Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel, where I bring you new
videos every week on all aspects of the past. Today on History Calling I’m going to tell you
about one of the greatest royal tragedies and dynastic upsets to ever hit England and one
which ultimately resulted in a lengthy civil war and a fight for the crown. I’m speaking
about the White Ship Disaster of 1120, which caused the death of the heir to the throne
and the demise of the flower of the English nobility, all in one tragic and brutal night.
Stick around to hear how this disaster happened, who the dead were,
how the few bodies recovered from the water were identified and what happened next.
Please remember to give this video a thumbs up and hit the channel’s
subscribe button with the notification bell switched on so that YouTube lets
you know when I upload. My social media and Patreon page are also linked in the
description box below if you’d like some additional History Calling perks.
It’s 1120 and the King of England is Henry I, whose father was none other than William the
Conqueror. Henry had married Matilda of Scotland (whose original name was actually Edith) back
in 1100 and they had had two surviving children, another Matilda in 1102 and a
son named William born in 1103 and often known as William Aetheling, or William the Aetheling,
William Adalinus or William Adelingus. I’m just going to call him William for simplicity’s sake.
Queen Matilda died in 1118, but she’d done her job by providing the all-important male heir and the
succession seemed secure. By 1120 young William was 17 years old and recently married to Matilda
of Anjou. His sister Matilda meanwhile (and I know there are a lot of Matildas in this story)
had been married off to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry V, when she was 12 and was now the Empress.
The other important player in this story who you’re going to need to know about
is Henry I’s nephew, Stephen of Blois, who was the son of his sister, Adela.
In November King Henry, his son, some of his illegitimate children (of which he had many),
his nephew Stephen and a whole host of other English nobles were in France, negotiating a peace
deal with Louis VI. When the deal was done, it was time to return to England on 25th of that month.
We have several primary sources describing what happened next. One is Orderic Vitalis,
an English-born monk then living in France who was already in the process of writing his book,
Ecclesiastical History, which would later include a description of that fateful night.
He tells us that a man named Thomas FitzStephen obtained an audience with the King before anyone
set sail and identified himself as the son of the man who had brought William the Conqueror
to England back in 1066. This Thomas had a boat named the Blanche Nef (the White Ship)
and asked that he be allowed to convey Henry to England, just as his father had conveyed Henry’s.
The King had already made his travel plans however and did not wish to change them, but
he entrusted Thomas with his son, Prince William and 300 others from the royal entourage including
one of his illegitimate sons, Richard and one of his illegitimate daughters, Matilda, Countess of
Persche (I know, another Matilda). His nephew, Stephen of Blois, was also meant to be onboard.
The Prince (who was just 17 remember) now indulged in an act of teenage stupidity which would get
virtually everyone who sailed with him killed. The sailors asked him for alcohol and he obliged.
Soon the mariners and much of the rest of the party were all rip-roaring drunk.
Stephen of Blois and a few of his comrades, seeing that the boat was full of inebriated youths,
opted to disembark, though Orderic also says that this was partly motivated by
a bout of diarrhoea on Stephen’s part. If so, his misbehaving bowels had just saved his life.
The King’s boat set off from Barfleur Harbour first, followed later in the night by the White
Ship with its intoxicated crew and passengers. Orderic tells us that the 50 experienced rowers
were ousted from their positions by William’s drunken marine force. Those onboard now came
up with the bright idea of trying to show off by overtaking the King’s ship. Those at the oars made
it fly through the water and ‘the luckless pilot’ as Orderic calls him ‘steered at random’, sending
the ship off course. Just a mile from the shore, it struck Quillebœuf Rock, which is visible at
low tide and underwater at high (the moon was out so had the rock been above water, it likely would
have been seen and avoided). Pandemonium now broke out onboard. Another original source, William of
Malmesbury, describes the ‘battered prow’ of the vessel hanging off the rock and though the
sailors tried to refloat the vessel, they could not. Some of those onboard were swept out to sea
immediately, others drowned as the ship went down. The Prince however, could have survived.
There was a smaller boat onboard and his guard immediately put him in it and launched. Had they
rowed for shore and never looked back, William would have made it. As they departed though,
William of Malmesbury tells us that the heir to the English throne heard the terrified screams of
his half-sister, the Countess of Pershe, ‘now struggling with death on the larger vessel’
and begging him to save her. Unable to bear it, he ordered his men to go back for her and when
their little boat got close to the larger one, it was swamped as panicked men and women jumped
onto it. As you can see in this image, it too rapidly sank beneath the waves and was lost, as
were all onboard, the Prince supposedly drowning in the arms of his tutor, the nobleman Othere.
The captain of the ship, Thomas FitzStephen had gone into the water early on, but he surfaced
again and called out to those still alive and onboard, asking where the King’s son was.
When they told him the Prince was dead, Orderic tells us that he responded that it would be
‘“misery for me to live any longer.’ Having said this, he abandoned himself to his fate in utter
despair, preferring to meet it at once, rather than face the rage of the king in his indignation
for the loss of his children, or drag out his existence and expiate his crime in a dungeon’.
Only two men survived the initial disaster; one was a poor butcher named Berold who came
from Rouen. Another was Geoffrey, who was the son of the nobleman Gilbert de l’Aigle. They
clung to the yard arm to which the sail had been attached and which was still sticking up above the
water (because remember they’d crashed on a rock close to shore, so it wasn’t particularly deep).
Sadly Orderic tells us, Geoffrey was unable to hold on for long enough and during the
cold November night the plunging temperatures and exhaustion got to him. He commended Berold to God,
then ‘fell into the sea and disappeared’. Berold however was able to hold on and he was the only
one of the 300 people who got on the White Ship to ever make it back to land alive.
Wrapped in a sheepskin coat, he clung on until morning when he was picked up by a local fishing
boat and taken back to shore and it is from him that virtually all of our knowledge of what
happened ultimately derives, for although the screams of people on the stricken vessel could
be heard onshore and Oderic even says that the King’s ship, far out to sea heard the commotion
without realising what the cause was, the level of detail we have about individual conversations
and the fate of Prince William and his sister can only come from someone who was on the White Ship.
Having survived this terrifying ordeal, Berold would go on to live for another 20 years.
A search now began for the bodies of those lost, but most were never
found. A few washed up on shore but had to be identified by the clothing they were wearing,
their faces having already started to decompose or be eaten by marine life. As writer William
of Malmesbury tells us, ‘delicate as they were, they became food for the monsters of the deep’.
Orderic Vitalis tells us that the wreck of the ship was dragged to the shore and its
valuables recovered though I don’t know if this is true or not. In 2021 divers
said that they had found pieces of it, but without definitive proof of the source of
any underwater debris and given that 900 years has passed and Orderic’s assertion
that most of the boat was salvaged at the time, I remain sceptical about their claims,
though I’m not saying that they don’t believe them. I’ll leave an article about this supposed
discovery linked in the description box below for you to read if you’d like to know more about it.
Back in England, when the news of what had happened arrived, no one knew how to tell
the King of his and the realm’s catastrophic loss (because remember, hundreds of noble families had
lost their heirs, not just the monarch). Though his remaining courtiers were in some cases almost
broken with grief at the loss of their own loved ones and the King was asking where his children
were and why they had not arrived, when in his presence Oderic tells us, the nobles ‘concealed
their grief’. Eventually the job was delegated to a young child who was brought crying to Henry
(who I think it was assumed wouldn’t lash out at a youngster) and told him what had happened.
Henry’s shock and anguish were so great that he collapsed on the spot and had to be helped to
his apartments where Orderic tell us he ‘gave free course to the bitterness of his grief’.
Not everyone was heartbroken though, for then as now the royal family and the court weren’t
popular with everyone and some writers were not remotely sympathetic. Henry of
Huntington wrote of the deceased that ‘All of them, or nearly all,
were said to be tainted with sodomy and they were snared and caught. Behold the glittering
vengeance of God! They perished and almost all of them had no burial. And so death suddenly
devoured those who had deserved it, although the sea was very calm and there was no wind.’
The disaster would irrevocably change the direction of English history. With
no legitimate male heir to succeed him, Henry now rapidly remarried in an effort to produce another,
wedding the teenaged and famously beautiful Adeliza of Louvain at Windsor Castle just two
months after Prince William’s death. The marriage was childless however,
though Queen Adeliza would go on to have seven children with her second husband so the issue was
obviously some later-in-life fertility problems on Henry I’s side. This is strongly reminiscent
of what happened to Henry VIII 400 years later and if you see my video on the Tudors’ fertility
problems you can learn more about that. It’s linked on-screen and below for you.
With no new male heir to replace the lost one, Henry now took the unprecedented step of declaring
his daughter, Empress Matilda, his heir and had his nobles swear allegiance to her. One of those
who did so was the Empress’s cousin, Stephen of Blois, but this was not an oath he would keep.
When Henry I died in 1135, Matilda (who was by then married to Geoffrey of Anjou) attempted to
make good her claims on the throne, but Stephen took it instead. What followed was a long civil
war known as the Anarchy, with Matilda’s claims only eventually made good in the person of her
son, who became Henry II after Stephen’s death in 1154. That’s a story for another video however.
Before I leave you, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my Patrons for their
generous support of this channel which helps me to keep making these videos for you. If you’d
like to become a Patron and get some History Calling bonus material, see the Patreon link in
the description box below. I’ve also had some questions about making a one-off donation. If
that is something you would prefer to do for any reason, YouTube also have a Thanks button below
videos with pre-set amounts which will enable you to do so. This allows you to post a customisable
and brightly coloured comment and get a one-time animation over the top of the video. Again I’d
like to again take this chance to thank you for your support and to emphasise that there’s
absolutely no pressure to do any of this. [Let me know below who you blame for the White Ship
disaster; whether it’s Henry I for letting his teenage son (who was a married man to be fair,
not a young child) sail without him, Prince William’s for allowing his sailors to get drunk,
or someone else entirely. I’ll be back next week with a new video and until then, keep learning.