Robert de Bethune Robert de Bethune Robert de Bethune (died 1148) was a medieval Bishop of Hereford. From a knightly family, he became a teacher before becoming a canon, a type of monk, by 1115. He was elected prior of Llanthony Priory in the middle 1120s, and was named bishop by King Henry I of England in 1130. As bishop, he was often appointed a judge by the papacy, and was known for the care he took of his diocese. After Henry's death in 1135, Bethune first supported King Stephen, who seized the throne from Henry's heiress the Empress Matilda, but when Matilda's
English claims to the French throne English claims to the French throne From the 1340s to the 19th century, excluding two brief intervals in the 1360s and the 1420s, the kings and queens of England (and, later, of Great Britain) also claimed the throne of France. The claim dates from Edward III, who claimed the French throne in 1340 as the sororal nephew of the last direct Capetian, Charles IV. Edward and his heirs fought the Hundred Years' War to enforce this claim, and were briefly successful in the 1420s under Henry V and Henry VI, but the House of Valois, a cadet branch of the