Family Quarrels

All told then, from the 1070s through to the 1130s, the wealth and energy of the kings of England was devoted principally to warfare and foreign alliances and specifically to warfare provoked by family quarrels, fought out in Normandy and dragging in broad coalitions of northern French noblemen, from Flanders to Anjou, and from the kings of France to the counts of Alsace. An inestimable quantity of English silver and human life was expended in a quarrel provoked originally by a couple of teenagers urinating on their elder brother. There was a great deal more to the reigns of both Rufus and Henry I than just this narrative of family squabbling, but not surprisingly their contemporaries looked to moral or cosmic explanations to explain the turmoil. Both the Bible and classical antiquity are full of the contentions of sons against fathers, of brother against brother, and of the moral causes that were believed to explain such sickness within the body politic. To those seeking explanations, the rebellions of Curthose and the fact that the ruling family was increasingly given over to internal squabbling could only be interpreted as proof of the illegitimacy of Norman claims in England; fit punishment for the violent usurpation with which William the Conqueror had despoiled the Anglo-Saxons. In turn, this carries us back to another overriding theme in English history after 1066, the guilt that the Conquest had inspired.