William II of England

King Stephen reigned from 1135 to 1154 claiming the crown before the anointed heir Empress Matilda had a chance to act.

Although his predecessor, Henry I, had started the construction of Carlisle Castle in stone to replace the wooden fort that Henry's brother William Rufus had established some 25 to 30 years earlier, Carlisle was taken by King David of Scotland in 1135 after Stephen's hurried ascent to the throne.

The struggle between Stephen and Matilda for the English crown kicked off a period of civil war known as the Anarchy.

Henry I had married David's sister, and it was this friendship that had kept the peace in the Western Marches.

It was like seeing a man in a long sequined coat.

All the children that were born whilst my family lived there all saw the same boy wearing a white gown with a roof round his neck like a choir boy.

Even my sister's friend once asked who the boy was sitting next to my brother on his bed.

But there was no boy.

He was the fourth son of William the Conqueror, the one who wasn't supposed to get anything.

He'd taken the English throne in August 1100 within days of his brother William Rufus being assassinated on a hunting trip.

Six years later, he'd beaten his other brother, Robert Kurt Hose, at Tinchabray and taken Normandy off him too.

Robert spent the rest of his life, nearly 28 years, as Henry's prisoner, forced to watch his brother's ascendancy.

But for King Henry, it turned out that holding Normandy was much harder than taking it.

Louis VI of France backed Robert's son, William Clito, as the rightful duke, and from 1116 onward, the border was permanently on fire.

It reached Count Theobald of Blois and the other lords, and they made a decision that says a great deal about what it was like to work for Henry.

They didn't tell him.

We're doing our Norman King series.

We started with William the Conqueror and then we went to William Rufus.

And now we have come to the I want to call him like the troublemaker.

maybe murderer henry the first

i'll find a way to laugh don't worry

yeah yeah the darker it gets the more you laugh

So last week we ended the episode essentially at William Rufus being killed in New Forest, most likely by his brother, but we don't have any proof.

Just seems coincidental.

But I've come here to see a very different sort of landmark, established by our country's next great builders in stone.

Twenty years after the massacre of the harrying, William II, son of the conqueror, granted this site to the Benedictines and started St Mary's Abbey.

So is it unusual to have such a big monastery so close to the middle of town?

No it isn't really.

The king looked on monks as spiritual soldiers.

But Abbot Stephen himself, the founder abbot, wrote a short narrative of the foundation of St Mary's.

And he makes the specific point that William II was quite aware that York had been a troublesome place.

So when this stone abbey started to rise up here in the late 11th century, within sight of the stone minster, you think of the stone castles that William I had built, these were all real symbols of royal authority.

With this fair, unwilling Saxon bride and her long plait of yellow hair goes a very pretty, pathetic story, which I may tell you at some future time, if you take kindly to this.

A Cascodin was seneschal to William Rufus and sat at the rich, half-barbaric banquets in the first great hall.

Still another was one of the doughty barons who wrested from John the great charter, England's declaration of independence.

Another was high in the councils of Henry V. I have omitted one whom I should not fail to mention, Adjudica Cascodin, who was a member of the Dunce Parliament of Henry IV, so called because there were no lawyers in it.

And now the fire was threatening something infinitely older.

Westminster Hall, that magnificent medieval hall, built in the reign of William Rufus, son of William the Conqueror.

Think about that.

A building that had stood there since 1097, more than seven centuries old on the night of the fire.

Well, I mean, he, again, there's a little bit of backstory there because people have been looking at Ireland since the beginning of the 12th century, if not earlier.

I mean, William Rufus at the end of the 11th century, the Conqueror's, um, first successor as King of England, he is said to have stood on the ba- the coast of Pembrokeshire and fantasized about building a bridge of boats across the Irish Sea to conquer Ireland.

By the time you get to the middle of the 12th century, Henry II, right at the start of his reign, is applying to the Pope for permission to conquer Ireland, and is, is all set to go until he's distracted by other business in his sprawling kind of, you know, cross-Channel empire.

So the idea of, of, you know, Ireland is the next stage in the, in the, uh, next part of the frontier that we're gonna colonize, that's there very strongly.

Robert ended up becoming Duke of Normandy.

The next King of England in 1087 was William Rufus.

So we know him as William II, and he ruled until the year 1100.

In 1100, Robert was still alive, um, but he was also still rebelling and eventually was imprisoned by William's youngest son, who'd become the third King of Norman England, and we know him as Henry I.