William II, or William Rufus, was King of England from September 1087 until August 1100, about a month shy of 13 years.
William would be the second Norman king to sit on the English throne. And he would take the reins 21 years after his father William the Conquerer had been crowned.
We don’t know exactly when William Rufus was born.
William Rufus would have been anywhere between one and ten years old at the time of the Norman Invasion.
His mother Matilda of Flanders bore around 10 children so William Rufus had several brothers and sisters.
With two older brothers - Robert, the eldest, and then Richard - it was likely that the idea of him ever succeeding his father, either as Duke of Normandy, or King of England, was probably only a distant possibility.
Two factors would change all that.
In 1070, Richard was out hunting in the New Forest, rode into a tree branch and died. William was suddenly second in line.
The second factor was his eldest brother Robert’s terrible relations with their father, which ultimately meant that, when William the Conquerer was at the end of his life - having suffered a catastrophic injury in 1087 - instead of leaving both Normandy and England to his eldest son, he divided his kingdom in two.
Seventeen days after his father’s passed away, William Rufus was crowned King William II of England.
One of William II’s first acts as king was to carry out a series of tasks given to him by his dying father.
If you’ve watched our previous video on William the Conqueror, you’ll know that though he won the Battle of Hastings and was crowned in 1066, it took him several years to put down the various English rebellions that sprang up in opposition to his rule.
In 1069 his patience snapped and he launched a campaign to suppress revolts in the north of England.
His troops massacred many many northerners and they even salted the land to prevent crops being grown.
Perhaps with the idea of seeking God’s forgiveness or saving his soul, one of William II’s first tasks given to him by his father was to open the Treasury and distribute generous gifts to the church, monasteries and the poor.
But it was the Conquerer’s other instructions - to release Odo and give the Duchy of Normandy to Robert - that would prove critical during William II’s early reign.
Soon after he was crowned, some of the most powerful Norman nobles in England revolted with the hope of uniting England and Normandy under William’s older brother Robert.
The revolt was led by none other than Odo, who had been released the previous year by the Conquerer, as he lingered after being injured.
The Rebellion of 1088 represented an existential challenge for William II.
The King responded by laying siege to Odo’s castle. He also recruited English soldiers to his cause by promising to abolish the much-hated Forest Laws.
The strategy worked and the revolt failed. Odo was forced to surrender his Earldom and return to Normandy.
Sadly though, when the revolt was suppressed and he was asked what he wanted to do about the Forest Laws he replied - “who can be expected to keep all his promises?”
The Forest Laws stayed and as the next century wore on, the size of land designated ‘forest’ would only grow - by the middle of the 1100s they covered around a third of England and included the entire county of Essex.
Though the 1088 revolt failed, the rebels’ plans to unite England and Normandy under one king did eventually succeed, just not in the way they had planned.
In 1091 William invaded Normandy and took the east of the Duchy from his brother Robert.
By 1096 Robert decided he’d had enough of Normandy and galloped off towards Jerusalem to join the First Crusade, mortgaging the rest of the Duchy to William for 10,000 marks of silver.
By the turn of the century, things were looking good for William II.
His kingdom was secure and he was making plans to expand beyond the borders of Normandy.
A keen hunter, in August 1100 he was out hunting in the New Forest in the South of England.
William’s body appears to have been abandoned in the forest and was effectively found by a commoner who it’s thought took it to Winchester where it was buried and where it lies to this day.
There is debate over whether it was as accident or an assassination - some historians see Walter Tirel’s actions of fleeing the scene and of Henry’s riding straight to the Royal Treasury as suspicious. Other historians point out that hunting was a dangerous sport and accidents did of course happen.
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