White Ship Disaster

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Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Matt Lewis. During the night of the 25th of November 1120, what should have been a routine crossing of the English Channel went horribly wrong with disastrous consequences. The White Ship disaster was a personal tragedy, with 300 or so souls lost, their families bereaved and left without bodies to bury. But more than that, it represented a dynastic disaster for King Henry I, the youngest son of the conqueror.

because his only legitimate son and heir was on board and was lost, throwing England and Normandy into uncertain turmoil. I'm delighted to be joined today by Charles Spencer, who, as well as being the custodian of his family home at Althorpe House, is a historian and author, most recently, of the stunning The White Ship, Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I's Dreams. Thank you very much for joining us today.

It was a great pleasure. Thank you. So your last few books have focused on the 17th century around the English Civil War and Charles I and Charles II. What lured you back into the depths of the medieval period for the White Ship? Yes, well, I'm a narrative historian, not an academic one. So I look for really fascinating tales from the past, particularly ones that can illuminate an age.

I didn't really have a set criteria for the 17th century lot. They just fed one on from the other. I did one on the early 18th century, actually, in the Battle of Blenheim, and then three on the English Civil War, which just... fed from one to the next. My main passion when I was reading history at Oxford was medieval. And I remember the white ship from my childhood as one of the great tragedies of English history.

And when I spotted that the anniversary, the 900th anniversary, was coming up a few months ago, it seemed the perfect excuse to put this book out there and try and connect people with my passion, which is these stories that I think have been sadly and wrongly... forgotten and breathing new life into them.

I think this is definitely one of those stories, but it must be quite frustrating coming back into this realm of the medieval history where everybody is called the same thing. There's a very small number of names that are recycled and reused over and over again, which makes it difficult to tell the story sometimes, doesn't it? It really does. many Matildas in this book, but they all have to be in there. I have gone with Matilde.

for the Princess of Boulogne, just to try and differentiate her from the others. And otherwise, when you're writing these books, you have to pretty much stick to the full title. Otherwise, it's just another Matilda. So it's Matilda of Scotland or Empress Matilda. That's the only way you can help.

the reader really actually interesting with the name thing also what I found fascinating was how even members of the royal family we don't really have the birth dates of William the Conqueror's children they just didn't bother to write them down so It's all quite frustrating from this distance to write about. But at the end of the day, the story is still very strong that the book's based on.

So the book is named really for the cold, dark, fateful night in 1120, as we mentioned. Can you just describe for us a little bit what happened to the white ship? Yeah, so the White Ship was one of the most glamorous and, well, just most impressive ships of its day. And it was based in Barfleur. Barfleur is quite near Cherbourg on the Cotantin Peninsula of Normandy.

It was the main pushing off point. If you were travelling between the south coast of England and Normandy, that's where you went from or to. And Henry I... who, as you mentioned in your introduction, was the fourth son, the youngest son of William the Conqueror, who had seized the throne when William Rufus was killed in a hunting accident in 1100. He turned out, over the next 20 years, to be a surprisingly powerful and impressive...

medieval monarch. Not a particularly nice man, but you didn't want to be that if you wanted to stay on your throne. I think the two things tie together quite well, don't they? It's hard to be considered by your peers a good king and be a nice person. Yes, I think back then what most people craved was peace. And peace tended to come from a very tough ruler. So we do have images from Henry I's reign celebrating him, stringing up 50 robbers at once, and tales of him among people from the more...

privileged classes. It was thought really wrong to execute them. So I'm afraid a lot of cast ratings and blindings. And Henry even had two of his granddaughters blinded unbelievably. So we are dealing with a very cruel but effective monarch, one who set up an incredibly successful bureaucracy to govern England and Normandy with, set up the Exchequer, which of course still controls British finances today.

One of his other main jobs, he had two really. One was to provide an heir to settle the dynasty, which he did. And then secondly, he had defeated repeatedly the French in battle. He was up against this wonderful contemporary of his called Louis the Fat, who he soundly beat in 1119. So in 1120, he arrives, Henry with the head of his court.

and army, they arrive at Barfleur ready to return to England in triumph. And when they get there, the king already has his arrangements for returning across the Channel. But a man steps forward and says that it had been his father's privilege in 1066 to be... captain of the flagship from Barfleur that had taken William the Conqueror to conquer England. And it would be this man's great privilege to have the king on board while returning to England in such triumph after beating the French.

pragmatist said, no, he'd already made his arrangements. He was going to stick with them. But he did note how glorious the white ship was. And it was something really, we had to remember, Matt, it was a really big ship because... Bayo Tapestry was pretty accurate on most of the details. And we see that the larger invasion ships of William the Conqueror had 16 oarsmen. the white ship had 50, 5-0, so it was a really massive bit of kit.

Although Henry turned down the opportunity to travel back to England in it, he said it would be fun for his son, his one legitimate male son, William Atheling. Atheling's rather like Prince of Wales now, it means the designated heir. for him to return with, turns out, 300 of the most important people in England and France, including other natural children of Henry I. They decided this younger crowd, rather glamorous crowd, with Prince William Athling.

They settled in for an evening of debauchery in the cold late November air, while the king progressed in his stately way back to Southampton in an earlier ship. And by the time they pushed off that night, around midnight, everyone was rip-roaringly drunk, including the crew. This was the crucial mistake. And although it was a flat night and there was really not much wrong with it, the combination of everyone being drunk...

And then the cry going up suddenly that, oh, we must try and beat the king back to England, even though he had a few hours head start. The oarsmen bent their backs. The captain dropped the sail too soon. And they went into one of the great obstacles outside Barfleur, which is called the Keyberth Rock. It's invisible at high tide, but everyone knew where it was, you know. They miscalculated the speed of the vessel. It hit at high speed, this giant rock.

And people panicked. You know, it was cold. It was miserable. They were in the middle of nowhere and they couldn't swim. So they cascaded into the channel and died either of cold water. shock, really, or hypothermia or ground. None of them could swim. I think we forget swimming wasn't really something that people indulged with in the medieval period, was it? It wasn't considered a sport or anything like that. It wasn't a skill that people learned.

That's absolutely correct. The only people I could find who knew how to swim did so professionally in terms of... maybe diving for snagged nets or whatever. People around ports and harbours might have had a bit of knowledge of this, but it was not a leisure time activity. People were terrified of the sea. I was most interested in that, actually, looking.

at the documents from the time, you know, the poetry and the literature. People were amazed by the scale of the sea and the way that it had so many moods. But overall, it was terror. And actually, an interesting point. that before they set off in the white ship, because it was such an important vessel, a delegation of monks had come to bless it before its voyage, to give it God's protection. But the drunken passengers on board chased the monks away.

And when the monks who recorded the disaster that ensued went back to it to find a reason as to why it had happened, because in those days everything went back to God, they said that God had felt insulted and that's why he had allowed this disaster to happen.

So, yeah, they pushed off and hit the rock and none of them able to swim. We know that there was a small... lifeboat on board and that the Prince William was bundled into it and he was being rowed to safety. This all happened only a mile off the shore of Normandy. And people did hear the screams for help, but they misinterpreted them. They thought that the party on board the white ship had just gone up a notch. And so they didn't take it seriously.

But above the wails of those who are about to drown, Prince William heard one of his sisters, the Countess of Pesh, call out and A, beg for help, and B, tell him what a failure of a man he was for leaving her to die. So William ordered the little boat to turn around. And of course, you know, when people who were drowning in the water saw it, they latched onto the side. And there were so many of them that they took it and the prince down and he drowned.

And we know this, actually, because the one man who survived the disaster was probably the lowliest-born passenger on board, Barot the Butcher from Rouen, who had pursued aristocratic debtors on board because he thought he might not see them again. And luckily, he was dressed differently to the nobility on board, because whereas they had silks and animal furs, he actually had goatskin and sheepskin as his tunic.

And that, once you're out of the channel and lying on a mast, as he did, that was able to give him some warmth. And he stayed alive till the next day, actually lived for another two decades as the sole survivor of the greatest maritime disaster.

And oddly, being the poorest man on board is probably what saved his life. That's it. If he had been in the fashionable tunics of the day, he would have joined the others in death. Because in fact, one of the great knights of Henry I's army clambered on board in his finery.

onto the same piece of mast. And the way he was tough and he survived a lot of the night, eventually he succumbed to hypothermia and slipped into the waves. So I understand there was a dive recently to look for parts of the wreckage of the white ship. Can you tell us if anything significant was found?

Yes, so it was last week I went with digital archaeology. They work all over the world. They've helped with the Sutton Hoo investigations now, and they're actually helping in a building there, rebuilding of a model of the Sutton Hoo vessel and various other things, the villas in Rome, etc. And they have very sophisticated... magnetology units for finding things. We worked out beforehand in that all the eyewitness contemporary accounts had the key birth rock as the place that was struck.

The Keeper of Rock actually at low tide is a series of rocky outposts, as it were. And so we worked out where it must have hit coming out at high speed in 1120. And then we sent divers down from Oxford, connected to the university. Took about half an hour and they found a three metre stretch of ancient vessel. We're still analysing the photography they took.

It's clearly very, very old. I mean, well before 1500 through the construction. And we're going back in a couple of weeks to have another couple of dives and see what else we can find. But it was under the mud, just a tiny bit above. There's been no scientific examination of this spot before that we know of. We know the vessels that have gone down there that have been recorded, and it's not anything later than medieval.

And we're very hopeful. In fact, the main diver, when he came up and said we found something, we all thought he was playing a trick, but really not. So we're going to go and see what we can find that definitely connects it to this tragedy. It would be incredible to find it still. almost in the same spot that it sank 900 years ago to find it still sitting there. It's an incredible discovery. Yes, it really is. So we knew other old boats that were...

around there that had sunk and it just wasn't them, you know, Napoleonic privateers. It's really not that. We've done a lot of research on what had gone down there and this really does fit the white ship. The construction is identical early 12th century. But I won't be...

popping the champagne corks until we actually have a proper scientific validation. I'll be keeping track of that story, definitely. It sounds incredible. Yeah, I do. We're back very soon. So the White Ship disaster itself is kind of the fulcrum of your book and where it takes its name from, but it's far...

from the whole story. The narrative kind of builds towards the disaster and then deals with the aftermath of it. And a significant amount of the book is essentially a biography of Henry I. And I was struck by the impact that Henry's childhood and his adolescence seemed to have had on him. Can you tell us a little bit about particularly his relationship with his father and his brothers? Yes.

I was so intrigued. I mean, I remember studying Henry I. I just knew about his reign. I didn't know about his early life. So we don't know when Henry was born, but it's very likely he was born in Yorkshire, in Selby, because that's what people said at the time, although it's not recorded. He was unusual.

First of all, he was the fourth son of the Conqueror. I was only aware of two others until I studied this book, but there was another one called Richard who died in the very dangerous game of deer hunting. I mean, it took two of the Conqueror's sons in the New Forest. And then you had an elder son called Robert Curtos, the eldest of the four, who had a complicated relationship with the Conqueror. And this is important because the Conqueror...

actually had a civil war with his eldest son for quite a number of years. And when he died, when he was mortally wounded in a raid on horseback, William by this stage had become really morbidly obese, actually. And the pommel on the front of his saddle punctured the innards of his stomach, and he hemorrhaged slowly to death. During his time, essentially lying in a hospice, waiting to die.

He was attended by Henry, his youngest son, as I've mentioned. And at this point, you see, actually it comes up again and again in this book, the self-interest of the aristocracy. Many of the great families of Normandy had estates in England. It was very complicated. You wanted everything clear-cut because you wanted to be able to get on with your power and money. And they persuaded the ailing Duke of Normandy, William, that, OK, he could do what he wanted with England because he'd won it.

but it was his duty to leave Normandy to his eldest son. There wasn't actually primogeniture there, but this was what they persuaded him to do. And William agreed to that, but he insisted on giving England to his favourite son, which was William Rufus. And I think that was because... Not only did he like William Rufus, but he was a sort of rough, tough soldier and he had the best chance of clinging on to the recently acquired prize of England.

And then William gave the bad news to Henry. I'm just giving you some money. It was quite a lot of money, but it was just money at a time when status and land was everything. And there was a possibility that Henry had actually only been marked out for a life in the church. And that's why he's known as Henry Beauclerk by historians, and that's referencing his literacy.

Semi-literacy, actually. He could read, but he couldn't write. So Henry's left with silver and he's very open about it and says, well, that's a bit disappointing. And his father allegedly, he always have to take the utterances of monks as rather backward words.

watching. You know, they wrote a lot later. But apparently William the Conqueror said, don't worry, my son, one day you'll be greater than both your older brothers. Well, certainly that wasn't the case after William died, Robert Kurtos and William Rufus. basically tricked their youngest brother out of his inheritance because he did go on with that money to buy a chunk of West Normandy and including Mont Saint-Michel. But it was all a disaster and they tricked him.

So they decided really that their youngest brother, everyone underestimated Henry I as a young man is the key. And as soon as he had acquired his own land and status, they conspired, the two older brothers conspired to take it off him. And so they did. They besieged him at Mont Saint-Michel, which was his final defensive point. And they got him, put him in prison. They treated him abysmally for years. But, you know, he was quite a...

good soldier. There was a period where he went into exile. He came out of France as a changed man. We just don't know what happened to him in there, but he was tough and he was ready to be more ruthless.

And really, the moment he springs into life in our history is being in the hunting field in the New Forest in early August 1100. And he's in the party where his brother, William Rufus, has had... He's had a very, very difficult relationship with the medieval church, particularly the man who became Saint Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. His conscience is getting a lot of him, William Rufus. He wakes up on the morning.

his final morning, with premonitions that something terrible is going to happen, but is laughing it off, hands out these new beautiful arrows that have just been made by his Fletcher, and... It goes into the new forest and we don't know. We just don't know what happened next except he was hit flush in the chest by an arrow.

falls silently to his knees, which the silence is interesting to the medieval mind because this is a man who is seen to have racked up an enormous amount of sin and he didn't have a chance to make his peace with God. falls onto his front. He's snapped off the shop, but falls onto his front and drives the remainder in and he dies. Now, I find it fascinating, you're medievalists who listen to this, you know.

they will know this, but really a lot of these very powerful kings went from omnipotence to irrelevance on death. And you have, I mean, terrible scenes when William the Conqueror died, where the monks try and squeeze his body, which is rotting because it's been on display for a long time. And it's a very large body. It's a much larger body than the sarcophagus that was originally carved for him.

And first of all, he's been stripped of all his jewels. When he died, his servants fell upon him and just took everything they could. Then here we are, you know, much later in a royal funeral. And the monk squeezes his body in as best they can, but his body bursts open and everyone runs from the service appalled by the smell. And here we cut forward 13 years to William Rufus.

dead on the floor and everyone leaves him. Just a couple of servants are left to deal with the corpse and they sling him over an animal and take him towards Winchester. Henry and his supporters gallop on ahead. get to Winchester, announce that the king is dead. Henry seizes the royal treasury, which is kept at Winchester, of course, at this time, and then drives on, goes as fast as he can on to London and is crowned in Westminster Abbey.

Again, your more seasoned medievalists will know that this is partly to do with the king's peace, as we would call it. You know, you had to have a king on the throne. Otherwise, the place became lawless. You couldn't prosecute somebody for a crime if a king wasn't offended. It wasn't until 1278, I think, Henry III first institutes the idea that his heir will succeed him immediately on his death. But before that, you get...

this kind of immediate vacuum of power where there is no king. So as you say, there's no king's peace. Anyone can do whatever they like and there's sort of no punishment. So there's a need to get a new king in as quickly as possible. Yes, you could commit murder and not be held to account. It's incredible really, isn't it?

But I think that explains why Henry was accepted so quickly, because people were just desperate for somebody to be on the throne. And then there was a sort of, people took stock. They suddenly got this rather strange, in their eyes, rather strange. young man who could read and who liked going into the forest with his pack of dogs and hunting by himself and they thought he was an oddball in charge and within a year

Robert Courthouse, who should have inherited the English throne. It had been agreed between him and William Rufus that if they died... sunless that that's what would happen he arrived back from the first crusade the high point of his career actually he did very well on the first crusade having previously

been a terrible, and subsequently been a terrible Duke of Normandy. He was too kind and too generous and not very focused, I think it's fair to say. The opposite of his father, probably. Total opposite, yeah. And he ends up... invading the south of England. And again, the self-interest of the aristocracy, they suddenly think, do we really want to die for one of these brothers in battle?

And so a treaty is drawn up, the Treaty of Alton in Hampshire, whereby it's agreed that Henry will remain King of England. In return, he'll pay a ransom, effectively, to Robert Curtis in Normandy, and Robert needs the money. Robert goes home. But that's not the end of it between the brothers, you know. Henry is a tough medieval king, and he looks at the way his elder brother's squandering his father's dukedom in Normandy.

And, of course, a self-interest. And he manages to manoeuvre over the next five years, more and more support in Normandy. And then in 1106, they meet in battle, the two brothers. Henry offers him the chance of not going through this, and he says, no, he will. And Robert Curtis is captured and is imprisoned in England and Wales for the rest of his life. Very long life. He lives for another 30 years. But this means that...

Henry I, this totally underestimated youngest son, has actually reclaimed the dual realms of his father and is Duke of Normandy and King of England. I wonder if he felt any satisfaction at the idea that he'd got one over on both these brothers who had bullied him when they were younger, you know, done him out of his inheritance from their father, and he'd ended up with England and Normandy all joined together. Yes, I think there must have been satisfaction too in putting his...

brother into prison, having been imprisoned himself. You know, it's extraordinary, isn't it, when we look back at it, but it was a dog-eat-dog sort of existence. You know, with the papal reforms, Gregorian reforms of the 1070s, you weren't allowed to... kill aristocrats, really, unless they've done something terrible. So imprisonment and maiming were the main ways to go. Actually, Robert Curtos, from the little we know about his imprisonment, for the next three or so decades.

He seems to have quite enjoyed not having the responsibility. And we have him learning Welsh when he's in prison in Pembroke and then writing poetry. And maybe he just wasn't cut out for strong leadership in the real world. Maybe he was a little bit relieved to have that burden taken away from him. And Henry was obviously much more suited to medieval rule than Robert was. Interestingly, the main rival that Henry I's son has is another William.

William Cleto, who is the son of the imprisoned Robert Curtos. And he has all of the necessary qualities for a medieval monarch, that there is a sort of echo here of William the Conqueror. A very fine soldier, very charming, persuasive, interesting figure, found it easy to persuade allies to support him. And that's really the tussle which seems to have come to an end when...

Finally, Henry I beats the French in battle in 1119. It looks like they have to put away William Cleto, the claimant to the throne. to the Dukedom, they have to say they're not going to support him. So it is a very key moment, you know, in Anglo-French Norman relationships. And that's why it's a double blow when the white ship happens because everything had been resolved so successfully up until that point. Just at the height of Henry's powers.

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One aspect that I thought was interesting in the book as well is that Henry holds this record amongst English and British monarchs for the most illegitimate children that we know of, getting into the 20s of illegitimate children. But he had only two legitimate children. So his daughter, Matilda, who we know as Empress Matilda, and his son, William Etheling, who we mentioned.

Do you think in any way Henry's own experience as a young man with his older brothers perhaps played into his idea to only have one son? Do you think that was a conscious decision maybe to avoid the kind of trouble that he'd faced? I genuinely think that, on no evidence, but it just makes sense. The three brothers had been at each other's throats the whole time. I mean, I didn't go into all of that, but Robert Curtis and William Rufus.

were constantly at each other. I think the only time they were on the same side really was when they were against Henry, wasn't it? That's right. They ganged up on Henry, but otherwise they were tearing each other apart as well. And using Henry as an ally against each other. So the whole thing was a total mess. And I'm sure that had an impact.

Another reason was that Henry married Matilda, another Matilda, Matilda of Scotland, and she came from a background of religion. She had hidden in a convent away from marauding Norman knights as a young girl. There was a strong suspicion that she had intended to take holy orders, and this was thought to be a reason for her having tragedy in her life, that she had spited God by effectively dumping him to become queen.

And although they married, the contemporary chroniclers say they married as a love match. It was a very convenient match, you know, because Henry, the Norman conqueror, well, his family being Norman conquerors, was connecting through Matilda of Scotland with the ancient line of Alfred the Great. So...

Maybe there was love or maybe there wasn't, but it seems to have run out. I'm sure Henry running around all his mistresses didn't help the marriage to settle, but it's quite clear that after the son, William Aetheling, was born, I think Matilda... the Queen felt she had done her duty and lived a parallel life to the King.

Essentially, she started a salon in her palace of good works, you know, hospitals for lepers, etc., who she tended herself, actually, much to the astonishment of her brother, who had become King David of Scotland. She would tend the leprous wounds of... people and even kissed them. She was thought fairly saintly and I think she'd had enough of the royal marital bed and so that was another reason.

why there weren't any more sons. And so Henry, in the White Ship disaster, loses his only legitimate son and heir. And this is obviously a dynastic crisis for Henry. So what was his response to this? How did he set about trying to rebuild what he'd lost that night? Very, very soon after that.

He had already been widowed by this stage. A couple of years earlier, he had lost his wife. He decided to remarry. Now, the marriage might have been in prospect anyway, we think. It was to a woman called Adelisa of Louvain. that also considered very beautiful, known as the Fair Maid of Brabant. And she was very young and everyone hoped, you know, this is a very basic bit of bargaining, but hopefully she was young and fertile and there'd be another male heir.

We don't know what went wrong. She was certainly kept around the king for a very long time, but there was no other child. And we know that's nothing to do with her because she later remarried and had half a dozen children actually with her second husband. Was it some form of impotence or disease or whatever? Who knows? But there were no other children. And Henry was already in his 50s when he married this young girl. Fair old age for that time. And...

After a few years it became clear that there probably was a problem in providing another heir. And at that stage, Empress Matilda... His elder child and the only other legitimate heiress was brought forward and she had been widowed. She had married the Roman emperor. what we would later call the Holy Roman Emperor, which was a great coup for Henry to marry his daughter to somebody so powerful. But he died. He was another Henry. He died of cancer.

So Henry I realised that his greatest hope was bringing Empress Matilda back into the marriage market. And he persuaded her, much against her will, actually... on the 17th of June, way back, to marry a very eligible but not very powerful young man, Geoffrey of Anjou. And Geoffrey was a Plantagenet. Poor Empress Matilda found this. quite an impossible match. First of all, he was 11 years younger than her. He was 15. On the plus side, I suppose, he was renowned for being very good looking.

But again, on the downside, he was a count and she was an empress. This was a downgrade of massive proportion in her eyes. And she would continue to call herself empress, of course, for the rest of her days, or queen of the Romans as well. But essentially, it was a very unhappy marriage. very fiery. The Plantagenets were known for their very bad temper. They were considered to be descended from the devil.

And we know of appalling episodes of bad temper, including in Henry II, who was the product of this marriage of Empress Matilda and Geoffrey Plantagenet. He was very jealous of other people being complimented and later as King of England. Henry II heard a compliment of the King of Scotland, which made him so angry that he started chewing his mattress.

So the Plantagenet marriage, which kicked off a dynasty that lasted on the English throne for over 300 years, started with a very odd marriage between a young teenage hothead and a rather unhappy empress.

And Henry's answer to his dynastic issue then is to try and encourage people to swear this oath of loyalty to Matilda, Empress Matilda, to recognise her after his death. But he must have realised that that was difficult. I think there's an obvious other candidate in William Clito, the son of Robert Curtos.

who we mentioned a little bit earlier, do you think Henry ever countenanced allowing William Cleto to be his heir? Would seem to have solved one of the problems of female rule, although it might have brought other problems with it. You're right that Henry identified.

his daughter Empress Matilda succeeding as a problem, but he was absolutely determined on it. So interestingly, you and your regular followers would know this better than me, but the problem with female monarch at this time was that... People literally could not imagine following a woman into battle.

So I was looking at Adela of Blois, who is the conqueror's youngest daughter. And she was a fantastic figure, actually. And ironically, it's her son, Stephen, who becomes king off the back of all this confusion. But people who... Almost worshipped her, you know, people who wrote about her as the greatest, wisest, most beautiful, all the compliments. But even they say, what a pity she can't be ruler because she's a woman.

And there wasn't really a concept at this time in England of a woman being able to rule in her own right. So what was Henry thinking? I think Henry I was assuming he would live a little bit longer. and in our parlance she'd be the regent bringing up the little boy who he already knew.

his grandson, Henry, who was going to be Henry II, I think what he was really hoping for was not that people would go against all their prejudices and recognise Empress Matilda as Queen of England in her own right, but that they would... help her to bring forward her young son.

to be the rightful heir. And why I say that is because Henry didn't ask for the great noblemans and noblemen and churchmen to say that she should be queen. She wasn't to be his heir, she was to be his successor. It was quite a subtle distinction. Even he knew what was what in terms of the power he could insist on.

Everyone had to publicly, you know, it didn't matter if it was King David of Scotland or the Archbishop of Canterbury, they had to publicly say they would support it. And everyone did. Part of that is because Henry was terrifying, isn't it? I mean, he really was a very direct sort of person and he wouldn't countenance disobedience on that.

You weren't going to be the man who stood in the room, put your hand up and said, I'm not sure about this, actually. But what's interesting, what bears your question out? It's fascinating because when Henry dies famously from a surfeit of lampreys, he eats too many rich. Eels, basically. There's no problem when Stephen of Blois, who actually didn't get on the white ship, he was meant to and got off because he was feeling sick. When he springs across the Channel and seizes the throne...

He's a nice man. Everyone likes him. He has a way with people. He's a good soldier. They go, yeah, we'll have him. And I think it was Stevens to lose at that point in 1135. But he was really a poor king. He was too nice, too weak. He had moments where he could have made examples of people who stood up against him by supporting Matilda, and he was too lenient. It was shockingly lenient for the times. After about three years of misrule...

People decided that this was, they weren't putting up with this. And then they suddenly conveniently remembered that they had backed Matilda. And then she had a party to come to in England and in Scotland in 1138. She landed at Arendelle Castle. with a considerable force of cavalry and an able general, her half-brother, Robert of Gloucester, who was sadly out of the running as an heir because he was...

illegitimate. But you can see a lot of William the Conqueror and Henry I in that man. He was very dramatic, but just not possible. Interesting how it had changed just in this period I've written about, you know, William the Conqueror was illegitimate and was known as William the Bastard.

And it was OK for him to become Duke of Normandy, but a generation later or a generation or two later, absolutely out of the question. So Empress Matilda joined in the civil war against Stephen. It was a very up and down affair for about five years. And then this appalling state set in into England of, well, it was later called the anarchy, still is today, where nobody felt safe at all, churchmen or noblemen.

or obviously people who are just living a normal life. And an on-pass arose, which had to have a solution that everyone could subscribe to. And that meant that Stephen was allowed to continue as king until he died. but that his children were out of the running as rulers and that the compromise would be that the crown of England would go to Henry I's grandson, Emperor Matilda's eldest son, Henry II.

So do you think, because William Cleto dies just before Henry dies, and so he's removed from the playing field, but do you think if he'd still been around when Henry had died, he may have made that dash that Stephen made for the throne and been... acceptable. Oh, that's a very good point. Very good point. He would have had a much better chance.

He had a huge support, actually, when he was alive, from people who genuinely believed he should be Duke of Normandy. So I think it would have been very easy for William Clutter, if he was still alive, to have got Normandy. I don't think he would have got England, though.

It would have been a separate inheritance. One of the problems everyone had at this stage, unless they were as tough as William the Conqueror or Henry I, was ruling both places at once. You know, it was impossible. I mean, I was fascinated by how... Because Henry I was very effective at settling England, how much time he then had to spend in Normandy, because he was up against an alliance of the French with maybe the Angevines or the Flemish. There wasn't really anyone in what we call France.

who was happy to see Normandy ruled by the King of England. It was too much. England had such huge wealth and Normandy had this very gritty reputation for fighting. It was something that... the French king wanted to stamp out at any cost. I remember reading, I think it was Audric Vitalis at one point, talks about Normandy.

only ever being happy when it's fighting. And if nobody's invading it, then they'll happily tear themselves apart. And the only thing that unites them is the opportunity to fight an invader really. So it's constantly unruly there and difficult to keep a lid on. Yes, I found that very interesting. Essentially, we think of Normandy as a settled land, but it wasn't. It was full of Vikings, you know. It was a Viking state. It was carved out to appease the Vikings who were invading France regularly.

But at the end of the day, they were fighters. You know, you look at the great fighting nations of history. They're up there with the Spartans. It's just that's what their culture was about. And they didn't really evolve. another system of another way of thinking, I don't think. And as they accrue more and more power, gaining the throne of England and things like that as well, they become a threat to the King of France in Paris, who was himself, you know, at this time.

in a pretty shaky position, doesn't really have all that much control directly. He relies on soft power and influence over a lot of vassals and if all of these vassals start to become more powerful. That's a threat to him. So that's another element, I think, of what Normandy has to worry about and face. Very much so. So the King of France wasn't the King of France, except notionally. He was the king of what the area we call the Ile de France around Paris.

That's what he actually controlled and owned. The rest, you're absolutely right. It was a sort of feudal tentacles going in different directions. And he had to have alliances to have his voice heard. And on top of that, just... Going slightly back on what you were saying, yeah, the Normans did very well, but they also did this extraordinary thing in southern Italy. If you think of the amount of power they had there, and one of the Angevins becomes king of Jerusalem. I mean, it's an incredible...

The ability of these people to travel and settle and become powerful is really, I mean, hats off to them. They got stuck in. It's quite startling, isn't it? So Henry I was...

buried when he did die at his own foundation at Reading Abbey, which I think is also 900 years old this year. Do you think there are hopes of finding his remains there one day? I know you've been to the site and sort of looked at how it looks today. Yes, I've spoken to local. people who've really looked into this much more than I have.

Well, everything that's ever happened. The origin stories of the cities we inhabit or of what's in our kitchen cupboards. Why we've always been drawn to dictators. The greatest discoveries, inventions and mistakes. It seems fairly certain that he's still there. in Reading, where he would have been at the high altar as the founder of Reading Abbey. And Reading Abbey was an extraordinarily grandiose scheme. It was one of the great abbeys north of the Alps.

And it was destroyed under Henry VIII and then took more knocks during the Civil War, during fighting with Charles I. Right now there's a school. It's not a car park. It's a school extension, which seems to be covering where Henry I is buried. It's a very difficult one, isn't it? I mean, I think that Henry I did not probably intend to be buried under a school. And he is one of the great kings of medieval history. I think it would be appropriate if he was...

found and relocated to Westminster Abbey, but then I'm sure there's an equal argument, why should you disturb where somebody's buried? But there is a slab against a wall saying near this point, Henry Beauclerk, this is at Reading Abbey, Henry Beauclerk is buried. Local experts have pinpointed exactly where that is. And I'm sure if he had been moved, there'd be a record of it. There is none. So I think it's...

very likely that he is still there. But I love Reading Abbey. It's very haunting for any of your followers who haven't been there. These huge broken walls, you know, you still get a sense of the scale of it, even though it's been open to the element for four or five hundred years. Wonderful place. And I guess the discovery of Richard III's remains mean that these things are...

Possibly, you know, however unlikely there were all sorts of stories that Richard was no longer where he was. So I guess as long as we know he might be there, there's always a chance that we may be able to find his grave one day. I think it'd be wonderful. I really do think he should be in Westminster Abbey, but obviously that's just my opinion.

And just to end on a kind of impossible question for you to answer, how different do you think the remainder of the 12th century might have been if William Aetheling hadn't gone down with the white ship? Well, I think there'd have been two major results. So I think I'm going slightly further than you've just set me. I don't think there would have been an 100 years war because we had just been bound up in English and Norman politics. It was the huge wealth and power.

of the Angevin Empire that brought us into conflict with so much. And I think you can go even further and question when the Reformation would have hit England. if we hadn't had, again, this sort of influence. It's a very great possibility that the Reformation would have happened at a different time, you know. I think those are the big ones, both the biggest foreign...

which obviously had a huge impact at home, would have happened. And then you look at the things that wouldn't have happened. I mean, I don't think, well, obviously it could have come in another form, but you wouldn't have got Magna Carta. And the characters, think of that. You wouldn't have Richard the Lionheart and things. I mean, it's very easy to think, oh my God, history would have been all the poorer, but it wouldn't. It would have just been very different.

We're just taking a very different course. And I suspect there would have been other characters to replace those that we do know. They're always there to be found. I think what's sad for me as a history writer. is how short William the Conqueror's Norman dynasty was actually because of the white ship. It staggered on for a couple of decades, but it was done.

And in a way, I find that genetic pool so interesting. You know, you look at those people from that. Of course, Henry II is descended from William of Conqueror, but there's something... Very Angevin about him. He's not Norman and he's not English. He's very much his father's son, I think, wasn't he, in his outlook? He really is, yeah. Absolutely the same.

And that Andrew and Streak is there. Look at what the trouble Henry II had with his sons as well. I mean, it's really there. Are you able to tell us what you're working on next? I'm doing something on the 20th century, a bit of modern history. So that does rather prove the point we were talking about earlier. I don't have a period, but I like stories. So that's what I'm on next. But I hope we could talk about it, but not on a medieval podcast. I've just started the podcast.

just to get you back and talk about that in the future. Thank you so much for joining us. That's been really interesting and really enlightening. I can't recommend the White Ship Conquest Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I dreams highly enough. It really is a gripping...

thrilling and lurching ride through a critical moment in history. And it's so beautifully told as well. Don't forget to subscribe to Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcasts and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval.

I would just like to give a quick mention to the Not Just the Tudors podcast with Susanna Lipscomb, also from History Hit. There's a great episode on there about Louis XIV and his mistresses, which fits nicely with Henry I and his own little horde of illegitimate children. But I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with History Hits.