William II "Rufus", second Norman king of England (1087–1100), beat down rebellion and Scottish and Welsh challenges, wrung Normandy from his crusading brother, and died with an arrow in his chest in the New Forest.
William Rufus inherited England in 1087 under his father's division — the kingdom to him, Normandy to his elder brother Robert Curthose — and spent his reign mastering the consequences. He crushed the great baronial rising of 1088 that backed Robert, then reversed the pressure until Robert pawned Normandy to him in 1096 to go on the First Crusade.
Contemporary churchmen loathed him: he kept sees vacant to milk their revenues and drove Archbishop Anselm into exile. Soldiers followed him gladly. He died unexplained in the New Forest, and his brother Henry took the crown at speed.
Born in Normandy around 1057, Rufus — the byname from his red face — was the Conqueror's third son and the favourite. His eldest brother Robert rebelled twice against their father; Rufus stayed loyal, fighting at his side, and was rewarded on the deathbed at Rouen in 1087 with the greater prize: the crowned kingdom rather than the ancestral duchy.
He was knighted and trained by Lanfranc, the great archbishop who had anchored his father's regime, and it was Lanfranc who crowned him at Westminster within three weeks of the Conqueror's death — speed that forestalled any move for Robert.
Almost everything written about Rufus's character was written by monks he had taxed, and it shows. William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis describe a stocky, red-faced, stammering king, blasphemous and mocking, presiding over a court whose fashions and morals scandalised the cloister; Eadmer, Anselm's biographer, made him nearly diabolical. The absence of wife, mistress, or child left his private life to hostile speculation from that day to this.
The same sources concede, almost against their will, the qualities his own world prized: open-handed generosity to soldiers, flawless courage, and a knightly sense of largesse — the chivalric virtues in their rawest form. Mercenaries across France held him the best of paymasters. The monastic verdict and the military one describe the same man from opposite sides of a real divide: Rufus paid the warrior class and squeezed the praying one.
The test came at once. In 1088 half the Anglo-Norman baronage, led by his uncle Odo of Bayeux, rose to reunite England and Normandy under the pliable Robert. Rufus appealed to the English shire levies with promises of good law and lighter taxes, took Rochester, and broke the revolt — then spent the next decade turning England's wealth against Normandy until Robert mortgaged him the duchy for 10,000 marks in 1096 and left for Jerusalem.
On his other frontiers he was relentless: Cumbria annexed and Carlisle founded in 1092; the Scottish crown effectively in his gift after Malcolm III fell at Alnwick in 1093; the Welsh marches pushed forward behind new castles. The machinery that paid for it all — vacant bishoprics farmed, geld driven hard by his minister Ranulf Flambard — is what the chronicles could not forgive; the quarrel over church rights sent Anselm of Canterbury into exile in 1097.
On the evening of 2 August 1100 Rufus rode out hunting in the New Forest and was shot through the chest by an arrow loosed — all accounts agree — by or near Walter Tirel, lord of Poix. The court scattered; Tirel fled to France protesting his innocence for the rest of his life; and the king's body came to Winchester on a charcoal-burner's cart.
His younger brother Henry, in the hunting party that day, rode straight for the treasury at Winchester and was crowned at Westminster on 5 August — three days, start to finish. Robert Curthose was still on the road home from crusade. No inquest was ever held; historians remain genuinely divided between hunting accident, which was common enough, and a murder whose one clear beneficiary moved with remarkable readiness.
Rufus consolidated the Conquest at its most fragile point, proving in 1088 that the Anglo-Norman kingdom could survive its own baronage, and his Cumbrian and Welsh gains fixed borders that outlasted him by centuries. Westminster Hall, which he built and thought "not half large enough", still stands as the one physical monument of his reign.
The manner of his death, and the monks' portrait of the king it ended, made him medieval England's standing example of impious kingship punished — the Rufus Stone in the New Forest still marks the traditional spot. Modern historians, working from the record rather than the sermon, have largely rebuilt him as one of the most effective of the Norman kings.