464 – Rufus’ Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Campaign

Welcome to the British History Podcast.

My name is Jamie, and this is episode 464, Rufus's terrible, no-good, very bad campaign.

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We don't know precisely what Henry got up to once he fled Mont Saint-Michel.

What few records we have are incomplete and somewhat contradictory.

But from those records, we are able to glean some details.

And when we look at the accounts in total, what immediately becomes clear is that just because Henry was in exile, it didn't mean he accepted his defeat.

He had plans, and he was setting them into motion.

His first plan was to have sex, like lots and lots of sex.

And to be completely fair here, this wasn't just a Henry thing.

Most Norman lords had at least a few mistresses.

The only potential exception here being Rufus.

If he did have paramours, their names didn't survive in the record, so at the very least, he was more discreet than most.

Not that Momsbury gave him any credit for that.

Henry, on the other hand, well, he was anything but discreet.

Or restrained.

This dude simply could not keep it in his pants.

And it's at about this point where he begins to build a small army of mistresses and illegitimate children.

In the end, Henry is responsible for over 20 illegitimate children that we know about.

And only God and Santa know how many went unrecorded.

And don't take this as a sign that Henry was some sort of romantic.

Many of the stories behind these couplings actually sound pretty dubious, if not downright scary.

For example, there was a man from Abingdon who was imprisoned by King Rufus, and Rufus's prisons weren't exactly health spas, so the poor man died.

As a result, the prisoner's widow, a woman named Anne's Frida, had to somehow find a way to regain the lands of her husband from Rufus, or she would be left destitute.

And Rufus, being his father's son, wanted to pocket those lands for himself.

So, hitting a wall, Anne's Frida sought the aid of the king's brother, Henry, who at the time was in England, and she begged him to intercede with the king on her behalf.

Now it's not clear what Henry did to help her, nor what he asked from her in return, but we do know that she bore Henry at least one child.

Henry then handed that child off to be raised by the Bishop of Lincoln, because I suppose being a dad would have really cramped his style.

And as for Anne's Frida, well, we're not told how she felt about any of this, nor are we told whether she got any kind of say in what happened to her child.

And that is just one story about his shady liaisons.

And that behavior of his was really starting to escalate at this point in his life.

Something else that was escalating was his aggression and his his avarice.

You see, Henry wasn't content to just be a Randy exile.

He wanted lands.

He wanted titles.

Henry wanted to be a f ⁇ ing lord, with an emphasis on both words.

So, shortly after fleeing Mont Saint-Michel, Henry began carving out lands in the southern marches of Normandy.

In only a matter of months, Henry was effectively operating as a medieval robber baron, and he was launching raids upon Normandy.

Now, this was pretty effective strike back, if I'm being honest, because the lands that he was operating out of, and thus stealing, officially belonged to Robert of Boulem.

And then when he went raiding, he was stealing the wealth directly from his elder brother, Duke Robert Curtos.

So he was injuring both of them at the same time.

So how was he getting away with it?

Well,

probably because of what was happening happening in England.

You see, Henry's older brothers were probably quite distracted at this point by the fact that Scotland had just invaded, and consequently they were on full-on crisis mode.

Because this wasn't a minor skirmish or a raid of a border town.

The Chronicle tells us that King Malcolm had called up a sizable army, and by the time that word of the invasion reached King Rufus, the army had already overrun a large portion of the kingdom.

Now, as for why the Scots were invading, the scribes don't actually say.

The closest we get is an entry from Malmesbury, who tells us that King Malcolm wanted to, quote, make the people of England feel his power, end quote.

And on the one hand, you know, go off, king, but that doesn't really tell us much.

And it actually feels a bit like the medieval version of they hate us for our freedoms.

Light on the facts, but heavy on the, oh, so that's how you see yourself in your place in the world.

But that ridiculous statement is the only explanation that the scribes give us for this invasion.

It's nuts.

And I wonder if this silence is because the actual cause of the invasion was kind of embarrassing.

I mean, let's think about this for a moment.

When Duke Robert ousted Edgar the Atheling as part of his peace treaty with Rufus, he should have known there was a good chance that the guy would go to King Malcolm of Scotland.

I mean, Malcolm was Edgar's brother-in-law, and he just happened to be governing over the kingdom that most threatened King Rufus, the guy who had just gotten him evicted.

So, logically, where else would the exiled heir to the House of Wessex go but to Scotland?

Furthermore, the peace treaty between Malcolm and William the Conqueror had ended when William died.

And Orderic tells us that when Rufus invaded Normandy earlier in the year, he had attempted to call upon the terms of that treaty, but Malcolm let the call go to voicemail.

So this wasn't exactly an unknown issue.

Scotland was very much acting as a free agent by 1091.

And this scenario is one of the many reasons why I wish we had more information on that meeting meeting between Rufus and Robert and the eventual treaty that was formed between them.

Because ousting Edgar did have the surface appearance of an appeasement of Rufus.

But at the same time, Scotland was a very real threat to England.

And releasing a rival claimant to the throne of England, who was definitely gonna run straight to Scotland, is just deliciously backhanded.

You know, assuming Robert did it on purpose.

The problem, though, is that I can't tell if Robert was holding his breath as Rufus signed off on his own future invasion, or if he just chuckle f ⁇ ed his way into this genius move.

Because this is the weird thing about Robert.

He's either a terrible player at risk or a great one.

There's no in-between.

But if I had to venture a guess, given Robert's ruling style and his pattern of being surprisingly nice for this dynasty, I'd probably say this was entirely accidental.

But we'll never know for sure.

Either way, though, this Scotland thing was a problem for Rufus.

And by this point, he'd been in Normandy for about six months.

So he couldn't just jump back onto the boats that he had used to cross the channel.

Those had already moved on to other tasks.

And he had a similar problem with his army.

Again, we're not told specifics of how Rufus arranged his original army or what the terms of service were, but at some point during his six months in Normandy, Rufus must have disbanded a sizable portion of his forces, because the chronicle tells us that he had to muster an army and a navy to counter this Scottish threat.

And Robert, continuing his tradition of just being way too nice to be a part of the House of Normandy, took the position of, look, bro, I know this wasn't part of our peace treaty, but I'm gonna back you up on this because I love you and your problems are my problems.

Sweet, darling Robert.

And so the two brothers were preparing their forces for the crossing.

All the while, Henry was down south ignoring the family crisis and instead raiding the family lands as a horny bandit lord.

Younger siblings, man.

Meanwhile, across across the channel, things were getting worse.

Well, they were getting worse if you're English.

You're pretty awesome if you're Scottish.

Because make no mistake about it, England was laid bare.

The entire royal family was across the channel in Normandy.

And Bishop Odo was out of power.

And the warlike Bishop Joffrey of Goutens was nowhere to be seen and possibly exiled.

Bishop William of Durham was also in Normandy.

Landfrank was dead.

Most of the loyal and warlike Anglo-Norman barons had crossed the channel and joined the invasion of Normandy.

Oh, and thanks to this fracas with Balem, Hugh Montgomery, the Earl of Chester, was also over there as well.

And based on the description of the king's army in Normandy, a chunk of the military of England had also crossed over the channel.

And all the while, this entire conflict was draining the royal coffers on top of that.

So when King Malcolm and his army crossed the northern border, England was completely without a protector.

And according to Simeon of Durham, the English were damn near defenseless.

We're told that as the Scottish army advanced through Northumberland, there was no hope of an organized resistance or any sort of defense.

The people who were supposed to handle that sort of thing, the exact people who were demanding high taxes and claiming that's fair because they provided protection, well, those people were across the channel playing horsey because three brothers never learned how to share.

So the Scots, unopposed, were raiding and pillaging everything and everyone that they could find, and all the English could do was flee into the woods and mountains and hope to survive.

With the upper territory thoroughly overrun, the Scottish Army then crossed the Tyne, completely bypassing Newcastle and its defenses.

And in the face of this, the people of Durham took refuge within the city walls, hauling anything they could carry with them, knowing that whatever was left behind would likely be lost.

In a matter of hours, maybe less, the city cemetery was absolutely stocked with confused and stressed out livestock, and everywhere else in the city was home to equally stressed out refugees and piles of their belongings.

The scene that Simeon provides us is an an absolute horror show, as nearly everyone just tried to find a way to weather this coming storm.

Now, to be fair, there were a few soldiers and barons who remained in the north, and so we're told that they assembled an army and they took a position to the south of Durham and began to prepare for whatever fight they could give.

Meanwhile, to the north of Durham, at Chesterless Treat, lay the forces of King Malcolm of Scotland, and in between those two armies were the people of Durham.

But thanks to the walls of the city, they were safe from the Scots, at least for now.

But it was summer, and this was a large number of people and animals kept in a confined location.

And I suspect that when the people were leaving their homes and packing up their valuables, they were bringing mostly high-value items, leaving only so much room for bags of barley and wheat.

And so food was in short supply, and people started to go hungry pretty quickly.

It was so bad that the livestock apparently started to even get aggressive, with horses biting at each other to get higher up on the pecking order so they'd have a better chance at getting whatever food there was.

And if the horses are doing it, you have to imagine the people are doing it too.

Again, the description that Simeon gives us sounds like a nightmare.

And get this, Scotland wasn't even the only problem for the English and their Norman overlords in 1091.

Because after a long hiatus, the Welsh had returned to the record.

Well, they returned to one record.

and only one record.

And this, by the way, is why we hear so little about Wales in the show right now and why so much of it involves England.

Because that's what our sources are talking about.

And unless I want to start a foray into historical fiction, I'm stuck with whatever previous historians have written about.

But today,

we have a record, and I'm going to give it to you.

Now, this comes from William of Malmesbury, and he tells us that in addition to Scotland invading, the Welsh had also risen up and were rebelling against the Norman occupation.

And while he stands alone in this description, it's not impossible.

And that's because, unlike England, Wales was not fully subjugated.

When the Normans invaded England, they solidified their hold on the kingdom within a handful of years.

Now, granted, there were uprisings and rebellions, and we've discussed those at length.

But ultimately, England had fallen into their hands.

Wales, on the other hand, was a much slower process.

and that additional time was working to the advantage of the Welsh, because it gave them time to better understand what kind of threat the Normans were, and come up with strategies to counter them.

It also helped that the Norman grasp on the region was much less complete than it was in England.

I mean, sure, the Normans were building their castles, and they were seeking to gain further authority over the Welsh.

Robert of Ridlin in his seizure of a large portion of North Wales is a very good example of that.

But there were still plenty of regions within Wales that remained outside of Norman control.

And that meant there were regions that you might launch a rebellion from, you know, if you were so inclined.

There's also the fact that the Normans were working very hard to make sure that the Welsh had a bunch of reasons to want to rebel.

As historian John Davies says, the Normans were, quote, gratuitously cruel, end quote, to the Welsh during their invasions and occupations.

And so while Malmesbury is the only surviving report on this Welsh uprising, it's entirely possible that it happened.

So when Rufus and Robert finally arrived in England, they found a kingdom beset by crises, and so they prepared to make their journey north.

But I guess they weren't in too much of a rush because they paused to handle some administrative matters, like appointing an abbot to oversee Saint-Ovrue.

But once those crucial issues of titles and land grants were handled, the king and the duke were finally ready to move.

Now, traditionally, you would expect a two-pronged attack.

With land forces being led by Robert and Rufus, who would go up the Great North Road, all the while you'd have naval forces sailing up the eastern coast providing support for the army.

And sure enough, Rufus had assembled a fleet and was loading it up with a huge amount of grain from Wessex.

But maybe the process of loading it was taking longer than expected, or maybe the fleet was taking too long to assemble, or maybe Rufus just wanted to deal with a closer issue first and avoid the possibility of being caught between two enemy armies.

Whatever the reason, Malmsbury tells us that rather than marching up the Great North Road to rescue Durham and deal with King Malcolm of Scotland, Rufus and Robert instead gathered their combined forces and marched into Wales.

And once they were there, they encountered some sort of resistance and got absolutely wrecked.

We're told that in the fighting, Rufus, quote, lost many of his soldiers, end quote.

But it gets worse because as we all know by now, an army marches on its stomach.

Campaigns are all about supplies and logistics.

And by going west and leaving the support of the fleet behind, this army was now reliant on their own supply train.

And Malmsbury tells us that the Welsh didn't just kill the invading Anglo-Norman forces, they also managed to intercept their supply train and steal it for themselves.

And this is also absolutely possible.

While King Rufus was a combative and warlike king, and he did have a reputation for victory, that wasn't the case in Wales.

The Welsh had that ruddy king dialed in and were damn near making a tradition out of giving Rufus the business whenever he strayed into their territory.

Now, as for why this happened and why they did so well, well, as I mentioned earlier, I think it has a lot to do with the timing of the invasions and the fact that the Welsh were able to develop strategies to counter the Norman tactics.

And Welsh tactics of asymmetrical warfare and ambushes would have been quite difficult for the Norman knights to counter, especially as the Welsh had the advantage of being in their home territory.

So that's my take.

Malmsbury, naturally, had a different take.

He insists that the Norman losses were due to the fact that the weather in Wales was just absolutely terrible and the landscape was even worse.

He argues that given the awful nature of Wales, the only way to deal with the Welsh is to install a permanent military occupation within the region.

I dare you to find a more English historian than William of Malmsbury.

I mean, maybe Frank Barlow, who describes the Welsh uprising of 1091 as sedition,

which is just a hell of a statement considering that Wales was not part of England.

But anyway, after this brief and disastrous campaign into Wales, Rufus and Robert regrouped their forces and finally headed north to deal with the invasion of King Malcolm Canmore of Scotland.

Meanwhile, do you remember that fleet that was being loaded up with the West Saxon grain and sent up the eastern coast?

Well, it had finally set sail, and they'd managed to reach the Tyne, but the army that they were supposed to support was nowhere to be seen.

So, the fleet were just out there, fully 50 ships just bobbing around the channel without much to do.

But these were professionals.

If they didn't have a job to do, they knew to look around and find something that needed doing.

And since they were Normans, you know what that means.

Yep, they started raiding the English.

The Navy of the King of England started going from English settlement to English settlement, taking anything and everything they could get their hands on.

And in classic Norman fashion, this raiding was absolutely ruthless.

For example, we're told that at one point, they came across an old woman who was weaving some cloth.

Now, that unfinished cloth would be pretty much worthless to anyone but the old woman who was likely intending to use it to help get through the winter.

But that didn't stop the sailors turned pirates from yanking it right out of her hands.

Because sometimes it seems like the cruelty is the point.

But Norman's sailors didn't have a monopoly on ruthlessness and cruelty, and the channel was the most ruthless of them all.

And the story goes on to tell us that a few days before Michaelmas, this fleet meeted about 20 miles up the Tyne at Coquette Island, and there the channel turned on them, and waves battered the fleet into splinters upon the rocks.

Now the Vita Oswini tells us that this was divine retribution, as the old lady had prayed to to St.

Oswinna, you know, the peaceful King Oswina of Deira, who was murdered on orders of King Oswiu in the 7th century.

And maybe that was the case, but it does seem like a departure from Oswina's general vibe of pacifism.

And so I suspect that this was probably much more likely the Normans sailing way farther north than they were used to, and they didn't know that some of the coastline could be pretty rocky, and they got caught in an unexpected gale.

Regardless, though, a short while later, bits of wood began to wash ashore, and then waterlogged supplies began to arrive, as well as stolen goods, and a whole bunch of corpses, like 50 ships worth of corpses.

Now the English, who had been hiding from the Scots and the Normans, began to emerge from the woods and other wild places so so that they could gather the supplies and plunder and take it back with them to their hiding spots.

They left the corpses though.

And as the people of Northumbria were retrieving what remained of their stolen stuff from the beaches, the army of Robert and Rufus finally reached the Tyne.

And I'm guessing they were rather excited to get there.

After all, the Welsh had nicked all their supplies and much of the north had been plundered by both the Scots and the Normans.

So they were probably getting a bit hungry and were looking forward to all that West Saxon grain that had been loaded up onto the ships.

Whoops.

Now, according to Simeon of Durham, at this exact same moment, the people within Durham remembered that they had a spiritual heavyweight on speed dial.

They had a guy who was so impressive that he kept touring the country even after he died.

This guy even dropped by to give a pep talk to Alfred the Great back when he was hiding in a swamp.

That's right, Saint Cuthbert.

And so the desperate people of Durham got together and they prayed for a miracle.

And lo and behold, the next morning, the Scottish army had retreated.

And this prayer was so effective that you have to wonder why they were waiting until they were literally starving to death to ask old Cuthbert to intervene.

I mean, it's either that, or Cuthbert waited until Rufus and Robert were right outside the city to go and deliver the goods.

Either way, though, the people of Durham were freed, and the Scots, presumably satisfied with several months of pillaging and not wanting to get into a knockdown drag out with the Norman army that just arrived, decided to head home.

Besides, campaigning season was over.

It was late September or early October by this point.

The weather was shit, and it was only gonna get worse, so might as well pack it in and rest up.

But here's the thing.

Rufus was mad, and it wasn't just the hanger.

In the space of a few months, he had his ass handed to him in Wales, who stole his supplies for good measure.

His own fleet had plundered the north, which obviously was probably fined by him, but then all 50 ships crashed into the rocky coastline and were lost, and all the plunder was seized by the local English.

And this whole time, the Scots had been taking everything that wasn't nailed down and had just brought it all back across their damn border.

So at the end of the day, damn near everyone was getting booty but Rufus.

So while King Malcolm and his army were ready to call it quits and settle in for a nice cozy winter, King Rufus was looking for a fight.

He decided he'd head north and kick Malcolm in his big old head.

Now, keep in mind that Robert and Rufus hadn't arrived in England until August.

And then they decided to handle some administrative matters in the south, go and receive a drubbing by the Welsh in the West, and then finally decided to go and visit the Tyne.

So, it was late September by this point, very late September, and chances are by the time that Rufus and his army marched out of Durham, it was early October.

Not exactly good campaigning weather.

Not even in a normal year.

And 1091 was not a normal year.

Do you remember how Malmesbury was bitching about the Welsh weather?

Well, English weather wasn't any better.

And the weather in 1091 was wild.

Records report major storm damage even as far south as London and Winchcombe.

Even worse, due to the destruction of the fleet, the army was forced to travel on foot through rough and hostile territory.

Because yeah,

even though they were still within England, the fact was that Robert and Rufus were leading a Norman army through territory that had suffered intensely at the hands of the conqueror and Odo, not to mention the Norman aristocrats, the Norman soldiers, and the Norman pirates who had just gleefully plundered and butchered their way through these lands.

These fields and lands were repeatedly stripped, and they had just been stripped again from this fight.

So Rufus and his army weren't likely to find any villages with food worth taking while they were on the road.

So needless to say, they were taking losses, and not from enemy attacks, unless you consider Mother Nature and God to be the enemy.

Which, actually, John of Worcester, for his part, is pretty sure they would, saying outright that God had turned against Rufus in this campaign.

So yeah, this was bad, and their supply issues were made worse by the fact that this weather was slowing down their advance, and that lack of speed also made a surprise attack impossible.

In fact, pretty much everyone knew where the Norman army was and where they were headed.

And so, over in Scotland, King Malcolm gathered his forces back up and he marched down to Lothian to counter the threat.

And by this point, you can imagine that Duke Robert and the other commanders were pleading with King Rufus to back down or at least wait until next year's campaigning season.

But the king pressed on, determined to bring the Scottish king to submission.

The two forces finally met somewhere between the Tweed and the Firth of Forth.

But by this point, even the Norman soldiers that remained upright were beginning to starve.

And that's not exactly what you want for a battlefield.

And it seems like the only thing the Normans had going for them here was the fact that King Malcolm really didn't feel like fighting.

The guy was old, like really old.

And on top of that, he'd been on the road for about five months by this point.

And it was cold and wet out here, so he didn't want bloodshed.

He wanted a warm fire and a nice woolly blanket.

Honestly, it seems like no one wanted this fight, but Rufus.

And so, emissaries were sent to discuss terms.

And in a sign of how seriously both sides were taking this situation, these weren't just some random courtiers.

From the Norman camp came Duke Robert himself, and from the Scottish camp was Edgar the Atheling.

And because this was feudal Britain, they weren't discussing war crimes or restitution for the death and destruction that was inflicted upon the public.

No,

they were discussing who is in charge and what duties and payments are owed.

Now, the Norman position was that this whole campaign was illegal because Rufus had inherited England, and thus, on the grounds of the previous treaty with the Conqueror, Malcolm owed Rufus fealty.

The Scottish position was that Malcolm didn't owe Rufus Jack shit.

And if this treaty was transferable, which we're not conceding, but if it was, then it would go to Robert as the eldest living son, not Rufus.

Now, unfortunately, Rufus was not about to budge on this point.

And so poor Robert found himself in a situation where he was was arguing against his own right to inheritance in order to obtain peace and support his brother, which is pretty on brand for short pants, if I'm being honest.

But that wasn't the only sticking point.

King Malcolm, for example, wanted the return of the properties that he had acquired during the reign of the Conqueror, which was a total of 12 villages.

He also wanted a yearly payment from the English crown of 12 marks of gold.

And Edgar the Athling had some requests as well.

You see, he was insisting he should be allowed to return to the English court.

Now, I have no idea why Edgar wanted this.

I mean, could you imagine a place more hostile to Edgar than the court of King Rufus?

This makes no sense to me.

But frankly, everything Edgar does is a little baffling to me.

This was clearly a strange guy in a strange situation.

But for whatever reason, there he was, pushing to once again become the ugly step-sibling of the English court.

So everybody had asks.

But again, nobody but Rufus wanted this fight, and so the terms were agreed upon.

Malcolm would conditionally become a vassal of Rufus, granting him the exact same terms that he had given the conqueror.

Basically, that he would do homage when necessary.

But that was about it.

Malcolm was still king.

In exchange, Rufus reconciled with Edgar the Atheling, gave Malcolm those villages, and agreed to pay him the yearly sum of twelve marks of gold.

And I guess Malcolm got to keep all his booty, and Rufus got to keep all of his um

all his corpses.

But peace was established, and so Rufus turned his army and began the long, grueling march back down south, no doubt losing even more of his troops to the cold and hunger along the way.

But at least he had his victory, victory.

Or at least he had what he claimed was a victory.

But when you look at the terms of the treaty and you consider that rather than getting restitution for four or five months of plunder, the Red King was actually promising to pay Malcolm a yearly stipend and give him additional lands and welcome his political rival back into court, all in exchange for just a promise to do homage.

Yeah, this doesn't sound much like a victory at all, does it?

And Malmsbury jumps in to point out that at the end of the day, various grounds of difference remained between the two men and that their relationship was marked by mutual animosity.

Yeah, I bet it was.

But hey, at least they'd be back down south for Christmas.

Well,

Rufus would.

Duke Robert didn't have any interest in spending the holiday in England with his brother, because actually, he had another brother that he needed to keep an eye on.

A brother who was currently raiding half the skirts in western France.

So, two days before Christmas, Robert sailed out of the Isle of Wight and headed back for Normandy.

And with him was Edgar the Atheling.

I guess the Duke talked some sense into the guy before he found himself stuffed into one of the Red King's dungeons.

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