Great Tales From English History (14 page)

The New Forest, south of Winchester, was the subject of a particular grievance. It was quite literally new, recently created by expelling people from their farms and villages, and William Rufus was hunting there on 2 August 1100 when a curious accident occurred. It was late in the afternoon, the sun was setting, and the King had to shade his eyes against the light. The royal hunting party was strung out at different stands in the forest, waiting for the rangers to chase up and drive the deer through the undergrowth across their line of fire. The King was with one of his favourite hunting companions, Walter Tyrel, a Norman nobleman who was an excellent shot. But somehow the usually accurate Tyrel missed his deer and fired directly into William’s chest. Reaching to tear out the arrow, William succeeded only in breaking off the shaft, and as he fell to the ground the arrowhead was driven deeper into his chest.

It was what happened next that suggests that this shooting was no accident, for Tyrel rode straight out of the forest and headed for the coast, where he took a boat to France. He had left the King’s body lying on the forest floor, where it was retrieved by local farm labourers and thrown on to a cart, to be trundled over the rutted lanes to Winchester. ‘Blood dripped freely the whole way’, according to William of Malmesbury, writing a few years later.

Tyrel’s strange behaviour could be explained in terms of sheer panic. But panic was anything but the reaction of William’s younger brother Henry, who was one of the royal hunting party that day. Henry had been at another stand in the forest with Tyrel’s brothers-in-law, Gilbert and Roger of Clare. We do not know who brought Henry the news of his brother’s death, but his reaction was as instant as Tyrel’s. He rode straight to Winchester to secure the royal treasury, and was proclaimed king next day. He then rode on to London, where he was solemnly crowned in Westminster Abbey on 5 August - just three days after the death of his brother, who was buried with scant ceremony at Winchester.

The chroniclers had no doubt that the death of William Rufus was inspired by God himself, to punish a monarch who had derided and exploited the Church. At the time, Rufus was enjoying the income of no less than twelve abbeys that he had deliberately kept abbotless - ‘without shepherds’, as William of Malmesbury put it. No wonder God should strike down ‘a soul who could not be saved’.

Today we might scan the evidence for a more earthly plotter. William’s brother, Henry, now sat securely on the throne of England. Walter Tyrel was never investigated or punished for the slaying of William the Red; and it was curious that among those to whom the new king showed special favour were Walter Tyrel’s brothers-in-law, Gilbert and Robert of Clare.

AD 1120

T
EN YEARS BEFORE HE BECAME KING, WILLIAM
the Conqueror’s youngest son Henry was helping to put down an uprising in the Norman city of Rouen. It was the late autumn of 1090, and after the fighting had ended he invited the leader of the rebellion to a high tower where he could look out over the walled city and admire the beautiful river and surrounding green fields and woods that he had been trying to conquer. Then he personally threw the man out of the window.

Henry I was thirty-two when he became King of England, and had shown himself to be both decisive and single-minded after the mysterious shooting of his brother Rufus. Now he set about capturing Normandy from his other brother, Robert Curthose. In 1106 he defeated Robert at the Battle of Tinchebrai, south of Bayeux - fought, by coincidence, on 28 September, the date on which William the Conqueror had landed his troops in Sussex in 1066. So forty years later to the day, William’s youngest son had reunited his father’s cross-Channel empire. Henry consigned his brother Robert to successive prisons at Wareham, Devizes, Bristol and finally Cardiff, where the unhappy Short-stockings would spend the last months of his twenty-eight-year imprisonment learning Welsh.

‘Woe to him that is not old enough to die,’ declared Robert Curthose, who finally expired in 1134 at the age of eighty, and whose tomb can be seen today in Gloucester Cathedral.

‘Exchequer’ is a modern word that comes to us from the reign of Henry I - a king with a sharp eye for a penny. We have seen him counting the silver his father gave him on his deathbed for his inheritance, then galloping straight to the treasury when his brother died; he was the last king for four hundred years shrewd enough to die without any debts. Now, sometime after 1106, he introduced the exchequer as a revolutionary new method of government accounting and of centralising royal power. Based on the Middle Eastern abacus or counting-frame, the exchequer was a chequered cloth like a chessboard. Counters were piled on the different squares, rather as croupiers handle chips on a gaming table. Twice a year, at Easter and Michaelmas (the feast of St Michael on 29 September), the sheriffs and royal officials from the shires had to bring their money to be checked and counted. To this day, the cabinet minister in charge of the nation’s finances is known as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and we all write and, if we are lucky, also sometimes cash ‘cheques’.

By 1120 Henry I controlled a well-financed empire on the two sides of the English Channel. He travelled quite frequently from England to Normandy in his own longboat or
snecca
, a Norse word literally meaning ‘snake’ or ‘serpent’. Merchants and nobles criss-crossed the channel on these medieval equivalents of the cross-Channel ferry, which, according to records from the next century, charged two pence for an ordinary passenger and twelve for a knight with his horse. In tapestries and paintings of the time the boats are depicted with striped sails, complete with masts, rigging, tillers and anchors. Often their prows were decorated with figureheads of dragons and other beasts.

As Henry was preparing to set sail from the Norman port of Barfleur at the end of November 1120, he was approached by a young seafarer, Thomas FitzStephen. Thomas’s father, Stephen, had been William the Conqueror’s personal sea captain, taking him on the historic voyage of 1066 to fight against Harold, and he had ferried him back and forth across the Channel to the end of his life. Now his son Thomas had a newly fitted-out snakeship of which he was particularly proud, the
White Ship
, and he offered it to the King for his voyage.

Henry had already made his travelling arrangements, but he suggested it would be a treat for his son and heir, William, to sail on this state-of-the-art vessel. William was just seventeen and a young man on whom many hopes rode. He was popularly nicknamed ‘the Aetheling’, the old Anglo-Saxon title meaning ‘throne-worthy’ (see p. 65), because his mother Edith-Matilda was descended from King Alfred’s royal house of Wessex. Here was a part-Saxon heir - some much-cherished English blood - who would one day inherit the Normans’ empire.

Henry set sail for England, leaving William the Aetheling to follow in the
White
Ship
, with many of the court’s most lively young blades, among them William’s half-brother Richard and his half-sister Matilda, two of the numerous illegitimate children that Henry had fathered outside his marriage to Edith-Matilda. Spirits were high as the
White Ship
loosed its moorings. Wine flowed freely among passengers and crew, and as darkness fell, the princely party issued a dare to the captain - that he should overtake the King’s ship, which was already out at sea.

The
White Ship
’s fifty oarsmen heaved with all their might to pull clear of the harbour, but as the vessel made its way through the night its port side struck violently against a rock that lay hidden just below the surface of the water. This rock was a well-known hazard of the area, uncovered each day as the tide ebbed, then submerged at high tide. It can be seen to this day from the cliffs of Barfleur, a dark shadow lurking beneath the water. But Captain Thomas FitzStephen, like his passengers, had been drinking, and the ship’s wooden hull shattered on the rock, the vessel capsizing almost immediately. It was still close enough to the shore for the cries and screams of its three hundred passengers and crew to be mistaken for drunken revelry. According to one account the passengers on the royal snakeship heard the cries behind them, but sailed on, unheeding, towards England, through the night.

The
White Ship
was the
Titanic
of the Middle Ages, a much-vaunted high-tech vessel on its maiden voyage, wrecked against a foreseeable natural obstacle in the reckless pursuit of speed. The passenger list constituted the cream of high society, cast into the chilly waters. Orderic Vitalis, an Anglo-Norman chronicler of the time, described the scene:

The rays of the moon lit up the world for about nine hours, showing up everything in the sea to the mariners. Thomas, the skipper, gathered his strength after sinking for the first time and, remembering his duty, lifted his head as he came to the surface. Seeing the heads of the men who were clinging somehow to the spar, he asked, ‘The king’s son, what has become of him?’ When the shipwrecked men replied that he had perished with all his companions, he said, ‘It is vain for me to go on living.’ With these words, in utter despair, he chose rather to sink on the spot than to die beneath the wrath of a king enraged by the loss of his son, or suffer long years of punishment in fetters.

Orderic was wrong about the full moon. Sky tables show that on 25 November 1120 the moon was new, so the night must have been dark. But the chronicler does seem to have gathered his information, directly or indirectly, from the wreck’s only survivor, a butcher from Rouen who had jumped on to the
White Ship
to collect some debts that were due to him from members of the court. The butcher was saved from the exposure that killed the others on that still, frosty night by the thick, air-retaining ram-skins he was wearing. Three fishermen plucked him out of the water next morning and took him back to dry land.

Over in England next day, King Henry became puzzled when the
White Ship
did not dock or even appear on the horizon. But the news of the catastrophe reached the nobles at his court soon enough, and everyone discovered they had lost family and friends. Stewards, chamberlains and cupbearers had all died - wives and husbands, sons and daughters. As the court mourned, no one dared break the dreadful news to the King, and a whole day and night went by before a young boy was finally pushed into the royal presence, weeping, to throw himself at the King’s feet. When Henry realised what had happened, he fell to the ground himself, grief-stricken at the news. He had to be shepherded away to a room where he could mourn privately - this stern Norman king did not care to display weakness in public.

In the years following the death of his cherished son, King Henry I governed his realm as busily as ever, and also found time for his pleasures. He founded England’s first zoo, where he kept lions and leopards, and a porcupine of which he was particularly fond. But he did confess to nightmares that terrified him so much that he would leap out of his bed and reach for his sword. He dreamed that his people - those who worked, those who fought, and those who prayed - were attacking him. The Conqueror’s shrewd, harsh, penny-pinching youngest son had provided England and Normandy with firm government, but the wreck of the
White Ship
meant that Henry left no legitimate male heir to succeed him. The drowning of William the Aetheling was not just a personal tragedy - it would lead to England’s first real and prolonged civil war.

AD 1135-54

K
ING HENRY I HAD A GREAT WEAKNESS FOR
lampreys, small, eel-like creatures that sucked the blood of other fishes and were considered a delicacy in the Middle Ages. Worried at the havoc this oily parasite could wreak on the digestive system, Henry’s doctor had banned the fish from the royal diet. But the King could not resist the temptation when his chefs served him up a plate of lampreys one late November evening in 1135 at the end of a day’s hunting in the forest near Rouen in Normandy. The sixty-seven-year-old king was stricken with chills and convulsions on the Monday night, and by Sunday 1 December he was dead.