He of course also fostered the interests of his immediate family. He strengthened his authority by an intricate series of marital arrangements whereby his illegitimate daughters became aligned with the various ruling families of Europe. He married his legitimate daughter, Matilda, to the prince of Anjou; from this union a new race of kings would spring.
It was said that he was endlessly inquisitive about the lives of his magnates, and knew of the existence of plots against him before the plotters themselves. He was a man of great natural curiosity, too, and was nicknamed by one of his kinsmen ‘stag foot’; he could determine, from the track of a stag, how many antlers the creature had.
There was one significant event, however, that he could not foresee. It occurred on the evening of 25 November 1120. His sixteen-year-old son and heir, William Adelin, was about to sail from Normandy to England. His party went aboard the White Ship in a festive atmosphere; the presence of an heir apparent always gives rise to gaiety. The crew, as well as the passengers, were drunk. The rowers kept up a frantic pace, but the helmsman was inattentive. The ship rushed on to its fate, and crashed against a large rock hidden just below the waterline. The heir to the throne was drowned, as well as many younger members of the nobility. Only one person, a butcher from Rouen, survived.
A survivor, in another sense, was left alive. The king’s nephew, Stephen, count of Blois, was suffering from a severe bout of diarrhoea and declined to join the revelry aboard the White Ship. Since he would be crowned as king of England fifteen years later, it can plausibly be maintained that an attack of diarrhoea determined the fate of the nation. Statesmen may plot and plan. Learned men may calculate and conclude. Diplomats may debate and prevaricate. But chance rules the immediate affairs of humankind.
It was said that, after the disaster, Henry never smiled again. But that is a line from a fairy tale. More realistic consequences ensued. The problem of succession, for example, soon became acute. Henry had only one legitimate child, Matilda, and he fathered no other children in the latter years of his reign. No woman had ever sat on the throne of England before, but Henry was not deterred. He gathered the principal barons of the land in Westminster Hall, and ordered them to swear an oath that they would uphold the succession of his daughter. Henry had a voice like thunder, and they quailed before the blast. They duly swore. Yet what was unintended and unforeseen once more came to pass. The perilous consequence of the succession was a long civil war.
While hunting in one of the royal forests of Normandy, the king contracted a violent fever. It was reported that his death was hastened by ‘a surfeit of lampreys’, and indeed he had always liked marine delicacies. In one charter he allowed the bishop of London to take porpoises from the Thames ‘except the tongue which I reserve for myself’. He lay for some days in weakness and confusion; but he confessed his sins, in front of many witnesses, and was given absolution. His body was embalmed but the unfortunate and unskilful embalmer died from the infectious stench that rose from the cadaver; one chronicler, Henry of Huntingdon, remarked that ‘he was the last of many whom King Henry had put to death’. The corpse, leaking what was described as black fluid, was eventually taken to Reading Abbey. This was the abbey that Henry had established as a memorial to his son. Its ruins can still be seen.
It is hard to speak of his achievement in any very positive way. He kept the peace in England. He was a good manager of business, and helped to maintain the administration of the country by appointing what were called ‘new men’. These were Norman or Breton clerks ‘of base stock’, according to Orderic Vitalis, whom the king had raised ‘from the dust’ and ‘stationed above earls and owners of castles’. He worked them hard but rewarded them accordingly. They represented a new class of professional administrators or curiales who stayed in one place and who were not part of the itinerant royal household. They were a sign of central administration.
The king always needed to make money, and the intensification of the royal government was essentially another way of increasing his income. Goods, and land, were forfeited to the king. Plaintiffs of every kind could negotiate a fine, by which they purchased royal favour. This is sometimes described by historians as legal reform. One judge from Henry’s own court was very stern with his contemporaries. ‘From the desire of money we become tyrants’, he wrote. ‘Legal process is involved in so many anxieties and deceits that men avoid these exactions and the uncertain outcome of pleas.’ So much for the description of Henry as ‘the Lion of Justice’. The lion’s law was the law of the jungle.
Other means could be found of making money. The exchequer, with abacus beads for calculation and a court for the audit of accounts, became more prominent during Henry’s reign. The money came from taxes and tolls. A rich orphan could be sold to the highest bidder, who then became his or her guardian; a wealthy heiress could be purchased as a bride. It was just a question of seizing the opportunity. ‘The king enquired into everything,’ Orderic Vitalis wrote, ‘and what he learned he held in his tenacious memory.’
As the king, so the age. In the early twelfth century there was a steady increase in what would now be known as bureaucracy, the word coming from the writing desk or bureau. Written documentation now became an essential element in the calculation of revenue and expenditure. The laws, and other formal rules, were written down. The essential movement of the age was towards systematization and centralization. In this period the two central departments of the court, the chancery and the exchequer, emerged in recognizable form. The chancery, staffed by clerics, dealt with manifold aspects of government business from the writing of treaties to the granting of charters. The exchequer was the department in which all of the king’s revenue and expenditure were controlled. So by slow and almost imperceptible means the English ‘state’ was created. No one was interested in creating a ‘state’. No one would have known what it meant. Yet it was the direct consequence of all these disparate activities.
Henry had never really liked or trusted the English. He did not appoint any of them to high office, but relied instead upon his French clerics and courtiers. ‘No virtue or merit could advance an Englishman’, one contemporary wrote. Henry’s son, William, had said that if he ever ruled England he would yoke the English to the plough like oxen. It was perhaps better that he drowned in the Channel. Yet the English had survived, and the slow process of assimilation had already begun. The Norman settlers had indeed settled, and were beginning to refer to England as their true home. A whole world of English song existed. The English monks wrote histories of their foundations and the lives of their local saints.
Another force for the cultivation of England can also be traced. In the early decades of the twelfth century a new order of monks came from France into England. These were the white monks, originally from the abbey of Cîteaux, who were known as the Cistercians. It was part of their unique mission to live far apart from the ordinary habitations of men, and to survive by tilling the soil; the land was supposed to be their sole source of income, and they eschewed all forms of luxury. They were soon established over vast swathes of northern England, where they employed lay brothers as their farm workers. So large tracts of undeveloped country came under the plough. The fens were drained and the forests were cleared; more controversially, however, villages were sometimes destroyed to make way for fruitful fields. The Cistercians soon proved themselves to be excellent sheep farmers, too, and the local economy flourished under their supervision. They became the most significant group of woolgrowers in the country and, despite their profession, they grew rich. That is the story of the Church itself.