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How the wreck of the White Ship plunged England into chaos

12 September 2020

9:00 AM

12 September 2020

9:00 AM

The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream Charles Spencer

William Collins, pp.304, 25

Never was a monarch so undone by water as Henry I. A fruit of the sea killed him in 1135: he ate too many lampreys, a jawless, parasitic fish that sucks its prey to death. But the tragedy of his reign occurred 15 years earlier. At the most ill-fated party of the Middle Ages, his heir — the 17-year-old William Ætheling (Anglo-Saxon prince) — drowned when the White Ship sank, taking nearly 300 of his friends and relatives with him.

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