Book Review: "The White Ship" by Charles Spencer

I've been looking forward to reading this for a while but it always appeared to expensive for me to buy. That's why, yet again, I have swung in when the sales were on. The White Ship is one of those books where I really felt like I was missing out for the time I didn't read it. When I finally had it on my Kindle, I dived in straight away and here we are. I am familiar with the story yes, but I also felt like I had acquired so much knowledge about some weird and odd details concerning the era and its kings.

You've probably worked out that I'm interested in English history and that's not just because I was born and raised here (though, that might be part of it). English history seems to have this fascinating amalgamation of random people walking in and out, taking the crown for some reason and then getting obliterated some hundred years' later. This definitely seems to peak with the Battle of Hastings, which is one of the events this book centres its first half on. We get a clear cut picture for what happened politically, and yes it's all that stuff we got taught at school. But, on top of this we get a certain amount of strange facts, as if littered into the detail. One of which being that King William's adversaries would make fun of his mother's humble origins whilst insulting her. King William won the battle and of course, had these people tortured and killed. That's what I call 'play stupid games, win stupid prizes.'

As we edge towards the 'White Ship Disaster', we get the story of Henry I and his brothers - who they were and which one the father (William I) doted on the most. Of course, the answer to that was William II (also known as William Rufus. There was an episode of Why It's Shifty dedicated to his death, which was odd to say the least). As we receive more background about Henry I, we find out how his father, King William, died as well. The King seems to have died after receiving a deathly blow to the stomach which seems to mean his death was long an agonising. The idea that King William was obese and in ill-health otherwise was not only touched upon but put at the forefront of the reader's mind, especially when it came to His Majesty's funeral arrangements:

'An even greater commotion blew up when the time came to lay William to rest in his stone sarcophagus. It had been carved when the duke was younger and slimmer, and it proved too small for his immense body. After much effort by the monks to squeeze him into the tomb, his guts burst open in a putrid cascade. The stench surged through the abbey, assaulting the nostrils of the congregation, causing widespread nausea. The abbey was quickly vacated, and the burial of one of the greatest men of the eleventh century was attended only by those clergy prepared to brave the foul smell of his rotten flesh.'

Yes, you read that correctly. The King of the post-Saxon English era was so obese that he could no longer fit into his coffin. A habit of being which would be inherited by his favourite son, King William II.

As we move further towards the disaster of the White Ship, we get a look at the fact that we don't actually know when any of King William's sons and daughters were born. We sort of take an educated guess at King Henry's birth year as being somewhere in the ballpark of 1089. This would make him the youngest, presumably, of all the children of King William. I find it quite interesting how we can't seem to put a date to these very important people. They came, they saw and they conquered and yet, documentation is severely lacking.

Of course, we have multiple references to the chronicles of Robert Wace, but a lot of his analysis was written decades after the fact (and the writer acknowledges this as a limitation). It would be like me writing about the composition of the song Rave On by Buddy Holly. It's all well and researched but, it would probably be more accurate to get something from the time and from someone who was actually there. We have no shortage of Anglo-Norman chroniclers and yet, we have a shortage of people who actually wrote down birthdays. However, we seem to know the day-by-day difference between the Battle of Stamford Bridge and the Battle of Hastings.

We get several glimpses into the rule of King William, again this is quite far before the White Ship Disaster itself but it helps us put it into some sort of political context. King William became the King of England very quickly after the Battle of Hastings and even quicker wanted to get his own people into land and money. He therefore had all the Anglo-Saxon lords killed or exiled, leaving all the land to his own men and giving generously in order to keep support. I enjoyed learning about the weird fact that the Captain of the ship that King William used to land in England also received a handsome sum of land in Berkshire for his efforts. I mean, this guy was just giving things to everyone - and he needed to in such a turbulent political era. An importance which cannot be denied when we learn about the fallout of the White Ship Disaster.

For those of you who do not know what the White Ship Disaster is, it was an accident that killed Henry I's eldest son, the future king of England. King Henry was distraught that the drunken partying had come to this. The screaming and the yelling was not, in fact, the party in full swing - but it was instead the dying cries of the young men aboard the ship. Yes, it was in fact a drunken car crash. The ship struck the rocks and everyone went down and, as people didn't normally know how to swim - it was destined to be a catastrophe. Many people would state that King Henry was never cheerful again after the death of his son, naming Matilda (his daughter who was married to the Holy Roman Emperor) as his heir. He had thus unlocked a battle between Stephen of Blois and Matilda for the throne of England. One that would be fought long after his death.

I'm going to end it there for this review because there were a lot of other things I wanted to say but then, I feel it would get too long and everyone would lose interest. The White Ship by Charles Spencer is an intense scrutiny of the political landscape which drew us ever closer to one of the most famed 'accidents' in British royal history until the death of Lady Diana. I'm also not going to say too much about the fact that Charles Spencer is Lady Diana's brother, but I will say this: if you're looking for a book about the early and deadly politics of England in the Norman era then this is definitely the book you want to go for.