Barfleur Harbour, Normandy

The loss of the White Ship

A shipwreck just outside the harbour at Barfleur in 1120 brought calamitous consequences for England and France.

Henry I, King of England and Duke of Normandy, was returning to England from Barfleur.  With the King were his only legitimate son and heir, William Aetheling (Royal Prince) and many other members of the royal family and court.

King Henry had only just sailed for England when the 17 year old William and his retinue boarded the fast, new White Ship.  There were about 300 people on board.  Crew members and passengers alike had consumed rather too much wine before departure.  Within a few minutes of its departure the ship became caught on an underwater rock, and started to take on water.  Escape attempts proved fruitless, and there was just one survivor of the wreck, a butcher from Rouen.

The drowning meant that there was now no successor to the English throne.  King Henry remarried (the Aetheling's mother, Matilda of Scotland, had died in 1118) but was to have no more male heir.  On his death, the right to the crown of England was disputed between Henry's favourite nephew Stephen of Blois and Henry's daughter Matilda.  More than a decade of ruinous civil war - dubbed "the Anarchy" by Victorian historians - raged in England.

The final resolution, after Stephen also died without an heir, was that his rival cousin Matilda's son, Henry II Plantagenet, inherited the throne.  A powerful new royal dynasty was established in England, and in due course its claim to the French crown would lead to the disastrous Hundred Years War.