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 brother ‘as a noble pilgrim, worn out with many troubles, reposing in a royal citadel (in arce regia), with abundance of delicacies and comforts.’ Arx regia probably means the Tower. Nine years later (1128) Robert was in the castle of Devizes. His last years were spent in that of Cardiff, in the custody of Robert, earl of Gloucester [q. v.] There is a poem translated by Edward Williams from the Welsh (Gent. Mag. November 1794;, Essais historiques sur les Bardes, ii. 95–7) which purports to be (traditionally) a song composed by Robert when a prisoner at Bristol, and addressed to a large oak that he could see from his prison. Some chroniclers say that the duke died at Bristol, which, like Cardiff, was a fortress of the Earl of Gloucester. According to the best authorities, however, he died at Cardiff, 10 Feb. 1134. Matthew Paris has a tale that he starved himself to death in disgust at being made the recipient of Henry's cast-off clothes, Henry having sent him a new mantle which had been made for the king himself, but had proved a misfit. The oaken effigy, which still marks Robert's tomb in the abbey church of Gloucester dates from the close of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century, and is probably a tribute from some warrior of the third crusade to the memory of the hero of the first.

Robert's wife had died in Lent 1103. Orderic attributes her death to poison, and implies that it was contrived by Agnes, the widow of Walter Giffard [see ], who, by promising Robert the enjoyment of her wealth and the support of her powerful kinsfolk, had induced him to promise in return that he would marry her, ‘and put the whole government of Normandy into her hands’ if his wife should die; a promise which his warfare with Henry left him no leisure to fulfil. William of Malmesbury says that Sibyl died from bad nursing after the birth of a child; if so, the infant did not survive her. The only known offspring of Robert's marriage was William ‘the Clito,’ born in 1101 ( l. x. c. 16, ed. Le Prévost, iv. 98; cf. l. xii. c. 24, ib. 402). In 1128 Robert, then in prison at Devizes, dreamed that a lance-thrust deprived him of the use of his right arm. ‘Alas! my son is dead,’ he said on awaking; and the dream was quickly followed by the news of William's death from just such a wound, received in a skirmish in Flanders (July). Robert had a natural daughter, married in 1089 to Elias of Saint-Saëns; and also two natural sons, William and Richard, born during the years when he was in rebellion against his father. These boys were brought up by their mother in her home on the French border till they reached manhood, when she brought them to Normandy, presented them to the duke as his sons, and by successfully undergoing the ordeal of hot iron compelled him to acknowledge them as such. Richard was accidentally shot dead in the New Forest in May 1100. William went after Tinchebray to the Holy Land ( l. x. c. 13). In August 1108 King Baldwin I entrusted him with the command of two hundred horse and five hundred foot, with which he captured a noble Arabian lady and her train, consisting of a number of youths and maidens, four thousand camels, and other spoil, with a loss of only two men of importance on his own side (, l. x. c. 47). In 1110 he held the lordship of Tortosa, and was one of the princes who mustered at Antioch in September to defend it against the Turks (ib. l. xi. c. 40). He seems to have fallen shortly afterwards, probably in battle with the infidels ( 1. x. c. 13).

[The chief source of information on Robert's life as a whole is Ordericus Vitalis, edited by Duchesne in Historiæ Normannorum Scriptores; better by Le Prévost for the Soc. de l'Hist. de France; reprinted from the latter edition, without Le Prévost's notes, but with others which are not without use, in Migne's Patrologia, vol. clxxxviii. The other original authorities for Robert's career in Europe are: William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum, the English Chronicle (Rolls Ser.); Flor. Wig. and his Continuator (Engl. Hist. Soc.); the Continuator of William of Jumièges (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt., and Migne, vol. cxlix.); and Wace's Roman de Rou, ed. Andresen. The best modern account is in Freeman's Norman Conquest and William Rufus. For Robert's career in the east we have, besides Orderic and William of Malmesbury, the original Latin historians of the first crusade, published by the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, viz. William of Tyre (Recueil des Historiens des Croisades, Hist. Occidentaux, vol. i.), the Gesta Francorum and its adapter Tudebode, Raymond of Aguilers or Agiles, Fulcher of Chartres, Ralph of Caen, Robert of Reims (ib. vol. iii.), Baldric of Dol, Guibert of Nogent, and Albert of Aix (ib. vol. iv.); the Chanson d'Antioche of Richard the Pilgrim, edited by Paulin Paris (Romans des douze Pairs); and its thirteenth-century continuation, the Conquête de Jérusalem, in the Collection des Poètes Français du Moyen-Age, edited by M. C. Hippeau. An old French chronicle, Li Estoire de Jérusalem et d'Antioche (Recueil des Hist. des Croisades, Hist. Occidentaux, vol. v.), existing in a thirteenth-century MS., but possibly dating back to the twelfth century in its original form, is full of incidents connected with Robert's crusading life, and illustrates also his relations