The White Ship

It took William more than twenty years to establish himself securely as ruler of Normandy. In 1053 he put down a revolt led by William of Arques, an uncle who had long challenged his illegitimate nephew’s right to rule. William of Arques had his Norman lands confiscated and was sent into exile.

Duke William gradually asserted control over his neighbours. Maine proved to be a hard-won prize, William only receiving its count’s submission in 1062 after laying waste to much of the land. He brought Normandy’s old rival Brittany to heel in 1065, after the surrender of its duke, Conan II. When Conan died suddenly, late the following year, it was accepted that he had been assassinated at William’s command. The fatal weapons were believed to be his own gloves, which had been laced with poison: when Conan took them off and wiped his mouth with his hand, death soon followed.

A devout Christian, William saw to it that Normandy embraced the key reforms that the papacy was starting to encourage: he outlawed the buying and selling of clerical offices, and barred priests from marrying. His changes were supported by a younger half-brother, Odo, who he made bishop of Bayeux when Odo was a teenager: in an era when the power of Church and state was intermingled, it was common for men of high birth to commit relatives to influential positions at court and on the battlefield, while others were sent to scale the peaks of ecclesiastical high office. The crossover between the various branches was fluid: Bishop Odo remained a counsellor and a warrior for the rest of his life (the Bayeux Tapestry shows him wielding a mace in battle), while continuing in his churchly duties.

From his earliest days, William would have been aware of the figure of Edward the Confessor at court. Edward was William’s first cousin once removed. He and his siblings had been exiled from England after Cnut overran half of England. The children had been welcomed in Normandy by their maternal uncle, Duke Richard II. In 1035 Cnut died, and his son Harold Harefoot claimed the throne while Cnut’s true heir, Harold’s half-brother Harthacnut, was distracted by rebels in Scandinavia.

Hoping the moment was right to reclaim his family’s crown, Edward the Confessor’s brother Alfred landed in southern England with an army of Norman mercenaries. Outside Guildford, thirty miles south-west of London, he was greeted by the powerful Earl Godwine, who declared his backing for Alfred. But it was a ploy. Godwine suddenly turned, taking Alfred prisoner and massacring his troops. The earl had Alfred’s eyes put out during the hundred-mile journey north-east to the monastery of Ely, where the royal prisoner was committed to the care of the monks. But Alfred never recovered from the brutality of his blinding, his life ending after months of agony in early 1036.

After five years’ rule, Harold Harefoot died in 1040, aged twenty-four, just as Harthacnut was poised to invade England from Denmark. Harthacnut desecrated Harold’s tomb and had his corpse decapitated before consigning the mutilated remains to an anonymous marshland grave. Yet the new king’s rule was briefer still: the last Scandinavian to rule England dropped dead at a wedding, in June 1042, while toasting the bride. This could have been the result of a stroke, caused by Harthacnut’s excessive drinking, or perhaps by poison, presumably authorised by Edward the Confessor.

Edward now sailed to England with a retinue of Norman aides to take the throne. He owed his elevation to the support of three powerful noblemen, the most significant of them Earl Godwine.

Edward cemented a pragmatic alliance with this kingmaker by marrying his daughter, Edith of Wessex. But by 1051 there was no child of the marriage, and Godwine and his formidable sons had fled abroad after a failed rebellion against the king. William of Normandy visited England during this interlude, when Edward was free from the overbearing Godwines. The Confessor appears to have invited William to become his successor at this time.

A year later the Godwines returned to England in force, but Earl Godwine died soon afterwards. His most able son, Harold, slowly took on his mantle as indispensable royal supporter, and by 1057 he and his brothers controlled the earldoms of Wessex, East Anglia and Northumbria. Harold twice led armies to crush uprisings in Wales. Edward, who had no instinct for battle, devoted himself increasingly to his twin passions, prayer and hunting, while occasionally displaying flashes of decisiveness in matters of foreign policy.

In 1064 or 1065, Harold set off on a mysterious voyage from Bosham, near Chichester. It ended in shipwreck on the coastline of Ponthieu. Guy I, Ponthieu’s count, was known to enslave, imprison and torture those washed up on his shores. But William went in person to demand that Harold be handed over to him, the count’s feudal superior. Harold was shown the respect due a great lord from a neighbouring land, and he repaid the compliment by fighting for William against Brittany: he is shown in the Bayeux Tapestry saving two Norman knights from drowning in quicksand on the flats near Mont Saint-Michel. William would always claim that Harold swore to acknowledge him as rightful heir to the English throne at this time.

After a series of strokes, the childless Edward the Confessor died on 5 January 1066. Harold lost no time. He declared that on his deathbed Edward had selected him as his successor. The next day he both buried the king and had himself crowned in the recently built Westminster Abbey. News of the coronation provoked William into preparing for an attack, his men felling the woods around the Norman coast for timber that could be shaped into warships. The great lords and bishops of Normandy found themselves urged to pay for as many vessels as they could, their subscriptions underwriting their duke’s aggressive intent.

William’s wife, Matilda of Flanders, ordered a magnificent ship to be built for her husband secretly, in the port of Barfleur. It needed to be a vessel worthy of William’s dynastic dreams and ambitions, as he prepared to risk all in the gamble of a lifetime. Matilda called her the Mora. The meaning of this name is unknown, but it may well be nothing more than an anagram of ‘Amor’, the Latin word for love, for the Flemish princess and the Norman duke’s dynastic marriage had blossomed into a romantic triumph. ‘The wife of my bosom’, William called Matilda, ‘whom I love as my own soul.’[3] She was the mother of all the duke’s children – there would be at least nine of these, including four sons. Unusually for the time, the duke appears to have had no mistresses and to have fathered no illegitimate offspring.

The Mora served as William’s flagship, sailing at the head of the huge invasion fleet that, with support vessels, numbered several hundred strong. This he led across the Channel in late September that year. The Mora was skippered by Stephen FitzAirard, the natural son of a nobleman. Also with William on his ship were his right-hand men – his commanders, advisers and key household officers – and the knights who had been handpicked by the duke to land beside him on the English soil that he claimed as his own.

The Mora had been built to advertise the importance of the leader she carried, as well as the military imperative of his cause. The royal lion carved onto her rear, its tongue rippling out from open jaws, roared defiance. The flagship had a mainsail of red and gold, and atop the mast fluttered the square papal banner: white with a blue border and emblazoned with the golden cross of St Peter. It had been sent by Pope Alexander II from Rome as confirmation that he – and therefore God – supported William’s cause. Also high on the mast hung a lantern to guide the following fleet in night-time. The ship’s figurehead, according to the twelfth-century monk and chronicler Orderic Vitalis, was ‘the image of a child, gilt, pointing with its right hand toward England, and having in its mouth a trumpet of ivory’.

The Bayeux Tapestry shows FitzAirard’s ship longer, stronger and built to be faster than the rest of the fleet: she had nineteen oars on each side, while many of her escorts had twelve, and others extended to sixteen. The Latin words on this panel of the tapestry, when translated, read: HERE DUKE WILLIAM CROSSED THE SEA IN A GREAT SHIP AND CAME TO PEVENSEY, immortalising the Mora, and the place in southern England where the invading army landed.

At first the winds were against William’s invasion fleet, and it seemed possible the expedition would disintegrate before it could set out. William’s father, Robert the Magnificent, had suffered similarly a generation before, his ships unable to cross the Channel, so he had turned his soldiers around and attacked Brittany instead. But there was good fortune for William in the bad weather. Commanders of the Anglo-Saxon fleet on the south coast felt it marked the end of the fighting season and sent their ships into hibernation. Then, while the Normans were forced to bide their time on their side of the Channel, Harold and his army were called away to fight elsewhere.

Harold’s younger brother, Tostig, had disgraced himself through his cruelty when serving as the earl of Northumbria, and had been declared an outlaw. Having failed to secure the aid of his brother-in-law, the count of Flanders, or of William of Normandy, Tostig had eventually persuaded the warrior Norwegian king, Harald Hardrada, to join him in an invasion of England. Ten thousand Norsemen sailed up the Humber in three hundred ships, defeating an Anglo-Saxon army at Fulford before occupying York.

Harold marched north at once, surprising the invaders at Stamford Bridge with a bold attack early on 25 September 1066. The Anglo-Saxon army won the hard-fought contest, with Hardrada and Tostig in the mounds of enemy dead: fewer than a thousand of the invaders managed to get away, although Hardrada’s son Olaf was among them, spared by Harold. The euphoria of crushing victory soon evaporated. News arrived that William and his Norman army had landed at Pevensey. The Anglo-Saxons wheeled round to meet the invaders, and marched 260 miles south as quickly as possible, gathering whatever reinforcements they could as they went.

The Battle of Hastings was fought on 14 October 1066, just nineteen days after Stamford Bridge. For much of the day it proved an even struggle. The two armies matched one another for bravery and military skill, and their infantry units locked together with discipline and grit, neither side able to gain the advantage. However, when some of the Normans appeared to flee the battlefield, the Anglo-Saxons broke ranks in pursuit. They then found themselves exposed to William’s waiting cavalry, which cut them down.

There were very few prisoners taken that day, Harold and his men choosing to fight to the death in defeat, as was the Anglo-Saxon custom. William of Jumièges, a Norman monk writing very soon after the battle, recorded Harold falling in the final clash of the day, ‘covered in deadly wounds’. The Song of the Battle of Hastings, a Norman celebration of the victory that was also written at the time, reported Harold being dispatched by four knights, including Duke William, who deliberately rode at the point where Harold’s banner flew.[fn2]

Some of the English wanted Edgar Ætheling[fn3] to be their king. The fifteen-year-old was a great-nephew of Edward the Confessor and a grandson of Edmund Ironside – a celebrated king whose staunch resistance to Danish invaders explains his nickname. But many of the fighting men who might have supported Edgar’s claim lay dead on the battlefield at Hastings. While he was proclaimed king by the Witan – the gathering of the most powerful nobles and churchmen in England – Edgar would never be crowned.

The victorious Normans pushed north, claiming London after some resistance around Southwark, before Anglo-Saxon leaders submitted to William in Wallingford and Berkhamsted. On Christmas Day 1066 Westminster Abbey witnessed its third momentous royal ceremony of the year. William was crowned king of England by Ealdred, Archbishop of York, the English Church endorsing the validity of his claim as the pope had done beforehand.

At the height of the ceremony the congregation was asked by Archbishop Ealdred (in English), and by Geoffrey, Bishop of Coutances (in French), if it accepted William on the throne. The Anglo-Saxon leaders present bellowed their loud approval, as was their tradition. But Norman soldiers standing guard outside the abbey mistook the clamour for the launch of an uprising. They started to torch the surrounding buildings. The congregation and most of the priests fled in terror, leaving William to complete the service with ‘only the bishops and a few monks and clergy’ on hand. It was noted how, with all the drama unfurling around him outside, the new warrior-king shook with fear.

Fear was an emotion that William was more used to provoking in others than experiencing himself. He began establishing his rule in the wake of Hastings by culling what remained of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. In its place came his own lords, knights and prelates, whom he rewarded with captured territories that they could control and grow rich from. Even Stephen FitzAirard, the captain of the Mora, received his share: he was granted lands in Berkshire.

Castles sprouted up across the kingdom, tightening William’s hold on England and helping to guard the borders with Wales and Scotland. The Anglo-Saxons had some strongholds, erected on the sites of Roman ruins, but these were basic when compared with the Norman motte and bailey castles,[fn4] which were easy to erect and hard to overcome.

By the end of the Conqueror’s reign, in 1087, there were thirty-six major castles (including first-rate ones, partially made of stone), as far afield as Rochester in the south-east, Corfe in the south and Bamburgh in the north-east, as well as a thick thread of lesser fortresses draped across the land. At their fulcrum stood the Tower of London, constructed on the site of a Roman fort. Together these garrisons placed a chokehold on Anglo-Saxon resistance to Norman rule so successful that, Henry of Huntingdon recorded, ‘there was scarcely a noble of English descent in England, but all had been reduced to servitude and lamentation, and it was even disgraceful to be called English’.[4]

Anxious that Scandinavian forces might cross the North Sea again, seeking to overthrow his rule, William decided to deprive any future invaders of food and supplies, other than those they could stow in their warships. So, in the winter of 1069–70, he took his armies to lay waste to the north. The entire population of England at this time was perhaps 1.5 million to 2 million, and of these roughly 100,000 now perished, as the Normans destroyed villages and farms in a scorched-earth policy.

So thorough was the destruction that it was still clearly evident in 1086, the year when royal officials finished Domesday Book – a record of ownership, resources and wealth in William’s England, laid out parish by parish. Its pages show that the north remained devastated, sixteen years on from the Conqueror’s shattering aggression. The greatest chronicler of this age, William of Malmesbury, writing half a century after ‘the harrying of the north’, found evidence of its prior desolation. The continued scarcity of resources in the region so long afterwards is testimony to the ruthlessness of the Conqueror: nothing would be allowed to threaten his dynasty. He wanted his descendants to remain the undisputed rulers of England and Normandy for generations to come.

TWO

Youngest Son

The Normans are an untamed race and, unless they are held in check by a firm ruler, they are all too ready to do wrong.

Orderic Vitalis, Anglo-Norman monk and chronicler (1075–c.1142)

Henry I of England’s life story starts with unanswerable questions. He is generally believed to have been the youngest child of the Conqueror (there were four sons and five or six daughters), and he was probably born in northern England. Tradition suggests Henry’s birthplace was Selby, in Yorkshire, but there is no written record to support this. We do not know the day (or even the year) of his birth but, from references to a birthday tribute four decades later, it is likely it was in the last few weeks of the year. It seems probable, through a process of elimination and an understanding of key moments in his later life, that the year was 1068, but 1069 is possible too.

We do know for certain that Henry was much the youngest of the Conqueror’s four sons: although these royal children’s birth dates are similarly unrecorded, with Robert being born in 1052 or 1054, Richard in 1054 or 1056, and William Rufus at some point between 1056 and 1060.

As the only son of the Conqueror to appear after his triumph at Hastings, Henry was alone in being born ‘in the purple’ – that is, after his father began to rule as a king. Henry was as mindful of this differentiation as his brothers were dismissive of it. He felt it set him apart in importance from the older children, calling on a tradition with roots that extend back to the ninth century at least.

The Conqueror’s eldest son, Robert, was, according to William of Malmesbury, considered ‘a youth of proven valour’, by the year 1066. We know the names of three of his childhood tutors: Raturius, who served as ‘an adviser on children’; Tetbold, ‘a teacher of literature’; and, later, Hilgerius, ‘a master of boys’.

While being groomed to rule, Robert was teased at home. He received the nickname ‘Curthose’ from his father, on account of his short legs. We know, from examination of the single thigh bone that survived a sixteenth-century desecration of his grave, that William the Conqueror stood probably five foot ten inches tall. Robert may have inherited his more truncated form from his mother: Matilda of Flanders was five foot, which was two or three inches shorter than was average for a woman at the time. Robert Wace, a reliable chronicler from the Channel Islands, writing in the second half of the twelfth century, recorded of Curthose that: ‘He was a small man, but burly, with short legs and big bones.’[1] Others picked up on these features, calling him ‘Gambaron’, or ‘Fat Legs’.

The second son, Richard of Normandy, was good looking and popular. His father planned to give him the Norman title of count of the Cotentin when he came of age but, ‘to the great grief of many’, it was recorded, he died ‘when a youth who had not yet received the belt of knighthood’.[2]

Richard met his premature end while hunting in the New Forest, crushed between the branch of a hazel tree and the pommel of his saddle. He died a week later. While his brothers’ exploits are well known, Richard’s brief life remains an indistinct footnote to history. Born ten or twelve years before the Conquest, he died at some point in his late teens and he was buried in Winchester – a Norman princeling, committed to the soil of the ancient capital of Wessex.

William, the third-born son, was known as ‘Rufus’, probably on account of his ruddy complexion, or because, as a child, he had inherited the red hair of his father. William Rufus’s turned blond as he grew older, and he wore it with a centre parting, framing his forehead in an inverted ‘V’ above flecked eyes. Rufus was also of a robust build, which would extend to a protruding belly as he grew older and began to run to fat. Daring, energetic, loyal and fun-loving, Rufus would be his father’s favourite son.

All the boys inherited the bull-like physique of William the Conqueror, whose strength was such it was said that, in archery, he could fully draw back bows that others simply could not bend. With this muscularity went Christianity: William ensured that all his children were raised from their earliest years with piety at the centre of their existence. Daily Mass became a feature of the royal court from the Conqueror’s time onwards, and he liked to conclude his day with the evening service of Vespers.

Despite their rigidly Christian code, the men in the royal family formed a dysfunctional unit. We see an example of the Conqueror’s three surviving sons falling out in the Norman town of L’Aigle, in the autumn of 1077. The teenaged William Rufus and the child Henry were up in a gallery, rolling dice with soldiers, when they saw the adult Robert with some of his friends below. As a prank they tipped a chamberpot full of urine over them, and Robert stormed upstairs to sort out his infuriating younger brothers.

The ensuing rough and tumble was broken up only when the Conqueror appeared and tried to calm things down. But Curthose felt far from appeased. The following night he left his father and rode to Rouen, intent on taking control of the ducal castle there. In this he failed, but it was the start of open hostility between the Conqueror and Curthose, after years of simmering resentment.

William had long had a difficult relationship with his eldest son. Robert Curthose attracted an entourage of ‘factious young knights, who incited him to rash undertakings’,[3] according to Orderic Vitalis, and who expected to profit from his generous handouts: these ‘jongleurs and parasites and courtesans’[4] had already consumed what resources Curthose had, and were living off a diet of promises from their highborn benefactor.

Eager to satisfy his followers’ greed, Curthose demanded his father give him control of Normandy. He had long been recognised as the duke-in-waiting, a charter of 1063 declaring him his father’s heir there, and he had been appointed co-regent of the dukedom – alongside his mother – in 1067.

But with that official status had come no increase in authority or wealth. William was outraged by Curthose’s cheek. ‘My son,’ Orderic Vitalis reports him as having said, ‘your demands are premature. Do not try to snatch recklessly from your father the power which you ought to receive from him in due time, with the acclamation of the people and the blessing of God, if you continue to deserve it.’[5]

Curthose stormed out. His Norman hangers-on began to be joined by powerful supporters from abroad, who were only too happy to sow some discord in overmighty Normandy. Disaffected members of the nobility from Anjou, Brittany and Maine came to him first. Robert then approached his uncle, Robert I, Count of Flanders, who was known to contemporaries as ‘an active man and a very daring knight’.[6]

Crucially Curthose also persuaded his mother’s cousin, Philip I of France, to take his side against his father. In 1078 the French king gave Curthose the important castle of Gerberoy as a base for his military operations. This impregnable fort, thirty-five miles east of Rouen, stood menacingly on the frontier between France and Normandy. Curthose garrisoned Gerberoy with unruly knights who used it as a platform from which to launch wild forays into his father’s lands.

During the winter of 1078–9 William arrived at Gerberoy to deal with the son whose men were damaging his interests and undermining his authority. In the ensuing siege the Conqueror found it impossible to force a victory. A battle followed. William received a wound in an arm and was toppled from his dying warhorse by Curthose who, on recognising his father’s distinctive guttural voice from behind the helmet, gave him a fresh mount on which to ride away. William of Malmesbury would later rank Gerberoy as the worst humiliation of the duke’s military career.

The conflict between father and son became a serious contest for control of Normandy. The Conqueror was understandably appalled and infuriated to learn that his wife, Matilda of Flanders, had been sending large sums of money to Curthose secretly, as her son battled the continuing poverty caused by his financial incontinence. In vengeance William ordered one of his wife’s messengers, a man from Brittany called Samson, to suffer blinding – the same fate that had befallen his biblical namesake. Warned of the duke’s intentions, Samson escaped the Conqueror’s reach by becoming a monk, a move that gave him immunity.