William II of England: The Sin King

A group of floppy-haired youths flaunt their bodies and flirt with one another. A religious leader in his sixties berates them for their behaviour and calls on them to repent. We might be forgiven for thinking this incident is set in the present day, but it was reported by a monk describing the court of William II in the 1090s.

Known as Rufus, William was the favourite son of William the Conqueror. He came to the throne in 1087, aged about 27, and died in a hunting accident in 1100. He reigned for 13 years and reached the age of 40, but Rufus was the only adult king of England never to marry – a remarkable omission for a medieval king, since marriage was the principal means by which they procured heirs. Yet there was no shortage of sex reported to be happening at his court.

Hugh of Flavigny, a monk from Lorraine, who first visited England in 1096, was there again around the time of Rufus’ death in August 1100 and for the accession of his younger brother, Henry I. On this second visit, Hugh heard that a clerk of the royal chapel, Peter, had conceived a monstrous foetus that began to grow in his ‘womb’. Racked with guilt and unable to hide the truth as his belly swelled, Peter confessed that he had let himself be sexually penetrated by men, ‘like a woman’. After he died from the tumour, his body was cut open and a vaguely human thing was found inside. He was buried as an excommunicate at his own request. The same year, Hugh goes on to report: ‘Sodomites were excommunicated in the royal chapel every Sunday and feast day.’

Scare story

Peter did exist. The brother of Bishop Gerard of Hereford, a later Archbishop of York, he appears in the only surviving list of Rufus’ chaplains, dating to 1091. Hugh was helping to spread a scare story, intended to deter men at court from having sex with each other. The scandal broke soon after Rufus’ death, when Henry took steps to distance himself from the perceived immorality of Rufus’ court. One of the first measures was the excommunication of ‘sodomites’ at court, a measure extended throughout the realm at the Council of Westminster in 1102. Peter’s offence was serious because semen was regarded as reconstituted blood, which rendered things impure. Clerks of the royal chapel having sex might defile the spiritual heart of the court. Not only was the Church opposed to sex between men, but a deterrent was needed in this case lest the palace itself become tainted.

Another reaction, from an anonymous source, was recorded by William of Malmesbury, a monk writing a history of England’s rulers in the mid-1120s. Although he was too young to remember Rufus’ reign, he cites sources written in the 1090s, including a satirical poem about the corrupting power of money at Rufus’ court. Concluding his account of the reign, he quotes a wise man declaring: ‘The court of the king of England is not an abode of majesty, but a brothel of male prostitutes.’ Phrased in the present tense, the quote appears to derive from an unnamed visitor to the court and was so risqué that William removed it from the revised version of his work. Classical Latin supplies more than 50 terms for female prostitutes, but few for male ones. The word used in the quote, exoleti, referred to mature male prostitutes, as differentiated from boys. It corroborates Hugh’s testimony that adult men were having sex with each other at court.

The monk Eadmer was about the same age as the king. As secretary to Anselm of Canterbury, Eadmer became the archbishop’s biographer. Three months after Anselm took up his appointment, he attended Rufus’ court at Hastings. Eadmer recalled what they saw there in February 1094:

At that time nearly all the young men of the court grew their hair long like girls and used to go around every day grooming themselves and glancing about flirtatiously, with dainty steps and mincing gait.

Anselm was so upset by this spectacle that he preached a sermon to Rufus’ courtiers at the beginning of Lent, a time of repentance. Eadmer states that many of the youths, after hearing the sermon, ‘cut their hair and adopted an appropriate manly bearing’. Having steered them away from behaviour deemed inappropriate to their sex, Anselm asked the king to let him convene an ecclesiastical council to denounce ‘the sin of sodomy’, which had ‘lately spread in this land and corrupted many’. Rufus refused. Frustrated in his mission, Anselm went into exile. Hugh of Flavigny’s testimony implies that men were still having sex at Rufus’ court six years after Anselm’s protests.

Sodom and Gomorrah

To put these criticisms in context, we must first understand what Hugh, Eadmer and Anselm meant when they referred to the sin of sodomy. The first book of the Old Testament, Genesis, tells of the city of Sodom, destroyed, along with its neighbour Gomorrah, by fire and brimstone because God was angry at its inhabitants. Such readings from the Bible were studied as warnings of what might happen when people sinned. To sin was to depart from God’s commands in any way. Since the fourth century or earlier, ‘the sin of Sodom’ was synonymous with sex between men. Though it might encompass other varieties of illicit sex, 11th-century authorities, such as the Italian cardinal Peter Damian, narrowed the definition to focus on sex between men. Damian was most concerned about members of the clergy having sex, because of the risk to the sacrament. 

Traditional Christian thinking disapproved of the idea that men might become like women. Feminine qualities in a man were cast negatively as ‘effeminacy’, which Christian thinkers linked to sensuality and a lack of discipline. Women were represented as ‘the weaker sex’, largely because sin was believed to have entered the world through the first woman, Eve, succumbing to temptation in the Garden of Eden; thus men who ‘behaved’ like women were judged less able to control their impulses. Christian theorists, especially those trained in the monastic tradition, such as Damian, Anselm and Eadmer, regarded women as a source of temptation to men. When men became like women, they likewise became a source of male temptation.

The context in which Hugh of Flavigny and Eadmer use the term ‘sodomy’ shows the same pattern of thinking. Eadmer depicts young men at court adopting the mannerisms of women in a sexualised way. This is the prelude to his scene in which Anselm bemoans the prevalence of sodomy. The scene attests his belief, shared by Damian, that sodomy and the gender nonconformity that accompanied it were spreading in the realm like a contagious disease and needed to be stamped out.

Modern historians of Rufus’ reign have not handled this evidence well. There has been a tendency to dismiss it as a clerical overreaction to new fashions among courtiers, who grew long hair and adopted novel styles of dress. Such arguments rely on the details provided by later commentators, such as William of Malmesbury and, in particular, Orderic Vitalis, writing in the 1130s. These later writers bundle together their criticism of fashion trends with criticism of perceived sexual immorality and gender nonconformity. The tendency among modern historians to labour accounts written 30 or 40 years after those events by men who never visited Rufus’ court is all too common. If we put these aside and consider only what eyewitnesses were worrying about, they focus on the issue of sex between men. Hugh of Flavigny, Eadmer and William of Malmesbury’s unnamed source all agree on this point, which is too specific to be dismissed as a flight of fancy on their part.

Eadmer was not complaining about fashion. He never mentions clothing and is not referring to conventionally masculine men whose offence was to grow their hair long. Rather, Eadmer constructs an image of youths whose affectations of style, gesture and gait – their behaving like ‘girls’, as he puts it – proclaim them to be ‘sodomites’. His language and imagery borrow from a classical tradition. The words delicatus  (delicate) and tener (dainty) were classical terms for a sexually penetrated male. Their grooming and flirting betray their supposed descent into sinful femininity and the seductive behaviour associated with it. Eadmer’s message is that Rufus’ court was full of the sort of men who ‘played the woman’ when having sex. Anselm, who was very intimate with certain male friends in his correspondence, picked up on the licentious youths straight away and became obsessed with the threat they posed. There is no evidence that any clergyman worried about it to the extent that he did, or that any other court could be characterised as a male brothel.

Eadmer’s collective word for these youths is iuventus, a classical category that spanned the ages of 20 to 40. The young men at court would have been the king’s chosen servants: his chaplains, chamberlains, butlers and stewards. Eadmer’s portrait of their flirty femininity belongs to a series of stereotyped depictions that begin with the Cinaedi of ancient Rome. The classicist Craig Williams describes Cinaedi as men who were characterised by gender nonconformity (negatively described as ‘effeminacy’), their seductive persona and an appetite for sex with other men. The same stereotype can be discerned in Eadmer’s description of the youths at Rufus’ court. Eadmer clearly recognised a type of sexual subject who behaved in this way, but his stereotype is there mainly to signal to his readers that Rufus surrounded himself with men of this kind.

Natural law

When considering the freedoms of Rufus’ court it is important to note that the sources we have were written by men who believed that this behaviour literally came from the devil. As monks, they had taken vows of celibacy and were suspicious of temptation. Their fear of sex between men came partly from contemporary theories of natural law and partly from a suspicion of women which derived from aspects of Christian teaching. Damian argued against two men having sex on the natural law premise that it did not happen in the animal kingdom. (We know that he was wrong about that.) The second part of the natural law argument determined that God had created two sexes with different roles and that men who conducted themselves like women sinned against God by contravening laws of nature. Monks who regarded women as inferior creatures were also alarmed at men who capitulated to the weaker, libidinous tendencies of the female. Men behaving like women threatened the divine order and might bring down heaven’s wrath.

Rufus saw things differently. Men at his court were free to express an identity and sexuality, which their critics were powerless to curb. Though they were not immune to Anselm’s preaching, a number of those courtiers continued to live freely until Rufus’ death, when a campaign of scare stories, punishments and ostracism was initiated to suppress them.

Soon after Rufus died in August 1100, a decree was issued by an unknown authority, excommunicating sodomites in the royal chapel. In September Anselm returned from exile, but it was another two years before he was able to convene a general council in September 1102. Assembling at Westminster, the clergy issued 29 canons, including an injunction against men wearing long hair, and a separate ruling renewing the earlier excommunication of sodomites on Sundays and feast days, extending it to churches throughout England. But after advocating stringent measures, Anselm was obliged to override the council’s decision and defer it. Apparently, the policy met opposition. In the Norwich diocese, the doorkeeper (a humble cleric called Norman), whose job it was to bar excommunicates from entering, complained to the bishop that the new policy was perceived to be too harsh. Later, in 1105, when Anselm had gone into exile a second time after falling out with Henry I over a different matter, a cleric wrote to him worrying that ‘the long-haired men’ and the sodomites were once again doing as they pleased and that no one dared confront them. Caught up in his worries, the cleric prayed that Anselm should return and condemn the offenders. But his remarks are revealing and we should take them as an indication that nobody much minded, beyond the unhappy clique who let such things prey on their minds.

Tom Licence is Professor of Medieval History and Consumer Culture at the University of East Anglia.