An attractively illustrated overview of the Norman kings of England, from Willie the Conq to Stephen the Inept.

It's part of a series published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in the 70s and 80s, edited by the redoubtable Antonia Fraser, authoress par excellance. The *popular* kings and queens got their *own* books, but W&N decided that the Saxon and Norman kings should get piddly little compendia of rumor and innuendo and downright condescension. Oh, excuse me...William the Conqueror has his own book, and the largely legendary Alfred the Great does too. Must be fair in my dismissivness.

Here's my problem with these sorts of books. They're all working from the same source material as each other, so there's really very little difference in the stories they can tell. What is different is the animus or slant each writer brings to the fete...I mean party. Opinion is all, really, and so the question becomes: "How well supported is the author's opinion? And do you, o reader, agree with it?"

Chambers and I do not see eye to eye.

His vituperation of William Rufus follows in the footsteps of the "great" nineteenth century Rufus biographer E.A. Freeman, whose Reign of William Rufus has always been the Gold Standard of the homophobes who inveigh against Rufus for his supposed sodomiticalness. So Chambers, writing in the "enlightened" 70s and 80s, offers a *better* idea...Rufus was impotent, not perverted! His sentences exactly:
"So he may have been homosexual...William's ostentatiously virile behavior...could as easily be used to deduce that he was impotent. On such evidence as there is, the atmosphere in William's household appears to have been more like a degenerate officer's mess than a perverted brothel."

Where do I begin...oh hell, two sentences and it's SUCH a target-rich environment!
1) Men of whom we have records in this era are prolific fornicators. They, married or not, left heaving seas of bastard children behind. (Willie the Conq a notable exception...all six feet of him seems to have loved his 4'2" queen to the exclusion of all others.) None of them merits the condemnatory word "degenerate" in decribing their courts full of fellow woman-screwing and bastard-leaving men.
2) Impotence, the *inability* to achieve erection, is preferable to homosexuality in this construction...it's offered as a *step up* from it. Dunno about y'all, gents, but I'd rather have been queer than limp back in the days when there was no hope for the impotent (and thank GOD those days are gone!). So it wasn't his fault that he ever married, left no children...it was nature's cruelty, not perversion! How insulting to the man!
To be completely fair, the author says he's relying on the chronicles of the churchmen for his information, and these witnesses had good, solid reasons to be anti-Rufus, but I note that the author is still glad to be judgmental....
3) "Ostentatiously virile behavior," is it? Rufus was a passionate hunter, and a good one. So was his father, so were his brothers, none of whom (producers of bastards and babies at a prodigious rate) merit the condescension of "ostentatiously virile."

I'm on record elsewhere as opposing the unhealthy sense of self-congratulation inherent in "outing" people in history as gay before such an identity was conceptualized. It's an entirely different thing to look at the evidence, assess a person's probable sexual nature, and judge them harshly for it as part of a complex of other "undesirable" characteristics as Chambers does. It's still outing, I suppose, but with minatory intent. "He was a rotten king, he hated the Church (go Rufus!), AND he was a shirt-lifter! EWWW!"

So...the other kings...well, honestly, I stopped trusting the author after Rufus and pretty much read the text as it broke up the illustrations. Not recommended for text, but the pictures are nice. ( )