Before the death of William Rufus, he was already High Sheriff of Berkshire and he is stated in the Abingdon Chronicle to have been one of the persons who profited by the unjust transactions of Modbert, whom the king appointed to administer the affairs of the monastery in the interest of the royal revenues, during the period when the office of abbot was vacant.
Born in 1770 in Ilfracombe, Devon to a Huguenot exile family that came to Britain in 1688 with William of Orange, he came from a military family: His great grandfather, Frederick La Penotiere, served in the Royal Irish Regiment in the campaigns of the Duke of Marlborough in the War of the Spanish Succession and received a bounty for his service at the Battle of Blenheim, in 1704.
Around the end of the 11th century William Rufus granted the estates in and around Kington to Adam Port and it is likely that he built the first castle here.
William II of England, commonly known as William "Rufus", or "The Red King"
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William II of England is indirectly the subject of two historical novels by George Shipway, The Paladin and The Wolf Time.
To be clear, Gaimar did not create two separate and distinct chronicles, and the two estoires were merely the former and latter sections of a long running history starting from the Argonauts' quest of the golden fleece to the reign of William II "Rufus" (d. 1100) that Gaimar set out to write.
His retelling of the Arthur legend, Firelord in 1980, Beloved Exile in 1984 and The Last Rainbow in 1985, is set in the 5th century during the collapse of the Roman empire, and his reinterpretation of Robin Hood (Sherwood, 1991, and Robin and the King, 1993) takes place during the Norman conquest and features kings William the Conqueror and William Rufus as major characters.
Basset was a native of Montreuil-au-Houlme near Domfort in Normandy, and possibly came to the notice of King Henry while Henry was count of Domfort during the reign of Henry's older brother King William II of England (1087–1100).