444 – Holy Beef

Welcome to the British History Podcast.

My name is Jamie, and this is episode 444: Poly Beef.

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Based on the emails I've been getting, some of you are having a hard time understanding why on God's green earth did Odo think he could just trot down to Rome and become the new Pope.

The truth is that actually he was less crazy than we might think.

And I'm going to take a moment to explain the situation a little better.

Partly because this becomes important for our story later on, and partly because it's hilariously messy, and I love mess.

Okay, do you recall the fight that Pope Gregory had with King Henry IV of Germany?

It was the one where Henry declared Gregory wasn't the Pope and Gregory declared Henry wasn't king.

At its core, this was a gargantuan battle over power at the highest level.

Henry had found himself in a weakened political state, and Pope Gregory VII saw an opportunity.

He wanted the church to rule above all kings and emperors, and so he publicly moved against Henry, trying to put him in his place.

Henry didn't appreciate that, and thus began the big holy beef of the eleventh century.

But this conflict wasn't constrained to two men and their hurt feelings.

When Gregory went so far as to excommunicate Henry and declare him not a king, a bunch of German nobles saw an opportunity to advance their own goals, and they selected their own king, a guy named named Rudolph.

And the new anti-king Rudolph and his supporters were causing Henry so many problems that he was on the verge of losing his crown.

So Henry had no choice but to seek Gregory out and beg for absolution and repeal his excommunication.

Gregory obviously didn't want to do that, and so he did the same thing that targets of lawsuits sometimes do.

He tried to evade service of process.

In this case, he moved to Canossa.

But it didn't work because Henry followed him.

And that was the famous walk to Canossa in 1077 that we talked about in an earlier episode.

Well, it turned out that walk didn't end the fight.

Henry's excommunication was lifted and some related disagreements were settled.

But the actual cause of the conflict, the question of royal authority relative to the church, and whether or not Henry was allowed to select bishops, was never resolved.

Henry still wanted to pick bishops, as monarchs had done for generations.

And Gregory wanted Henry to stay in his lane.

Also, Henry wanted to be crowned emperor, and Gregory wanted Henry to go kindly f himself.

So the resolution was more of a stalemate.

And it turned out that back home in Germany, Henry still had problems.

You see, anti-King Rudolph wasn't playing reindeer games here.

He wanted to be king, and he had an army.

So he continued his fight to take Germany.

And Henry had to find a way to stop him if he wanted to keep his seat, not to mention his head.

And while they were fighting it out, Gregory had problems of his own.

You see, a Norman adventurer named Robert Giscard had been gaining fame by gobbling up territory and generally kicking the hell out of anyone who looked at him funny.

And in regards to this conflict, he was actually a bit of a a wild card.

He was ostensibly an ally of Pope Gregory's.

However, during this period, he also conquered and annexed Bonavento, which was actually under the papal umbrella.

But Gregory was in such a state at this period that he didn't make a fuss about it, and instead worked hard to stay on friendly terms with Robert, which I think was wise, because if that Norman guy was willing to steal from the Pope when they were on friendly terms, God knows what he would do if he thought the Pope was hostile to him.

And besides, given Gregory's position in European politics, what exactly could he do?

Meanwhile, back in Germany, it was becoming clear that anti-King Rudolph might have been good at convincing people to fight for him, but he wasn't great at fighting a war.

And King Henry was.

The rebels had lost any forward momentum in their fight against Henry and actually found themselves on the losing side of a Bavarian campaign.

And without clear victories and without the support of the Pope, Rudolph was facing a massive morale problem.

And ultimately, he was forced to bribe his supporters with land just to keep them from abandoning him.

And Henry saw his chance to put this whole thing to bed.

And so he sent a message to the Pope asking Gregory to excommunicate the anti-king Rudolph.

And Pope Gregory let the call go to voicemail.

Now, the papacy framed this move as neutrality, but history is stuffed with people who claim neutrality when they're actually trying to hide the fact that they've already taken a side.

And Gregory was probably one of these people.

He seems to have been refusing Henry's requests and professing neutrality in an effort to give the anti-king some space to gather more support and win the fight.

Gregory was buying Rudolph time.

And it worked.

In January of 1080, Rudolph fought against Henry and didn't lose.

Now, to be clear, the outcome of this battle wasn't a victory for Rudolph, but it was a battle that wasn't a complete disaster for the rebels, which, given how the last few years had been going, was almost as good.

So Rudolph's allies brought word of this almost victory to the Pope, except they decided to spice it up a little.

Well, not just spice.

These allies took the tail all the way to Flavortown.

And the Pope, now thinking that Rudolph had decisively won a major victory, immediately came off the sidelines and excommunicated Henry and declared that he wasn't a king again.

But it wasn't long before Gregory realized he'd been lied to.

And even worse, it was also clear that he had misread the situation in Rome as well, because he found himself under attack by his own people.

Basically, they were arguing that the grounds of this excommunication were shaky as hell and possibly downright illegal.

And they were kind of right.

Meanwhile, Henry was moving quickly.

After all, this wasn't the first time the Pope excommunicated him and declared that he wasn't a king.

At this point in his life, it was just another day of the office.

So Henry got a bunch of bishops together and deposed Gregory again.

And they elected Archbishop Wibbert of Ravenna as the candidate for new pope.

Now, Pope Wibbert isn't exactly the kind of name that inspires hearts and minds.

It sounds like a video game back in the 80s.

However, anti-Pope Clement III?

Yeah, that's way better.

And so Henry promised newly named Anti-Pope Clement III that he would lead his forces to Rome and plonk him down in the holy city.

And so all of a sudden, Gregory found himself in a really tight spot.

But at the same time, beyond calling Clement names and demanding that Ravenna get a new archbishop, there wasn't much he could do.

Gregory just had to hope that Rudolph, with his army shining so bright, would fight the church's war tonight.

And to be fair, Rudolph was indeed putting up a hell of a fight.

And at the Battle of Elster, in the fall of 1080, anti-King Rudolph fought against King Henry.

And finally, he found an honest to God victory.

Henry's army was thoroughly routed, with many of the king's forces drowning in their panicked flight.

And the king himself was forced to flee for his life.

Anti-King Rudolph, at long last, had won.

Well,

militarily, he won.

Personally, he lost a lot.

First his hand, and then his life.

Oops.

And many people looked at this and determined rather understandably that this was divine judgment.

And in the face of that, the rebellion quickly collapsed.

A few of the rebels tried to keep it together, including a guy named Herman, but no one was all that thrilled with the prospect of anti-King Herman, so the rebellion was done.

The anti-king was dead, long dead the anti-king.

And that meant that Gregory had gone all in on a movement that no longer existed.

And in 1081, with the rebels defeated, King Henry had some free time on his hands.

So he turned his attention back to Rome.

A Rome that was basically defenseless thanks to the fact that in the previous year, Henry had kicked the bejesus out of the Tuscan army.

And so he marched to Rome, and pretty much no one was available to stop him.

However, within a couple months, it was starting to become clear that the people of Rome were loyal to Gregory and not Henry or Clement.

So the king was forced to retreat, first to northern Italy and then back to Germany because, surprise, he was facing even more rebellions within his own territory.

And it was somewhere around this point that that Norman scoundrel, Robert Guiscard, had second thoughts about what had happened at Benevento.

And so he decided to return it to the papacy, which suggests that actually Pope Gregory made the right call in avoiding a beef with this guy.

But at the same time, you don't really get the sense that Gregory had all that much power in this relationship.

Then, in the following year of 1082, King Henry tried to evict Pope Gregory again, and he laid siege to the Holy City.

And sieges take a while, so while he went off to ravage the Italian countryside, Anti-Pope Clement was the one commanding the besieging forces outside the Holy City, just as I assume Jesus would have done.

Meanwhile, the Byzantine emperor, because yeah, this also involves Byzantium, had a huge beef with Robert Giscard, who was the Pope's ally.

And so he sent a bunch of cash to Henry to fund the campaign to evict and replace Pope Gregory, and he also sent a bunch of cash specifically for kicking the hell out of the Pope's Norman friend, Robert.

And with all that money in hand, Henry started bribing the bejesus out of the Roman officials and nobles.

And anti-Pope Clement, at the same time, was busy undermining the Pope by talking shit about him to cardinals and bishops.

It was absolute religious chaos over there.

And it was at that point that Odo started to get the idea that he could be the new Pope if he gave it a shot.

And maybe, now you can see why.

Make sense?

Okay, so let's set messy papal politics aside and get back to messy English and Norman politics.

And at the center of it, in 1082, was wealth.

The cold, hard truth of European feudalism is that the nobles could never be rich enough.

They could never hold enough land.

They could never have enough titles.

It didn't matter if they had more money than they could ever spend in a lifetime, nor more lands than they could ever visit.

They still needed more.

And this wasn't because they were interested in the actual land they were acquiring.

As we've seen with the Normans, they might be actively disinterested in the lands they were stealing.

And let's not even mention how they felt about the people that actually lived on those lands.

Even when the nobles took the time to feign interest in governing, as William had done, it becomes quickly apparent that the real goal for many of them is extracting wealth.

And while the medieval nobility hadn't yet figured out how to acquire a property, load it down with debt through obscure financial products, strip it for parts, and then declare it bankrupt in order to enjoy a tax write-off, what many of them were doing wasn't all that far off.

And the most viscerally shocking example of this was the increasing seizure of common land.

Land that the people were living on or near to and had shared for generations in order to to feed and house themselves but was now being declared off-limits and only for the exclusive private use of the rich guy who claimed it but while that type of seizure is shocking and immediately noticeable land of all kinds was coming under this new type of aristocratic ownership and when you look at the extractive taxation system and the predatory land acquisition schemes you can see plenty of examples where individuals as well as entire communities were impoverished for the benefit of the primary estate of the noble who was wielding that system.

And this culture masquerading as an economic system was a major driving force of the downward social pressure that impacted even the noble classes that were carrying it out.

It was why children had fewer opportunities and were experiencing a harsher economic reality than their parents.

Not because the younger generations were lazy, just because as the wealthy competed with each other for a bigger slice of the pie, by the sheer physics of the thing, that meant there was less left for everyone else.

And those without access to the halls of power, those without armies and fancy titles, were the ones most likely to find their meager little slices reduced even further.

As for why the rich were doing this, well, While they weren't worried that their kids might starve thanks to the imposition of things like royal forests, they still had worries.

Every time their peers gained new land or titles, that put pressure on them to keep up.

If all your peers are expanding their wealth and you're not,

well, one day you might wake up and discover they are no longer your peers.

They own you.

And as nobles, they will have seen firsthand that once you fall down the social ladder, it is incredibly hard to climb back up, especially as their former peers look to maintain their standing by taking even more of the available pie.

So the rich were hoarding wealth like dragons, not just out of greed, but also likely out of fear of what might happen if they didn't.

And some of William's companions were absolute savants at this.

We've already mentioned the near-cosmic levels of wealth of Hugh Lupus and Alan Rufus, both leveraging their pre-existing wealth and titles, as well as their proximity to William and their comfortability with conquest and slaughter, to expand their holdings to an absurd degree.

And one where Lupus's living descendants are some of the richest people in the modern UK.

But they were far from alone in doing this.

Another figure of William's court was Roger de Beaumont, and he also managed to wield his social status to attain wealth that not even a thousand camels could carry through the eye of a needle.

This guy rode the wave of William's conquest, and he built a cross-channel real estate empire.

His developing dynasty held substantial properties in Leicestershire and Warwickshire, in addition to his already sizable estates in Normandy.

And recently, he made some new acquisitions.

You see, there were paths for the rich to get richer other than just conquest and war.

For example, there were also corporate mergers, by which I mean marriages.

And so Roger had married his son Robert to Adeline of Moulin, who was the daughter of Count Walleran III.

And thanks to feudal succession, that meant now his son Robert was the Count of Moulin.

and as such, delivered the dynasty's substantial properties in French Vexon.

And this, in turn, meant that de Beaumont's growing real real estate empire was no longer simply cross-channel Norman holdings.

It now stretched into the territory of the King of France as well.

Beaumont was setting up a dynasty that would dominate cross-channel politics for generations.

And this sort of thing was happening all over the place, including within the palace at Rouen.

You see, at this point, William's conflict with Count Fulk of Anjou and the rebels of Maine had been resolved somehow.

I was unable to find a blow-by-blow account of the event, and instead only found sporadic comments about armies and sieges.

But it does seem that in the end, a papal legate got involved.

Because even though Pope Gregory was totally on the ropes in Rome, he was still getting involved in other people's business.

And if I had to guess, I'd say he was probably hoping that if William's fight with Fulk came to an end, he might send some Normans to Rome to deal with Henry.

But that's just a guess.

Either way, the legate mediated some form of settlement, and William was able to reassert control over Maine, which did in fact give William some free time.

But he didn't go to Rome.

Instead, he went back to Rouen, and he started to work on a corporate merger of his own.

And this time, he was focusing on northern France.

To quote historian David Bates, while William arranged a fair number of marriages, quote, it must be significant that the only two marriages that actually ever took place involved northern French territorial princes, a reflection surely of where William identified the most serious threat, end quote.

So yet again, we're seeing marriages being wielded to acquire wealth and head off threats.

And Count Theobald III of Blois was a very powerful French aristocrat.

He had a ton of land throughout France, including lands that were sitting very close to William's.

But Theobald's eldest son, Stephen, was unmarried.

So that was good news for William.

But it also does make me wonder what was going on with Stephen.

Because the guy was in his late thirties.

And while getting married late in life is pretty common these days, and there were strategic reasons for holding on to that particular political card.

It could also be a sign of something else going on with Stephen.

But whatever, nobody could ignore that Count Theobald was getting old, and Stephen was next in line and unmarried.

And so William wanted to get in on that, and he had just the daughter in mind.

Now, you might be thinking that he went with Constance, who was unmarried and about 30 years old.

But no,

while Constance was the daughter of William, she was born when William was a duke.

And I guess that wasn't good enough.

And so William offered up his youngest daughter, who was born when he was a king.

Adele.

Hello.

It's me.

And due to magical birth status, this made her a much more prestigious match.

Now, unfortunately, it was also a match that, even by the standards of the time, was a bit too early.

Adele was only 14.

So, to keep the marriage from being creepy and predatory, Williams set up a betrothal.

Adele would have to wait until she was 16 to marry a guy who was nearly 40 years old.

Nice.

I mean, what red-blooded teenage girl doesn't want a man who throws out his back every other week because he accidentally slept wrong?

And possibly adding salt in the wound?

Constance actually got married a few years later to Alan Fergant, the Duke of Brittany, who was about her own age.

Medieval marriage is weird, but if you set aside the stark reality of what these marriages would have meant for the women being sold into them, you can see the politics of what the men who controlled their lives were playing.

William was trading his daughter's lives in exchange for an increase in his political and social position.

Now normally, I'd say he was doing this to increase his dynasty's position, but given how he behaved with his firstborn, I really wonder how William felt about his dynasty.

So yeah, during this period, William was doing pretty typical ruler stuff.

Charters, land grants, lawsuits, daughter selling.

But he was also doing some not so typical ruler stuff.

For example, it turned out there was an issue with the ordeal of iron.

And if you're not familiar, this was the practice of settling legal disputes by making people carry hot iron around in their hands.

And, well, it turned out there was a problem.

Not with the logic of the whole thing.

No, with the special iron that needed to be used.

You see, you can't solve a dispute by making someone carry just any old piece of red-hot iron.

That would be barbaric and stupid.

No, this only works if you've got a very special piece of iron.

It had to be carefully selected and then blessed by someone of suitable piety.

That way, when you force some poor person to carry the scalding iron and suffer third-degree burns and potentially die from the resulting infection simply because they said, but that's not true, well, that way you know it's in service of holy justice.

And the trouble was that an abbot had recently got his hands on that bit of iron and

well, he did something to it.

We're not told what he did to the iron, but it was either gone or it was no longer holy.

I'm gonna assume he just sold it or melted it down, but you know, who knows for sure.

But whatever happened to that holy iron, now they needed a replacement.

And so they reached out to the Archbishop of Rouen, who saw an opportunity.

The truth was, the Archbishop was not thrilled that the Abbey was making people carry around hot iron to settle legal disputes.

The Archbishop felt it would be much better if he was the one making people carry around hot iron to settle legal disputes.

Yeah, and this was such a problem that William was forced to go and sit in attendance as these holy men fought over who had the right to permanently scar, maim, or kill people with a bit of hot metal in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

And even though this was a huge dispute, apparently no one was making the abbot or the archbishop carry hot iron to find the truth of the matter, which seems like the obvious solution to me.

Anyway, eventually the abbot won, and I assume he went back to torturing members of the public with his newly blessed bit of iron.

And that rounds out 1082.

Good times.

And as we enter 1083,

records about William and his movements become sparse.

But it does appear that he made a visit back to England, which, given that Scotland, Wales, and Maine had all been dealt with, it was probably just a routine visit.

But at the same time, I really wonder how Matilda felt about her husband dropping by for a visit at this point.

Unfortunately, we're not told.

And instead, we're just informed that there was an issue that needed the king's oversight.

A weird issue.

An issue that, once again, involved the church.

You see, William had been installing continental nobles and churchmen all over over England.

And when Lanfrank deposed the English abbot Athelnoth of Glastonbury, William installed a Norman monk in his place, Brother Thurstan of Caen, who was now Abbot Thurstan of Glastonbury.

And,

well,

Abbot Thurstan had a lot in common with our old friend Abbot Turld.

Warderick describes him as shameless.

Malmsbury tells us that he was indiscreet and unworthy and engaged in acts of folly.

And a lot's implied there, but unfortunately, they don't give us an accounting of what these acts of folly were.

Instead, they just jump straight to his most serious charge, which was also the one that William was brought in to deal with.

And by bringing in the king, you know that this was a big deal.

And at the core of it was the critical issue of mismatched musical tastes.

You see, the monks of Glastonbury used the Gregorian chant, which is a close harmony style of chanting that honestly, if you're imagining monks chanting right now, you're probably imagining the Gregorian style.

And this method of chant was named in honor of Pope Gregory.

Not the seventh, the second,

the one who was Pope in the early 700s.

So this type of chanting was old, like five Gregs old.

And Thurstan hated it.

You see, it turns out that back home in Normandy, they had their own type of chant.

And these dirty English monks needed to stop using their stupid, ugly Gregorian chant, which was never gonna catch on, by the way, and instead use the much more civilized Norman chant, which we're told was developed by a monk from Facamp.

And because it was a Norman monk, he was, of course, named William.

And so Thurstan was like, switch over to the new style dorks.

Unfortunately, the monks of Glastonbury hadn't yet listened to the the demo tape coming out of Facamp, so they had no idea what Thurstan was on about, nor could they do what was requested.

So they continued to worship in the style that their brothers had done for literally hundreds of years.

And so faced with this, what did Abbot Thurstan do?

Did he talk to them to find out what the problem was?

Did he teach them the Norman chant?

Did he try and come to some sort of understanding with the monks under his care?

Did he bring William over from Facamp and host a sort of ecclesiastical band camp?

God know.

He was a conquest era Norman abbot, and so he solved his problems in the Norman style.

He waited until the monks, quote, least expected it, end quote, and on that day, while the monks were chanting, he charged into the abbey with a gang of soldiers.

The monks, terrified by the sudden appearance of heavily armed soldiers, panicked and fled into the church.

But Abbot Thurstan and his gang chased after them, and they found the poor monks literally clinging to the altar in terror.

Malmsbury tells us that as the soldiers attacked, one of the monks was impaled by a spear against the altar.

And in that moment, I guess the monks realized that God helps those who help themselves, so they grabbed anything they could, benches, candles, whatever was on hand, and they started beating back the attacking soldiers.

And thus, the first Glastonbury Festival was on.

We're told it was absolute chaos in there.

The soldiers were firing arrows and throwing darts wildly, killing another of the monks, wounding 14 others, and damaging a ton of property within the church.

Other records claim actually they killed three monks and wounded 18.

The sources vary.

But however many monks were killed and wounded within the church, I'm pretty sure it was more than you're allowed.

And we're told that some of the soldiers were also taking wounds themselves, presumably from the monks who were knighting them a bit clumsily with candlesticks and crosses.

So eventually, the soldiers pulled back.

I'm guessing it wasn't because of the casualties, since Mullinsbury makes it quite clear that the monks were on the losing side when it came to injuries and deaths.

And I have to imagine that after they started impaling monks against the altar of the church, some of the soldiers started to wonder what Big J would think about this.

Either way though, they pulled back and the monks were all, that's it, I'm telling the king.

And so a trial was held and we're told in the end that they found quote, the abbot was most to blame, end quote.

Which, yeah, obviously.

He and his boys literally impaled a monk to the holy altar.

That's pretty blameworthy.

But while you would expect a harsh sentence for the murder of a holy man within a church, it seems that William was a forward-thinking king, and so he adopted a far more ecclesiastical solution.

He just moved Thurstan to another church.

Nice.

As for the monks who survived the attack, they were sent into confinement in several cathedrals and monasteries.

We're not told which ones they were, but given how William handled previous disputes with English monks, I'm guessing they were almost certainly Norman ones, where they would no doubt now have to learn to sing in the style of that random guy from Facamp.

And that is kind of how these last two years went.

Charters, church drama, wedding drama, land grants.

And as I've mentioned in the past, William appears to have been a bit of a stress heater.

So I'm also sure there were more than a few banquets thrown in there as well.

Because listening to men in robes beefing over whose chant was better was probably really annoying.

And then another stressor was thrown into the mix.

At some point around here, concerns began to grow about the health of Queen Matilda.

Now, as I've mentioned, our records for this period are very sparse, and we don't know the precise timeline or movements of William or Matilda.

As such, it's hard to know whether this all started when she was in England or if it began when she was back in Normandy.

All we know is that by by the fall of 1083, Matilda was back in Normandy and people were worried.

As for why they were worried, that's tough to say because we're in this strange period of William's reign where our sources suddenly start getting very tight-lipped.

Well, most of them do.

Malmsbury is a bit different, and he has quite the tale to tell.

But heads up.

This one's a bit grim.

So Malmsbury, who wrote his account about 40 years after these events, mentions that people in his time were still talking about this affair that William had in his later years with the daughter of a priest.

And apparently, Matilda caught on to what was happening, and so she had her people

deal with the girl.

We're told she was hamstrung, which is absolutely gruesome.

When William found out about this, he had the knife-wielding servant exiled, and then he beat Matilda with a bridle so severely that she later died.

The phrase Malmsbury uses is quote, scourged to death with a bridle, end quote.

Now, Malmsbury goes through this entire story, but also tells us we shouldn't believe it.

And to be clear, we didn't invent lying and slander in the modern era, so it is entirely possible that people just really hated William and were saying as many awful things as they could about him.

But Malmsbury's explanation for why we shouldn't believe this story is not as convincing as he seems to think it was.

He tells us that the royal couple were on good terms, though he does admit that, quote, a slight disagreement arose between them in latter times on account of their son Robert, end quote.

And if attempting to mutilate your wife's friend and demanding the execution of your son, followed by a long solo trip to Germany and an even even longer one to England, counts as a slight disagreement, I would hate to see what a big fight looks like.

And honestly, a big fight might look like the story that Malmsbury initially described.

But he goes on and he offers his most ironclad proof of innocence.

You see, despite the slight disagreement over Robert, Matilda was buried with great pomp and magnificence.

And William cried in public, quote, for many days, showing how keenly he felt her loss, end quote.

And

I don't know.

I'm not saying that the rumors of the beating were true, but tears and a fancy burial could just as easily be proof of remorse.

And I think we have to consider here that this wasn't the only story we have of William beating Matilda.

You might remember that the Chronicle of Tours reported that William beat Matilda severely when she first first refused his marriage proposal.

Furthermore, it's not like domestic violence was outlawed in the 11th century.

Far from it, in the 11th century, physical violence was seen as a legitimate method to correct your wife's behavior or even just address displeasure.

This was not a great time for women.

And the man that Matilda had married was an extraordinarily violent man.

And on top of all that, I find it very strange that Malmsbury brought up the story unprompted and then asks him to trust him that it didn't happen because William's just a good dude and then provides us with no alternative explanation for why she died.

It's weird.

And if it didn't happen, then I'm annoyed that Malmsbury even brought it up because now it's in my head.

And it's in your head too.

So what actually happened to Matilda?

Well, the chronicle is no help.

It simply reports that she died with no explanation of what happened and then goes on to talk about recent taxes that were levied.

Thanks guys.

Fortunately, Orderk, who was writing really close in time to Malmesbury, took a break from trash talking his critics to share his version of Matilda's death.

And he tells us that Queen Matilda was back in Normandy at Caen in the fall of 1083, and she was suffering from a lingering sickness that just was not getting any better.

And people were getting worried.

Now, we do see her appearing in charters in Caen, so she was there, and apparently she was well enough to engage in some public functions.

But then we have Orderic telling us that her health was so bad that Matilda was tearfully confessing her sins and preparing for death.

Which is odd and seems like a contradiction.

But then we have other records that report that she bequeathed her crown and scepter to La Trinité in Caen, which suggests that either she really was sick, or if that incident that Malmsbury related really did happen, it wasn't followed by an immediate death, but rather something that was more fatal in the long term.

Without information, though, it's impossible to know.

And none of our sources are sharing anything regarding what Matilda's symptoms were, nor the nature of the illness, nor what was being done to treat her.

Now, interestingly, Abbot Baldwin of Bury Saint Edmunds is reported as being in Caen during this same period.

And that actually might lend credence to some sort of medical issue, either illness related or William related, because other records report that the royal household often called upon Abbot Baldwin to provide medical expertise when things looked serious.

However, the record of Abbot Baldwin's presence in Caen doesn't say anything about him providing Matilda with medical care, nor anything about the queen being sick at all.

So what was going on there?

Like I keep saying, it's impossible to know for sure.

I mean, Matilda was only 52 years old, but at the same time, they were a hard 52.

The poor woman had at least nine children that we know of.

possibly 10, not including any miscarriages.

And that will put a lot of strain on the body, especially without modern medicine.

And then add to that all the other illnesses that can take a person before their time.

I mean, people die in their 50s even now with our access to modern medicine and technology.

So it's entirely possible that Matilda caught an infectious disease and just couldn't shake it, or had a stroke, or just about anything else that can befall a human body.

It's also possible that her famously violent husband, with multiple tales of violence towards her, had finally killed her.

It's a big question mark on this page of history, and I'm not sure if we ever can truly know the final chapter of Matilda's story, given the way that these stories came down to us.

But however it came about, on November 2nd of 1083, Queen Matilda, the glue that was holding this dumpster fire of a family together, died, and she was buried at Conn with an enormous funeral.

And immediately afterwards, her son, Robert Curt Hose, got the fellas together and left Williams Court.

He was done with the bastard.

Father of mine.

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Thanks for listening.

Take me back to the day.

Yeah, when I was still your golden boy, back before you went away.