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Dreaming the Death of the Second Norman King of England
The year is 1100, and
William II, called William Rufus (William the Red) is the second Norman king
of England. He’s a rapacious, rowdy, brawling character who has earned a lot
of opposition, including that of the great scholar Anselm who is now
Archbishop of Canterbury. The king has forced Anselm into exile.
Anselm has a vision: the “saints of England” are applying to God to deal
with the Norman thug on the throne. God summons Saint Alban, the first
martyr of England, into his presence and hands him a flaming arrow. God
says, “Behold the death of the man you complain of before me.” Saint Alban
takes the arrow and says he will deliver it to “a wicked spirit”, so the
arrow will be “an avenger of sins.” In Anselm’s vision, the arrow is thrown
from the sky and comes down like a fiery comet.
At the same time,
or soon afterwards, William Rufus was struck by an arrow while hunting in
the New Forest; he died the same night.
Before the news
reached Anselm, the archbishop had already offered a thanksgiving mass,
packed his bags, and started his journey back to his cathedral, confident
that the arrow fired in his vision had actually reached its mark, flying
from the realm of the Aevum (the dimension between the world of time and the
world of eternity) into the king’s domain. Anselm received word that the
king had been killed by an arrow at he rode into Canterbury.
The story spread across Europe that the cleric Anselm had the power to
destroy kings through his prayers and visions – perhaps a desirable
reputation for a leading churchman in a time of constant power struggles
between church and state.
The account of Anselm’s vision comes down to us from a chronicler known as
Matthew of Westminster (also identified as Matthew of Paris). Modern
scholarship suggests that the author may have stretched his facts more than
a little. It appears that at the time of the king’s death, Anselm was in
France – and did not return to his see until after five years of bargaining
and jockeying with William II’s successor, Henry I.
According to other chronicles, William II had his own premonitory dreams –
in the most terrifying of which he saw blood spurting from his body until it
darkened the sky.
It is fascinating that on the morning of his death, the king received a
dream warning that he took very seriously. Robert FitzHammon brought William
Rufus word that a monk had dreamed that he saw the king trying to bite off
the legs of a figure of Christ on the cross. In the monk’s dream, the Christ
figure came alive and smashed him to the ground. The king lay under Christ’s
feet, belching fire and smoke from his mouth until the air was dark.
Though the dream was symbolic, its horrifying images weighed heavy on the
mind of the king, arousing deep fear. William Rufus was sufficiently rattled
to order FitzHammon to give the monk a hundred shillings and “bid him dreame
of better fortune to our person.” [Holinshed Chronicles 3:44] Holinshed
reports that the king
remained so troubled by
the dream that instead of riding out to the hunt at dawn, as was his custom,
he lingered in his palace and did not leave for his date with Saint Alban’s
arrow until after a long and very boozy lunch.
Sources: The vision of Anselm is in Matthew of Westminster,
Flowers of History. The monk’s dream is in Holinshed’s Chronicles 3:4. See
Frank Barlow, William Rufus. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1983 and C. Warren Hollister, “The Strange Death of
William Rufus”, in Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies. Vol 48, no.4
(October, 1973).
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