written ten years after his death and it's framed in negative terms. and it's also framed in terms which are familiar from classical discourse as well. So it's not clear how much Aadmmer is describing what he actually saw or how much he's painting a picture of what was going on in terms that his audience would understand Nevertheless, the point is clear. he is saying this is a queer court that Rufus has surrounded himself with people we might today call gay men. and that he's doing that for his pleasure. This is all all implied. and that's the sort of unusual environment that Anm was finding himself in and now having to police by preaching a sermon against it. That's say Admmer We then have these two other witnesses to this, independent witnesses, if you like Hua Flavigny, an anonymous commentator I'll start with the anonymous commentator first because there's a quote cited from this commentator in William of Malmsbury's work, William of Malmsbury being a historian writing accounts of the English Kings in the eleven twenties This commentator, we don't know who he was, but he seems to have been some satirist potentially of the ten nineties He said that Williams court was a brothel of male prostitutes. He uses the classical Latin term exolitus, which is a very specific and quite rare item of vocabulary, referring to a mature male prostitute who could perform various versatile roles in sex, that is to say, someone who is past the age of puberty. So we're not talking boys and pedderast it here, we're talking sex between men. And he'd characterized Rufus's court in this rather witty way, using words which play on various meanings. F from being an inn of Majesty, it was a brothel of male prostitutes And these words in and brothel, the words that he uses are again, quite squizzy items of vocabulary that can double up for each other. And he's playing on what it should be versus what it is And William Malmsbury interestingly cites this quote in the first edition of his work but then expunged it from the second and final edition of his work. And we know because we have both versions, probably because he thought it was too risque to put in, writing as he was in the reign of the dead King's brother, Henry I , is he going to accuse William of making his court a den of male prostitutes? In the end, William of Armsby decides not to. And it's very interesting that he decides not to because it's often what clerics and monks don't say that tells you what's going on. So his contemporary, William of Mammbury's contemporary Henry of Huntingon, again writing in the eleven twenties, eleven thirties He talks about unspeakable sexual sins at William Roofers's court. He doesn't say what they were, obviously, because they were unspeakable. but the fact that he describes it in those terms suggests that it is something other than the or usual sex prorocriative purposes or mistresses or whatever else of that sort went on in most courts As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Bwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors, and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history Kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to but twwix the sheets the history of sex scandal in society twice a week every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts, brought to you by the award winning network, History Hit It's annoying from historian's point of view though, isn't it to have a chronicer who's writing, this is unreportable. I'm not gonna to tell you what this is. Call it unspeakable. It's like, no, no, no, tell us Yeah, tell us, we want to know. But of course, the worry these monks have is that if they tell you too much, you, the audience might go and think, o, I hadn't thought of that. That sounds fun. I'll go and do it myself. They are worried that in naming and shaming, they will also be encouraging sin as they see it and potentially leading the minds of the innocent who might never have encountered such practices Astray. Unlike cllassical Roman authors such as Suetonius, who will openly say, you know, this emperor like men, this emperor like women, this emperor like both You don't tend to find monastic historians and most historians in the middle Ages at this period are monastic You don't tend to find them saying such things. You don't find them ascribing sexual predurilections to their subjects, even though of course, every king would have had his own tastes and preferences and inclinations and sexual orientation. But it doesn't get ascribed because they're worried about saying too much Except in the case of William Rufus, where we do get a bit more information than usual. And perhaps that I mean apart from the rottle of male prostitutees code The most interesting, I think, is the testimony of Qa Flavigny So Hugh Flavigny visited England as part of a papal legation in ten ninety six, and he was also there in eleven hundred. att the time of Ruvers' death, he seems to have been in England august september eleven hundred. and he wrote up his account in about eleven o one, so very soon after He tells a few lurid stories, so you can't always trust what he says literally, but it's interesting that he tells this story A story of a chaplain, one of Rufus's chaplains at court, named Peter who, as Hugh puts it, was impregnated by men That is to say, he is playing the receptive role in sexual encounters. Males, men are impregnating him. They believe that semen can impregnate men just as it can, women and potentially lead to something, as it does in this case becausecause the upshot is that Peter has a sort of monstrous pregnancy Now, his stomach swells up to pregnant proportions and In the story, Peter interprets this, or Hugh, the one telling the story interprets it as an obvious sign of his sin and shame and he feels so much guilt and shame that he confesses to his crime and he's had sex with all these men. and after he dies from this swelling, and it's a very ugly story, I'm afraid. But after he dies, they sort of cut him open and they find a fetus of monstrous and vaguely human form. And Peter was at his own request buried outside consecrated ground as a punishment for this So what we have here without getting into how much of it might be true is a scare story about the possible effects and risks of same sex relationships at the heart of William Rufus's court, particularly in the Royal chapel where there's this added dimension that they worry that semen is reconstituted blood. So if it's getting spilt in the royal chapel or people are having sex, they're then touching the wafer and the blood of Christ, this is a sort terrible thing from a churchm' point of view. This' contamination, pollution, defilement in the holiest place So there's this terrible scare story here and obviously a chaplain who meets a very sad end due to some illness he has, which obviously isn't do with the fact that he's you being made pregnant by men, but was interpreted in that way whether as a sign or whether as a punishment for such And this is where it all I think blows up because as Hugh tells us in that year, a proclamation was issued in the King's Chapel excommunicating Sodomites from the King's Chapel, basically casting them out of the communion of the Christian faithful. And the interesting thing for me in untangling all these sources is these three seemingly contemporary witnesses of Rufus's court. each independentlyies of corroborating each other's testimony. The key feature of this court The defining feature, it seems, is that men are having sex with men And later on, later accounts, they add all sorts of other things in there about men having long hair and all sorts of new fashions coming in. And some historians suggested, well, this is all just overflown fear running away with itself about new fashions and what that might imply. But actually my argument in that article was that if you go back to the contemporary earliest accounts in which all the other embellishments are built They are painting a very distinctive picture and they're using classical images and all sorts of ways to do that, but they're painting a picture of a court that is different to other courts in the sense that you have a king presiding over presumably men he is selected to have around him who share his predilelections And given then that we've got those kind of three contemporary witnesses Can you give us a sense of How clear are they that William Ruflus himself was a homosexual and When we add into this the idea that he never shows any just getting married, he doesn't have any children So how clear couldn't we be that he might have been homosexual In the eleventh century, they're not working with these labels. So when they see a phenomenon which basically would map onto, you scenes we might see today and be essentially the same thing, they're trying to find ways of understanding it And indeed, Peter Damian struggled with this idea in his treaty. He struggled with this idea. whyy are certain clerics always interested in other men? You know, what is it? And the only way he could understand and describe it was as some sort of demonic possession From his perspective as an eleventh century cleric and herermit He thought that men who attracted to other men were possessed by a kind of demonic entity, which he described as the quQueen of the Sodomites demon, the quQueen of the Sodomes, and he gendered that demon as female because he saw the pervasive energy that was, I suppose, possessing these men as a feminine energy, making them behave in feminine ways, you know, walking about in a flirty, sort of lascivious way, performing you know as he saw it the feminine role in sexual encounters So he had an idea that there were certain men who were of that stripe And I suspect pretty much everybody else did too. It's just that they didn't write about it. So yes, there were people we would describe as gay men in eleventh century England, but not many of them got to become king or make a mark in the records as William Rufus did. And I think his contemporaries knew and understood that. It's interesting to think about William the Conqueror too and his relationship with William Rufus probablyably his favorite son. William the Concorde doesn't seem to have had an issue with it. He was a man of the world It was more your conservative churchmen who really s grated against it, just as they were beginning to gr at that date against the idea that priests might be married because lots of priests had had wives and the same sorts of churchmen who didn't like ertain men having male partners also didn't like priests having female ones So there are conservative attitudes sort of being increasingly pushed onto the sort of secular society, which secular society is still coming to terms with What's interesting about Rufus though, again, is this question of the role one plays in sexual encounters. and this goes all the way back to classical Roman thinking and also ancient Greece in that if you are the penetrator as it were, if you play the active the inverted comm as the male role then you can still be a masculine figure. If you are the feminized one, the one who is receptive playing the passive role or the bottom, if you like, in the modern gay idiom, then that is seen as a shameful thing And why is it shameful in the eyes of those conservative clergy? It's shameful, not only because it deviates from what they consider to be the natural order of things, but also I'm afraid because of this vein of misogyny in thinking, which is that women are inferior to men. And so for a man to become feminized in some way is a step in a shameful direction. And so the reason that kind of character of the feminine gay man, if you like, is stigmatized is that men aren't supposed to be like women and it's not okay for a man to become like a woman. Whereas of course, we find again and again in medieval accounts, it is okay. In fact, it's desirable for a woman to become like a man. And you think of even Elizabeth I first saying I might have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a man. This idea that to attain great leadership and whatever else that women should become like men is a positive thing But men becoming like women is in the eyes of these churchmen, a shameful thing. So so long as William is ruling from the top as a top, if you like using that idiom and he's going around penetrating his courtiers and he isn't the one who's being penetrated, then that's probably okay. But if he also dabbles in that, as one hint is that he might because we've got this reference to him having his hair parted at top of the forehead you know of long hair going down, which I think ties into some of the language that's used of the Sodomites at his gt That's a more shameful thing. And the one thing that none of these commentators do they don't pin it on the king directly They might talk about his court being a brothel of male prostitutes and leave it to the reader to infer what that meant. And they might talk about a chaplain having sex with other men at his court and they might refer to these dainty feminine, sexualized young men walking around in a way that'ort of advertising themselves is available. But what they don't do is come out openly and say, for example, like Suetonius does of the Emperor Galba He liked men And again, this is a reflection of how historians handle monarchs. If you want to criticize a king or cast shade on a king, you don't do it directly. You slur those around him and you allow the reader to infer from what the problem is How much of an idea do we have of wider societies's opinions on this kind of thing? Because from listening to you there, it feels an awful lot like perhaps society might not have considered this outside the norm. You know, William Rufus is doing this in a fairly open manner. his court is his court and people can go and visit it. So should we think about a society that actually probably wouldn't had an issue with William Rfus's courourt, but they're been told they should have an issue by a church that is trying to take control of that. Yeah, I think more specifically by certain clergy. So there are a lot of clergy, who quite happily engaging in Rufus's court, including Peter the Chaplain and those who were having sex the other men who are having sex with him. Peter the Chaplain was the brother of Gerald, the Bishop of Herereford, who then becomes Archbishop of York So senior clergy around Rufus, they don't seem to mind. one can dig around a little bit because although the Anseselms and the Amers dominate the historical record with their opposition to married priests and their opposition to same sex love, one can find other examples which suggest that this isn't everyone's way of thinking I found, for example, a quote from the Cisterian Abbott Aylroward of Rivo writing probably in the eleven fifties, so sometime afterwards. And again, he is of the Anel persuasion. He doesn't approve this sort of thing But he says, I've got a quote from him here Going into the houses of some of our bishops and more shamefully some bishops who are monks is as if one were going into Sodom and Gomorah. Eeminate men with luscious hair walk about with half naked buttocks, dressed like hores of their sort, Scripture says, and they have lodged boys in the brothel. And basically Aylward there is complaining of certain episcopal households where bishops who presumably are gay or interested in young men, have done the same thing that they've surrounded themselves with people who are amenable to that or open to that or who share their predilections. It's a very similar s of description to Rufus's court I came across another bit of evidence too As I mentioned in eleven hundred, there is this edict that Sodomites or other men who are interested in other men should be excommunicated from the royal chapel. And then Archbishop Ansel after his returned from his exile in eleven oh two, issues a further ict as part of the Council of Westminster, excommunicating Sodomites throughout the land every Sunday and feeastday. And I should add that this too is interesting and significant because there's no other council between Thisort of the ten forties and eleven seventies that proclaims edicts against Sodomy. On these ones in England, so it's as though these are special edicts for special circumstances. be that as it may, Ansel proclaimed this sort of edict that Sodomes should be excommunicated on Sundays and feast days, and the other bishops seemed to try to enforce it, including Herbert Lzinger, who is bishop in Norwich at that time And there's a letter surviving written by his doorkeeper called Norman whose job was presumably to decide who got to go into church and he didn't. And he was saying that people were complaining that this was too harsh and you can't stop people coming to church because they're sodomized basically. And Herbert Losinger was writing to him and saying, Well, look, you know tell them about the fires of Hell and tell them about this and that and what happened to the people of the city of the Plain. And this is wrong But obviously the poor old chap has got to say, Oh you can't come into church His congregation members aren't having any of it, or at least some of them are And there are complaints even in early in the reign of Henry I in eleven hundreds when Ansm goes into exile again Someone writes to him saying, oh those long haired men and the effeministates, they're back again and they're doing their thing. These are influential individuals. They're the sons of leading nobles in the realm, they're senior clergy. They're obviously doing their thing and living their lives as happily as they can be. And by and large they're not leaving behind the sorts of records that the religious conservatives who want to police their behaviour are, or who want to stir up, I think we could talk about potentially a kind of moral panic going on, particularly with this incident of Peter the Chaplain at the end of Rufus' reign, a moral panic around sodomy, leading to these very harsh, you know all encompassing excommunication orders across the realm for anyone suspected of sodomatical tendencies presided over by figures like Anselm, who really are, I think, as he said, Matt, trying to steer society towards a more kind of conservative religious place It's so interesting, isn't it, though that It's people like Ansesel in their activities against what they perceive as a problem who have left the best evidence that that problem existed Absolutely. and it's also very specific evidence too, because sure, sometimes political opponents might smear each other. Certainly the kings of Germany and France at this point because of their quarrels with the Pope and the context of the investitature controversy, they're being smeared by leading churchmen with various accusations. The accusations against Rufus are of a much more specific kind of nature. They don't accuse him of having wr multiple women or being interested in boys. they are all about adult men having sex with men. And so one might say no smoke without fire, but yes If the clergy, these particular conservatives are sort of jumping up and down are getting angry in a particular context about a particular issue that there's probably something energizing bad. isn't necessarily helped by the fact that some of those clergy might have repressed their own sexual preferences There's been quite an interesting literature on Anselm himself who wrote some very loving, tender and intimate letters to male friends of his, monks and other clergy And I think one would be very naive to read those letters as they have been read by one or two scholars in the past and assume that there was nothing other than monastic friendship there. But of course, within the context of conservative religion There is no channel, there's no outlet for those feelings other than on the page So it may be that walking into an environment where other men are doing openly what he perhaps secretly always wanted to do but couldn't. Eyroward of Rivo, who I quoted earlier is another example, who talks about his own inclinations in this regard as it a sinful thing creates a particular explosive reaction in these circumstances As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Bwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors, and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between. We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodysiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to but twwix the sheets of the history of sex scandal in society twice a week every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts, brought to you by the award winning network, History Hit I mention at the start, there's lots of disiscussion, controversy, often air quotes around William Rufus's death in the New forest. So he dies in a hunting accident There's been lots of speculation ever since that it was deliberate that he was murdered, certainly his younger brother Henry is very quick to go off and get himself crowned and become king. So I just wonder what do you make of Rufus' death? Is it an accident or is this a sort of reaction against his court perhaps a driver to have him done away with while murder and intrigue always make stories don't they? And I think a lot of the interest around his death is there on the part of those who want to believe there's something more to it. There's sort some plot going on. And indeed, there are some contemporaries of well later suggestions that that might have been the case. But the way I look at it is that lots of people died in hunting accidents. William Rufus's older brother, Richard, the second son of William the Conqueror had been killed in a hunting accident in the newew forest Probably between ten sixty nine and ten seventy four His nephew, the son out of Wedlock of Duke Roberts, also called Richard, also died in a hunting accident in the New forest, as did various other people in the eleventh and twelfth century on record. So it was not unlikely that such a thing should happen when the arrows were flying in all directions as the stags were set loose. I look at the death as the sort of thing that could have happened anyway I see no reason to think that there's anything suspicious about it. And you know in those circumstances I always would prefer cock up to conspiracy as it were, that it's just an accident But of course, the greatest weight that was placed on it at the time wasn't about whether Walter Tyor shot him on purpose or whether there was some conspiracy to get Henry on the phone. The greatest force of emphasis was on the idea of this death as signaling God's judgment Because in the eyes of those chronicling history, it mattered how you lived and how you died. and sudden death was a terrible thing. The is Everyone's Catholic at this point. sudden death was a terrible thing. If you die without the last rites, without making confession You go straight to hell. There's no two ways about it. you know you have to make confession. At the very least you have to spend time purging your sins in the afterlife before God may or may not have mercy on you. So there's a question mark over Rufus's end. It's a sort of end that looks very much like divine judgment, and indeed one or two early sources suggest when, no one knows who fired the arrow, there wasn't someone faring narrow God fired the arrow It's this death which has overshadowed his whole career. In the light of his death, all those things that Rufus was doing suddenly seemed like, o, they must have been particularly bad. If he was having sex with men, that must be a particularly grievous sin you, worse than all the other sins that a king might commit to have landed him in this sort of trouble If we can think of William's reign without that