Gone Medieval - The Queer Court of William Rufus

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

What really went on at the court of King William Rufus?William the Conqueror's son and successor was fierce and ruthless. He taxed heavily, refused to conform to the ideals of kingship, and reportedly presided over a court of extravagant young men and sexual licentiousness. But how much of Rufus's reputation was shaped by the monks that despised him?Matt Lewis is joined by Professor Tom Licence, to explore the life, reign and shocking death of a king, whose reputation remains as provocative today as it was nearly a thousand years ago.More:King Arthur's Sex LifeListen on AppleListen on SpotifyEdward II: King of IncompetenceListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Natasha Hughes, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the 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 aliens, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here.

Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. Today, we're going to meet a medieval monarch whose behaviour 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, but a 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 1087, aged around 27, 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 13 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 1094, what the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury,

Anselm, witnessed at Rufus's court at Hastings, left him apoplectic. His secretary, the monk Aedmere, 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. Haydmere chose his words with one very specific meaning in mind. Rufus's court was a hotbed of male homosexuality. Hanselm was so horrified that he preached a furious sermon at the start of Lent,

and some of the ewes, duly chastised, cut their hair and tried to look respectable. But the king, Rufus flatly refused to let Anselm convene a council to tackle what the archbishop called the vice of Sodom, which has spread in this land and corrupted many. And so the courtiers carried on, and scandal followed scandal. And then, on the 2nd of August 1100, 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. Within weeks, the crackdown on the court's sexual freedoms had begun. The monks called it God's punishment. Historians still argue about it. To explore the court of William Rufus, the scandal, the suspicious death, and the remarkable, rule-breaking life of England's original Sin King,

I'm joined by friend of the podcast, Tom License, Professor of medieval history and literature at the University of East Anglia and Director of the Centre of East Anglian Studies. Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Tom. Great to be here, Matt. Thanks for having me back. Are we looking forward to this? William Rufus is one of those kings who's managed to slip underneath the Gone Medieval radar so far. We've not really tackled him, so it'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, well, 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 1052. Another brother, Richard, was born circa 1055. And then Rufus was born sometime around 1058, 1060, we're not sure entirely when. And he became King of England, in fact, on the death of William the Conqueror in 1087, beating his son. two other brothers, Robert, the elder surviving brother, and Henry, his younger brother,

who was born around 1069, beating them to the English throne, getting there very quickly and having himself proclaimed king in 1087. And then in 188, 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 13 years until his own death in August 1,100, in a hunting accident in the new forest where he was famously hit by an arrow. And if you go to the

new forest today, you can see the rufus stone and a great oak nearby, supposedly marking the spot where he met his, according to all chronicler's 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 1087, 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 William's favourite,

or is this more to do with the way you just divide up an inheritance? This projected division of an empire is not uncommon. and we see a similar thing with Kunut in 1035, where Denmark goes to one of his sons, half the Kunut, England goes to another Haralds, and Norway is still being held by Swain at this point, a third son. So there are precedence for that, and it's not clear the extent to which William I first 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 was most consistently closest to the father. William the Conqueror, 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 Lanfranc, who in some ways you could see as William the Conqueror's political and religious enforcer, 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 Jr. is being lined up for England.

And how then do we see William Rufus's 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 Jr. collaborating with Robert. So in 1091, 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 1096, when Robert gets caught up in the wave of excitement around the preaching of the First 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, comes back in 1100. By 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 rain, Henry is looking to William, really, for his future rather than to Robert. Although, 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, not least for having missed the opportunity twice to seize the throne as the eldest son of William the Conquer, first in 1087 when William II got it, and then again in 1100 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 these 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 what? 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 Normandy 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 barography of William, it's been dominated by ecclesiastical historians in the 12th century and even 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 Kerr deus Homo, why God became. man trying to explain the nature of the salvation, 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 that the reign has been discussed, plus the fact that William Rufus has been seen as the son of William the Conqueror, and therefore overshadowed by the father, and sandwiched between two reigns, which I think as you were suggesting earlier, have

attracted much more historical interest, William McConquois reign, of course, and Henry the First's 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 predilections 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 levelled 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 God dictates what happens. And if William was hit by an arrow and died suddenly and prematurely, then he must have been a bad egg. And so that idea has also lingered sewn 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 21st 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 Monarch. series in which he pointed out that Rufus had a sense of humour. The sense of humor is 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 12th century account of Geoffrey Gamar. William was a soldier's king in Gamar's eyes. And as John has pointed out, William himself was a very credible soldier, a 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 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 1088, both by land and C, 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 Malmesbury, 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 Gillingham,

also a little bit through Emma Mason, and there's a bit of that also in Frank Barlow's 1980s, And the tables have been turned a little bit on Anselm, rather than being portrayed as the suffering saint, which is how Anselm and his own contemporary biographer Ayadma 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 20 years or so. What 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 1080s. that this new Norman kingdom of England is going to continue. And William the second 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 Conquer and Henry I, the first, 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 Le Mans was a great achievement. But really, it was a rain where I think there was a lot more potential than was actualised. 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 13 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 are 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 A. Adma and then those who built on Aadma, such as William of Mammory, it becomes entirely Archbishop Anselm and Archbishop Anselm struggles. But there was a lot more to the church in England than Anselm. 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 Penguin English monarchs biography.

Anselm looks a little bit isolated if you put him to one side and they admis testimony. William gets on rather well with most of his clergy. But there are those complaints, even from the mid-1090s that he is taxing the church too much. And he scares some of the clergy too with his jokes. I mean, I say jokes, but the thing about Rufus is he's got this devilish humour and he never quite know whether he's being serious. He jokes about perhaps converting to Judaism on one occasion and he jokes about being sceptical of what the clerics claim about God, 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 St Peter's Pence, the 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 was forced to promise various things in his coronation charter, including that he won't levy fines and impost 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 recognised. 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 Aadma of Canterbury and feeding into the accounts that came later. Anselm just had better PR than William Reefest did. But I also wanted to ask you about the significance of that in dynastic terms during his reign because 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 destabilising 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 and have sons for that reason. Although there are all sorts of other political reasons and social and personal reasons why an individual, 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, ever the confessor had married, had been unable to father and heir, had adopted a son in Edgar Etheling. Yes, I mean, a king without an heir in 11th 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 and 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 47, Henry doesn't get married until he's 32. So they all leave it rather late. And Rufus is, of course, around about 40 or 42 at the time of his death. But the difference in Rufus' 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. And so I wonder if you could paint us a picture of that court. And I guess to start off with, what are the sources that are telling us about William Rufus' court? Well, this is a question that's interested historians back to the 19th 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 Flavigny, an English monk called Eadma, who was a child monk at the monastery of Canterbury, born there at 1060, and a comment by, it seems, an observer, which was cited later by William of Marmesbury, all of them reflecting independently on the nature of William Rufus' court. Now, if we start with Ayadma, Ayadma visited Rufus' court in February 1094 at Hastings in the company of the recently appointed Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury, Anselm having been appointed

to the Archipisopi at the end of 1093, so he's a relative newcomer to court. And Ayadma, ten years after Rufus's death, I should add, paints a picture of a court where there are lots of youths, which he means young men, sort of 20 to 40 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 effeminate 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 of 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, tenor, these sorts of words which he is using, sort of dainty, soft. And he's painting a picture in, in a sense of a queer court. Now, he underlines that very clearly then by saying that Anselm's reaction was to preach a sermon against sodomy. Now, Sodomy is a term which is being increasingly used by churchmen in the 11th century and given new and sharpened definition. There's an Italian cleric in the 1040s, Peter Damien, 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's thinking, outlined by St. Augustine and of thinkers subsequently, there is this idea that men and women play opposite roles. Their roles complement each other. It's a motion called the complementarity of the sexes and that the male is in sexual encounters as the penetrating, and the female is the receptive one, and that sex is for procreation. So this is the model that Anselm and other churchmen, and not all churchmen perhaps, but Anselm 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 10 years after Rufus's death by A. Adma, granted Aadma was there at the time in observing it. But it's written 10 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 Aadma 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 implied, and then that's a sort of unusual environment that Anselm was finding himself in and now having to police by preaching a sermon against it.

That's Ayadma. We then have these two other witnesses to this, independent witnesses, if you like. Hugh of Flavigny, an anonymous commentator. Now I'll start with the anonymous commentator first because there's a quote cited from this of commentator in William of Malmspray's work, William of Malmspray being a historian writing accounts of the English kings in the 1120s. This commentator, we don't know who he was, but he seems to have been some satirist potentially of the 1090s. He said that William's court was a brothel of male prostitutes. He uses the classical Latin term exotus, 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 pederastic here, we're talking sex between men. And he'd characterise Rufus's court in this rather witty way, using words which play on various meanings. Far 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 squiggly 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 of Malmesbury, 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, know, is he going to accuse William of making his court a den of male prostitutes? In the end, William of Marmseby 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 Marm's contemporary Henry of Huntingdon, again writing in the 1120s, 1130s, he talks about unspeakable sexual sins at William Rufus's court.

He doesn't say what they were, obviously, because they are unspeakable. But the fact that he describes it in those terms, suggested it is something other than your usual sex for procreative purposes or mistresses or whatever else of that sort went on. in most courts. It's annoying from a historian's point of view, though, isn't it, to have a chronicler who's writing this, this is unreportable. I'm not going to tell you what this is. Call it unspeakable. It's like, no, 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 of the audience might go and think, oh, 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. And unlike classical 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 of 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 predilections to their subjects, even though, of course, every king would have had his own, you know, tastes and preferences and inclinations and sexual or. 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, I mean, apart from the brothel of male prostitutes, quote, the most interesting, I think, is the testimony of Hugh of Flavigny. So Hugh of Flavigny visited England as part of a papal legation in 1096, and he was also there in 1100. At the time of Rufus's death, he seems to have been in

England, August, September 1100, and he wrote up his account in about 1101, 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 impregnated. him. They believe that, you know, semen can impregnate men as it can women and potentially lead to something as it does in this case, because 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 relationship. at the heart of William Rufus's court,

particularly in the Royal Chapel, where there's this added dimension that they worry that seaman is reconstituted blood. So if it's getting spilt in the Royal Chapel or people are having sex there, then touching the wafer and the blood of Christ, this is a sort of terrible thing from a church from his point of view.

This is a 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 to do with the fact that he's 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 independently sort of corroborating each other's testimony, that 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, you know, 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 predilections. 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 Rufus himself was a homosexual? And can we add into this the idea that he never shows any dress getting married, he doesn't have any children. So how clear couldn't we be that he might have been homosexual? In the 11th century, they're not working with these labels. So when they see a phenomenon which basically would map onto, you know, scenes we might see today, be essentially the same thing, they're trying to find ways of understanding it. And indeed, Peter Damien struggled with this idea in his treaty. He struggled with this idea, why 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 11th century cleric and hermit, he thought that men who attracted to other men were possessed by a kind of demonic entity, which he described as the queen of the Sodomites, this demon, the queen of the Sodomites, 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 it in a flirty, sort of lascivious way, performing, you know, as he saw at 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 11th 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 in his relationship with William Rufus, who is probably his favourite son. William the Conqueror 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 sort of grated against it, just as they were beginning to grate 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 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 commas, 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, you know, 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 the top of the forehead, you know, sort of a long hair going down, which I think ties into some of the language that's used of the sodomites that he's called. That's a more shameful thing. And the one thing that none of these commentators do is 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, sexualised young men walking around in a way that sort 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 criticise 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 that, you know, what's, you know, the problem is. How much of an idea do we have of wider society'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. 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 have an issue with William Rufus's court, but they're being told they should have an issue by a church that is trying to take control of them. that. Yeah, I think more specifically by certain clergy. So there are a lot of clergy who are quite happily engaging in Rufus's court, including Peter the Chaplin and those who are having sex, the other men who are having sex with him. Peter Chaplin was the brother of Gerard, the Bishop

of Hereford, who then becomes Archbishop of York. So senior clergy who around Rufus, they didn't seem to mind. One can dig around a little bit because although the Anselms and the admas dominate the historical record with their opposition to married priests and their opposition to same-sex love. One can find other examples which suggests that this isn't everyone's way of thinking. I found, for example,

a quote from the Cistercian, Abbot Elrod of Vivo, writing probably in the 1150s, so sometime afterwards. And again, he is of the Anselm persuasion. He doesn't approve of 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 Germon morrow. Effeminate men with luscious hair walk about with half-naked buttocks dressed like whores of their sort, scripture says, and they have lodged boys in the brothel. And basically, Aylwood there is complaining of certain Episcopal households where bishops, who presumably are gay or are 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 little description to Rufus's court. I came across another bit of evidence too. As I mentioned in

1,100, 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 Anselm, after he's returned from his exile, in 1102, issues a further edict as part of the Council of Westminster, excommunicating sodomites throughout the land every Sunday and feast day. And I should add that this too is interesting insignificant because there's no other council between sort of the 1040s and 1170s that proclaims edicts against sodomy only these ones in England. So it's as though these are special edicts for special circumstances. But be that as it may, Anselm proclaims this sort of edict that a sodomite should be excommunicated on Sundays and feast days.

And the other bishops seem to try to enforce it, including Herbert Lozinger, who is bishop in Norwich at that time. And there's a letter surviving a written by his doorkeeper, a chap 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 sodomites basically. And Herbert Lozinger 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 who's got to say, oh, you can't come into church. His congregation members aren't having any of it, or least some of them aren't. And there are complaints even early in the reign of Henry I,

in 1100s when Anselm goes into exile again. Someone writes to him saying, Oh, those long-haired men and the effeminates, 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 happy as they can be.

And by and large, they're not leaving behind the sorts of records that the religious conservatives who want to please their behaviour are, or who want to stir up, I think, you know, 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's reign, a moral panic around sodomy, leading to these very harsh, you know,

all-encompassing excommunication orders across the realm for anyone suspected of sodomitical tendencies, presided over by figures like Anselm, who really are, I think, as you 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 Ansel in their activities against what they perceive as a problem, who have left the best evidence that that problem existed. Yeah, 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 of the Pope and the context of the investiture controversy, they're being smeared by leading churchmen with various accusations. The accusations against Rufus are from much more specific kind of nature. They don't accuse them of having 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

and getting angry in a particular context about a particular issue, then there's probably something energizing about. And it 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. Elwood of Revo, who I quoted earlier as another example, who talks about his own inclinations in this regard as a sinful thing, creates a particular explosive reaction in these circumstances. You mentioned at the start, there's lots of discussion, controversy, often air quotes, around William Rufus's death in the new forest. So he does. 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 sort of reaction against his court perhaps a driver

to have him done away with? Well, murder and intrigue always make for good 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 some plot going on. And indeed, there are some contemporaries of, well, the 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 New Forest, probably between 1069 and 1074. His nephew, the son out of wedlock of Duke Robert, also called Richard also died in a hunting accident in the new forest, as did various other people in the 11th and 12th 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 Tiro or shot him on purpose or whether there was some conspiracy to get Henry on the throne. 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 thing is everyone's Catholic at this point. Sudden death was a terrible thing. If you die without the last rights, without making it. 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 the sort of end that looks very much like divine judgment. And indeed, one or two early sources suggest, well, no one knows who fired the arrow. There wasn't someone firing an arrow. God

fired the arrow. It's this death which has overshadowed his whole career. And in the light of his death, All those things that Rufus was doing suddenly seemed like, oh, they must have been particularly bad. If he was having sex with men, that must be a particularly grievous sin, 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 ending and try to put that out of our minds as much as possible, we might get closer to understanding the man and what he achieved as a monarch. Thank you very much, Tom. It's been so fascinating to try and get a little bit closer to the question.

we're a court of William Rufus, I guess, and try to understand what was going on, what people believe was going on and why we have this picture painted of him. I found this absolutely fascinating, so thank you very much for joining us again, Tom. Thanks, Matt. It's been a pleasure. If you've enjoyed this episode, you can find more about Rufus's little brother Henry I, the first, in our back catalogue, as well as an episode on the Children of 1066, which explores the effect of the Norman conquest on the next generation of Anglo-Saxons. You can also listen to Tom's last visit to Gone Medieval when we talked about his research into the Battle of Hastings. While I've got you, I'd like to plug a new documentary that Eleanor and I have had a great

time making which is coming out on history hit and which you might enjoy. Between the centuries that gave us the Norman conquest and the signing of Magna Carta, there was a king and a queen who would forever change the face of Europe. Eleanor of Aquitaine and King Henry II of England wielded power on both sides of the English. and gave rise to a dynasty that lasted for 331 years. But how did they become so powerful? What do we know about their early lives? Was it love at first sight or a strategic political alliance?

Ellen Earniger and I are tracing their steps from France to England to uncover the rise of this medieval power couple, from their births to their coronation as king and queen of England. There are new installments that gone medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries

with a new release every week at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Anyway, I bet it. let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.