These kings are usually called Anglo-Norman, because they had been dukes of Normandy (in France) before becoming kings of England and held onto the duchy.
William the Conqueror of course became king of England in 1066 by conquest (his nickname is a clue...). When he died, he was succeeded not by his oldest son, Robert Curthose, but by his second son, William II, also called William Rufus. Robert Curthose became duke of Normandy. When William Rufus died without children in 1100, he was succeeded by his youngest brother, Henry I.
Robert Curthose was in Jerusalem at the time, on the First Crusade. He was distraught, thinking that he ought to succeed as king. He came back to Europe, fought Henry for half a dozen years, lost, and ended up imprisoned for the rest of his life. So much for brotherly love.
Henry I had no shortage of sons. He had over a dozen. There was no problem there, except for one crucial issue. All but one of them was illegitimate. His one legitimate son was lost at sea (a group of young men trying to cross the English Channel during rough weather, all probably DUI). There was no way Henry could make one of his other sons king, even though several of them became bishops, and all of them had comfortable lives. So he chose his daughter Mathilda to succeed.
Mathilda was supposed to be king, not queen. She in fact usually called herself Empress, because she had been briefly married to the Holy Roman Emperor, though he had died without them having children. She had married a second time, to Geoffrey, count of Anjou. The county of Anjou is next to Normandy, and the Angevins had decided Normandy was rightfully theirs.
The great Anglo-Norman lords hated Mathilda, partly because she was a woman, partly because they hated Geoffrey of Anjou. They quickly declared they hadn't really sworn to support Mathilda and went instead for her cousin Stephen, son of a daughter of William the Conqueror. England now calls Stephen the rightful king, so Henry I was succeeded by his nephew.
Mathilda spent much of the next two decades fighting Stephen. She never won, but at the end of his life, when he had no children to succeed (what's with these guys? low sperm count?), he agreed that Mathilda's son, Henry II, would become king after him. So Stephen was succeeded by a first cousin once removed, a man who was already duke of Normandy and count of Anjou. Henry also acquired Aquitaine, essentially the southwest quarter of France, through his marriage.
Henry II and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had five sons. (No low sperm count there!) Though their oldest son, William, died very young, and the second, Young Henry, died as a young man while his father was still alive, the third son, Richard the Lionheart, was alive and ready to succeed when Henry II died in 1189. This was the first time an English king was succeeded by his oldest surviving son since before the Conquest.
But Richard had no children, so he was succeeded by his younger brother, John. When John died in 1216, his young son succeeded as Henry III, and (at least for a little while) there was a sense that this father-son inheritance should be the model.
Henry II and his five sons had not had a happy Dad-and-lad relationship. Richard and Geoffrey (the fourth son) rebelled against their father. They also did not get along with each other. Geoffrey was killed in a tournament, and his young son, named Arthur, mysteriously vanished after visiting his Uncle John. When Richard the Lionheart was preparing to go on the Third Crusade, he seems to have wanted to make John come with him, fearing that if John were left behind he would seize the English throne.
Although the King Arthur stories that developed in the twelfth century (which owe essentially nothing to the fifth century) cannot be seen as simple metaphor or roman-à-clef, there are similarities between the King Arthur of the stories and the real Anglo-Norman kings. Arthur in the stories never had a legitimate son, like Henry I. He was rebelled against by his son Mordred, like Henry II. Mordred was the product of an incestuous union, Arthur's nephew as well as son, which made it worse--and evoked nephews in royal succession (at least none of the Anglo-Norman kings were thought to have had incestuous relations with their sisters). The first people who heard the King Arthur stories saw parallels with their own line of kings.
© C. Dale Brittain 2017
For more on Anglo-Norman kings and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon.
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