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rivalries and jealousies that would dominate the next four centuries.
    William ‘The Conqueror’ spent the 20 years following his invasion fighting rebels and rivals. In 1087 he attacked Mantes, in the rival duchy of Maine, besieged it and set it on fire. During the siege his horse fell and William’s fat stomach was ripped open and became infected, and he spent five weeks in agony. As he lay dying he parcelled out territories to his sons and noblemen, but all his nearby possessions were ransacked and everyone went back to their lands to prepare for anarchy. William had grown so obese that at his funeral the pallbearers collapsed under the weight of the coffin, and his body fell onto the church floor, causing everyone to flee. 
    The Conqueror had three surviving sons, and had fallen out with his eldest, Robert, whom he called ‘Stubby legs’; in 1079 Robert had managed to personally wound his father in battle. Yet the king left him Normandy, middle son William inherited England and the youngest, Henry, got just £5,000. So much did he mistrust his father that Henry sat counting it in front of him until he was satisfied it was all there, before riding off.
    Nicknamed Rufus because of his red hair and alcohol-soaked ruddy face, William II alienated the clergy, and because monks wrote most history, he generally received a bad press, becoming the subject of many allegations, among them that he indulged in devil-worshipping and homosexual orgies. His conflict with his brother was resolved when in 1090, Pope Urban II called for a Crusade to win back the Holy Land for Christendom, and Robert volunteered, mortgaging Normandy to pay for it. Rufus died in a mysterious hunting accident in the New Forest in 1100, with his brother Henry only a mile way, conveniently close enough to reach Winchester within an hour to claim the crown. Hunting was a dangerous sport and accidents were quite frequent – the Conqueror’s second son Richard had been killed in 1081 in the same forest.  - but the circumstances of the king’s death were extremely fortunate for the youngest brother. Robert was still on his way back from the Holy Land, having won the crusade and picked up a beautiful (and, more importantly, rich) wife on the way back.
    Robert invaded the following year but foolishly agreed to a compromise under which Henry made him heir and gave him a pension on condition he go back across the Channel. In 1106 the younger brother invaded Normandy and took Robert captive, which is how he remained for the last 28 years of his life.
    Henry married the daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland, who was also from the old English royal line of Ethelred and Alfred the Great, giving him both peace with the Scots and a greater claim to rule the English. He also managed to sire numerous other children, estimated between 22 and 25, by ‘six or eight’ different mistresses, which even in a period when lords often sired bastards was impressive.
    Henry also kept the Church onside, which at least could not accuse him of homosexuality, but he was cynically pious. He promoted Roger of Salisbury to archbishop because he said Mass the quickest, and tried to make his doctor Archbishop of Canterbury, although the Church blocked the appointment as they thought it an inappropriate job for a man who inspected women’s urine for a living. Like Alfred the Great, Henry was a younger brother and groomed for the Church, and so could read and write. His nickname, beauclerc , means ‘fine scholar’, but he was also a brutal leader. While fighting Norman rebels with his brother William in 1090, Henry dealt with one, Conan, by throwing him out of a castle window. He allowed two of his granddaughters to be blinded by an enemy knight rather than concede his demands. Their mother, his bastard daughter Juliane de Fontevrault, tried to assassinate Henry afterwards with a crossbow. He also once blinded a Norman minstrel who sang a song critical of him.
    The War of the Roses was