ABSTRACT
The story of Ranulf Flambard’s overture to the young Theodora, later to be known by her name in religion as Christina of Markyate,2 and of how she frustrated it by persuading him to allow her to bolt the door, ‘for even if we have no fear of God, at least we should take precautions that no man should catch us in the act’, and doing so from the outside after making her escape, is understandably a popular one with writers and lecturers, and generally loses nothing in the telling. Ranulf was no longer, in William of Malmesbury’s phrase, totius regni procurator (manager of the whole kingdom), as he had been under William Rufus,3 but he was still bishop of Durham, one of the wealthiest and most independent magnates of the kingdom, long since recovered from the disgrace and humiliation which the beginning of the new reign and the distrust of the new king had almost inevitably brought for the greatest servant of the old one, and the obvious scapegoat for his unpopularity.4 Besides the elements of comedy and titillation in the story, there could hardly be a more touching image of defiance of the brutalities of conquest than a sixteen-year-old girl successfully fending off the man whose name, more than any except that of William Rufus himself, and despite the judicious reappraisal of modern scholarship,5 stubbornly continues to evoke them. Yet, even allowing for the selectivity of memory and the improvements which doubtless occurred to the ageing Christina as she told the story to
the anonymous monk of St Albans to whom we owe her Life,6 the text does not quite bear out that impression. Certainly, though Christina may have feared that ‘if she openly resisted him, she would certainly be overcome by force’, ‘attempted rape’7 is a stronger description than the text will support. Though its recent use obviously reflects late twentieth-century distaste for the abuse of power for sexual ends, it echoes an older stereotype of the licence and inclinations of ‘feudal’ magnates in relation to young women ‘of the people’ which this story should encourage us to question, at least occasionally. The term more commonly employed, ‘seduction’,8 is nearer the mark, but it does not altogether prepare us for Ranulf ’s response to his somewhat ignominious rebuff:9 he continued his journey to London, and ‘on his return came to Huntingdon, bringing with him silken garments and precious ornaments of all kinds’ – which Christina, of course, rejected with contumely. Nevertheless, that sounds more like courtship – even, conceivably, with a hint of apology for its over-hasty beginning. At the least it suggests that Ranulf ’s interest was neither impetuous nor furtive, and therefore – no small point for such a man – that he was prepared to risk whatever loss of face his failure, in the circumstances, would imply.
