FROM HASTINGS TO HENRY II,
1066–1154

The deeds of kings and the plotting of their advisers constitute only one small aspect of human history. We know about such things in a detail and with a clear chronological trajectory that we lack for the broader and deeper transformations within society. Hence the fact that stories of the wars of good and bad kings occupy so prominent a place in books of history: a rule that applies not just to medieval England, but to the Old Testament books of Kings and Chronicles. Throughout the Bible, and hence throughout the Christian Middle Ages, dynastic narrative served to underpin mankind’s understanding of the past. Kingly history cannot be avoided; indeed, deployed wisely it can lend a structure and coherence to the broader canvas of events that might otherwise be lacking.

The deeds of the kings and queens of Norman England can be briefly told. In many ways they are less significant than the background of conquest and colonization against which they were played out. They carry us, via the last twenty years of William the Conqueror, through the reigns of his sons Robert in Normandy and William Rufus in England, to the death of Henry I, the last of these sons, in 1135 and the accession of a grandson of the Conqueror, Stephen of Blois, in circumstances that led to civil war and the division of England into a series of hostile camps. The civil war of the 1130s and 40s was resolved only in 1154, nearly a century after Hastings, with the accession to the throne of a new dynasty, the Plantagenets, formerly counts of Anjou and hereditary arch-enemies of the dukes of Normandy. In turn, the Plantagenet succession, as we shall see, far from resolving the problems of the first century of Norman rule merely posed further problems of its own.