Shortly before midnight on 25 November 1120, less than a month before Thomas Becket was born, a swift, sleek, newly-refitted longship slipped out of the port of Barfleur in Normandy and entered the English Channel with fifty or so crew and up to 300 passengers on board. The vessel’s high-pointed ends, its single central mast and rectangular sail, most of all its distinctive side rudder, echoed Normandy’s debt to the Vikings, who in the ninth and tenth centuries had overrun large areas of the British Isles and Flanders, and after sailing up the Seine, occupied much of north-western France.
In or about the year 911 the weak King Charles the Simple, king of the West Franks, had made terms with Hrólf, a Viking lord said to be so huge that no horse could carry him, salvaging the rest of his dominions by ceding to him the lands about the lower Seine and the city of Rouen that the Norsemen had already settled, turning poachers into gamekeepers and allowing them to carve out a fief that would evolve into the duchy of Normandy. Hrólf, in return, was baptized a Christian and did homage and fealty to Charles, placing his hands on the Gospels or the relics of a saint and swearing to be his man and to preserve his life, limbs and earthly honour. Better known to his successors as Count Rollo, Hrólf founded a powerful dynasty through intermarriage with the local inhabitants, shaping a people as famous for their courage, ingenuity, sociability and piety as they were notorious for their wanderlust, violence, ambition and greed. From the legacy of the Carolingians, Count Rollo’s successors gleaned lingering concepts of ducal sovereignty, and from their Viking inheritance expertise in seafaring and trading. Perhaps the greatest irony of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 is that, within three weeks of annihilating the Viking invaders of Northumbria, King Harold, the last of the Old English kings, lost his throne at the battle of Hastings to Hrólf’s great-great-great-grandson William the Conqueror.
The night of 25 November was bitterly cold. A hard frost covered the ground, but visibility was good: the sky was cloudless and no mist or fog obscured the exit to the harbour and the open sea. Orderic Vitalis, a monk from the abbey of Saint-Evroult in Normandy, one of several contemporary chroniclers who did their best to uncover the true facts, erroneously reports that there were nine hours of moonlight. In reality it was closer to the new moon, so relatively dark. The stars, however, shone brightly, and since mariners set their course by the Pole star, which they called stella maris (the ‘star of the sea’), there were no good grounds for the skipper to delay sailing. A modern expert has calculated that high water was at 10.43 p.m. that night. By midnight (continues Orderic) the surface of the sea was relatively calm, lapping against the shore, and there was a southerly breeze.
But this was to be no ordinary Channel crossing. In fact another chronicler, William of Malmesbury, scarcely exaggerates when he says, ‘No ship ever brought so much misery to England.’ Thomas fitz Stephen, whose father had been William the Conqueror’s master-steersman in 1066, was the skipper. Hearing that King Henry I, the ablest and youngest of the late Conqueror’s sons, planned a voyage from Normandy to England with his whole court, this seasoned mariner had obtained an audience with him and begged to have his father’s old job. He offered him his finest vessel, the White Ship, and Henry decided that his sons William and Richard and his daughter Countess Matilda of La Perche should travel on it. Prince William, an ebullient, spoilt, fun-loving teenager, just seventeen and recently married, was the king’s only legitimate son on whom he doted. His elder siblings were bastards, for Henry was one of the most promiscuous kings of England, fathering at least twenty illegitimate offspring by a parade of mistresses, effortlessly beating Charles II, who sired a mere fourteen. ‘He gave way too easily to the sin of lust,’ says Orderic drily: ‘from boyhood to old age he was sinfully enslaved by this vice.’
With his ship detailed to carry only passengers, without horses or heavy cargo apart from the royal treasure and some casks of wine, fitz Stephen’s task looked easy. The king’s children were to be accompanied by many leading courtiers and their retinues, and the crew were elated at the prospect. When Prince William arrived at the quay, the sailors greeted him with cheers and shouts of glee. They asked for drink to toast him and were granted three ‘muids’ of wine from the casks on board, amounting to roughly 200 litres – far too much for fifty men – but fitz Stephen was unable or unwilling to interfere.
No sooner had the casks been broken open and the men filled their cups than a great drinking bout commenced: soon the sailors were swaying on their feet or rolling about on the deck. Worst-behaved was a cohort of armed marine bodyguards ‘who were very disorderly, and as soon as they got on board insolently took possession of the benches of the rowers’. As the party atmosphere took over, most of the passengers also joined in the fun.
When, finally, the sail was hoisted and the anchor weighed, some of the drunken passengers dared fitz Stephen to order his men to overtake the king’s main fleet, which had departed at high tide. Henry’s great warship or snecca, a poetic word deriving from the Old Norse for ‘snake’ or ‘serpent’ (snekkja), was commanded by a highly paid master and a more professional crew. Fast and manoeuvrable, it was already disappearing over the horizon.
Confident of his seamanship and the skill of his crew, the skipper accepted the challenge. On hearing the order, the oarsmen did their work and the White Ship cleaved the water like an arrow, the white foam flying off the blades. The safe passage out of Barfleur harbour is directly to the north-east, which should have been straightforward had the helmsman steered correctly. But in his haste to cut the corner, he steered too far north, where some dangerous rocks are submerged at high tide. Just at the point that the crew were trimming the sail to the wind, the ship, almost a mile from Barfleur and half a mile from the shore, struck a huge rock, probably the one in the current known as the Raz de Barfleur that, even at high tide, is still visible from the lighthouse on the cliff as an ugly brown shadow beneath the water.
Two of the oak planks on the starboard bow were smashed and the water poured in. The sailors tried to free the vessel with their boathooks, but the prow was stuck fast. The rowers fled in panic from their benches, leaving their oars to splinter against the rock. Some men drowned inside the ship; others were washed overboard. When the ship suddenly capsized, passengers and crew were thrown into the freezing sea, where a brave few attempted to swim against the strong underwater current, while others thrashed about helplessly until they drowned.
Soon after the collision, a dinghy was launched carrying Prince William. He might have escaped – but on hearing his sister shrieking from the deck, he turned back to try and save her. He paid a high price for his rash gallantry, since as the dinghy nudged its way through the foaming current towards the stricken longship, it was swamped by those who jumped down or clambered into it, plunging everyone into the sea. Two men swimming nearby grabbed hold of the spar from which its sail had been set and clung to it. One was a butcher from Rouen called Berold; the other a youth of noble birth, Geoffrey, a younger son of Gilbert de l’Aigle. Thomas fitz Stephen, already in the water but an exceptionally strong swimmer, inched his way towards them, calling out, ‘What has become of the king’s son?’
‘He and all who were with him have perished,’ they replied.
‘Then it is misery for me to live any longer.’
Rather than face the king’s wrath, the skipper decided that he would prefer to drown, for Henry had a reputation for exacting harsh reprisals when he felt he had been crossed or his trust betrayed. Applauded as the ‘Lion of Justice’ by smooth-talking courtiers or poets eager for a fee, he summarily blinded or executed rebels and castrated thieves, even encouraging the governor of a castle whom his illegitimate daughter Juliana had wronged to slit the noses and put out the eyes of two of his own granddaughters. He was rarely a man to be trifled with or who allowed failure to go unpunished.
The White Ship claimed its final victim when Geoffrey de l’Aigle, suffering from hypothermia, could no longer hold on to the spar. Commending his soul to God and making the sign of the cross with his fingers, he disappeared beneath the water. Shortly after dawn, three fishermen arrived in a skiff to rescue Berold, the poorest of the travellers, who is said to have survived the cold because he alone was clad in sheepskin. Once carried to safety and revived with soup and wine before a roaring fire, he told his story to a large crowd and afterwards lived in good health for twenty years. Doubtless the chroniclers obtained their information about the wreck from him or one of his audience.
The king and his companions, although several miles away when the ship went down, were said to have been able to hear the cries of those who were drowning, but did not understand their cause and so continued on their voyage. They may have been afraid to return, for it was commonly believed that at night the dead rise out of their graves to frighten or harm the living, and that demons compel the souls of the damned in hell to re-enact the sins for which they were condemned. There were tales of mermaids with wings and claws and of wild men of the sea – maybe fish in human form or spirits lurking in the bodies of drowned men – and of great serpents or sea monsters that gobbled up distressed mariners and would regurgitate them on the Day of Judgement.
Henry landed around midday on the south coast of England, probably in Hampshire. When towards evening he asked for news of his children, those around him were struck dumb with fear and claimed ignorance. They wept privately for their own kinsfolk, but none dared to admit their loss or whisper the truth in case the king overheard. They continued their deception until the following day, when on the initiative of one of Henry’s nephews, Count Theobald IV of Blois-Champagne, a young boy threw himself at the king’s feet, sobbing inconsolably, and on being questioned as to the cause broke the news. ‘So sudden was the shock,’ says Orderic, ‘and so severe the king’s anguish, that he instantly fainted.’ He was carried by his attendants to his bedchamber, where he remained in seclusion for several days, grieving for his lost children, for his knights and barons, and so many of his household officials. Besides dozens of the flower of Anglo-Norman society, they included eighteen high-born women, the daughters, sisters, nieces or wives of counts and earls.
The Norman villagers, meanwhile, scoured the beaches around the bay of Barfleur until they located the wreck, which they dragged ashore with ropes at low tide. All the royal treasure was salvaged, as was almost everything else except the bodies. After a search lasting over a week and in spite of generous rewards offered to experienced divers by the victims’ relatives, very few bodies were recovered for burial, and those that were found were heavily disfigured, discovered far away from where the ship was lost, having been swept along by the currents. The bodies of Richard, Earl of Chester, and several more could be identified only from their clothing. Prince William’s body would never be found, his death triggering a royal and ducal succession crisis that would rock the stability of the Anglo-Norman state and dominate the minds of the chroniclers for almost thirty years.