mtvessel | A Mediaeval Titanic

Sep 2021
The White Ship - Charles Spencer – William Collins, 2020
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If, like me, your historical education followed the Sellar and Yeatman curriculum, then you will probably vaguely remember the post-Norman invasion politicking covered by this book and may even recall the importance of the White Ship. I must confess that I didn't, which made this an entertaining fleshing out of the dry-as-dust lessons I had at age eleven (which consisted of our teacher basically writing out a history text book on a blackboard with squeaky chalk). Spencer uses this mediaeval Titanic as the central event in a more general history of the reign of Henry the First.

But first we have to get to know the cast of this drama, which means going back to William the Conqueror and his problems with his rebellious eldest son Robert Curthose, which led to him bequeathing the throne of England to his second son William Rufus, a hard-living party animal who never married and whose court was known for its excesses. When Rufus died in a hunting accident, William the Conqueror's youngest son Henry seized the opportunity to make himself king before his unpopular elder brother could get back from the First Crusade.

The early part of Henry's reign was a series of military and political machinations that led to his eventual triumph over Robert Curthose at the battle of Tinchebray and the quelling of his rebellious barons. Spencer shows an admirable attention to detail in tracing the lineages of the familes that formed the Anglo-Norman aristocracy and their intermarriages, a task that must have been rendered much more difficult by the fact that about half of the women of the time appear to have been called Matilda, including Henry's wife. She gave birth to a daughter, also called Matilda, and a son, William Aetheling.

The high point of Henry's reign was the Battle of Brémule against Robert Curthose's son William Clito and the French king Louis the Fat, which finally settled the succession of the Dukedom of Normandy in his favour. It was also to be the cause of the downfall of his line. In November 1120, the triumphant Henry and his court, which included the seventeen-year old William Aetheling, prepared to make the short hop across the channel from Barfleur to Southampton. Henry then made his fatal error, which was to travel home on his own ship, leaving his son and many of the younger scions of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy to follow on the Blanche-Nef, a fancy clinker-built ship with fifty oarsmen. As soon as his father was out of sight, William, being a teenager, decided to turn it into a party boat and ordered huge quantities of wine to be brought onboard. As a result, when they set sail close to midnight, the crew and passengers were intoxicated after several hours of heavy drinking. This included the helmsman, who fatally underestimated the ship's speed and drove it onto a rock about one nautical mile out of harbour. Its passengers were tipped overboard and perished quickly in the icy waters. There was only one survivor - ironically the lowest status passenger on board, a butcher from Rouen called Berold who was chasing some aristocratic debtors who owed him for meat.

After that, everything fell apart. As part of politicking to secure the French county of Maine, William Aetheling had been betrothed and then married to a daughter of the Count of Anjou (called, yes, Matilda), an arrangement that rapidly dissolved when she became a widow. The Welsh revolted and William Clito attempted to re-take Normandy, only ceasing to be a threat when he died at age 25 after a splinter in his hand turned septic. Henry's relationship with his daughter Matilda, now his sole legitimate heir, had turned toxic after her marriage to Geoffrey of Anjou. And then Henry died, famously of a surfeit of lampreys.

There followed the period known as the Anarchy, when Henry's nephew Stephen of Blois, who had only avoided being on the White Ship due to a bout of diarrhoea, seized the throne in place of Matilda, on the grounds that he was a) a good soldier and b) a man. Not that either of these qualities saved him when, after four years of chaos, Matilda and her supporters invaded and, after a further two years of civil war, captured him at the Battle of Lincoln in 1141. He was released in 1143 and the civil war dragged on for another ten years until Matilda's son Henry invaded and Stephen's barons forced him to recognise him as his heir. Stephen died the following year and order was finally restored.

Spencer tells this story with a journalist's eye for memorable details and a talent for creating compelling character sketches. In particular it is pleasing to see attention given to the personalities and actions of the women in the story. There are a few omissions, particularly in the section on the White Ship itself - what did ships of the period actually look like? How were they crewed? - and I suspect that some of the more colourful incidents are historical hearsay rather than being attested by good evidence. Nonetheless, this story of a reign wrecked by a hedonistic teenage party is well told.