2 Bizarre Medieval Mysteries Explained

On the night of November 25th, 1120, the King of England was aboard a ship out in the Channel when he heard screaming carry across the water behind him.

So did a bishop standing on the beach he'd just left, but neither of them knew what it was.

The king asked around, got no answer, and sailed on, oblivious to the event that had just altered the course of English history and world history.

It would be the better part of two days before anyone worked up the nerve to tell him what he'd heard, and by then almost everyone he'd built his life around was at the bottom of the sea.

By the autumn of 1120, Henry I was the most successful ruler in Western Europe.

He was the fourth son of William the Conqueror, the one who wasn't supposed to get anything.

He'd taken the English throne in August 1100 within days of his brother William Rufus being assassinated on a hunting trip.

Six years later, he'd beaten his other brother, Robert Kurt Hose, at Tinchabray and taken Normandy off him too.

Robert spent the rest of his life, nearly 28 years, as Henry's prisoner, forced to watch his brother's ascendancy.

But for King Henry, it turned out that holding Normandy was much harder than taking it.

Louis VI of France backed Robert's son, William Clito, as the rightful duke, and from 1116 onward, the border was permanently on fire.

In August 1119, Henry beat Louis at Bremoule, and by 1120, he'd forced a peace that gave him everything he wanted.

The centerpiece of that settlement was his son, William Adeline, who was only 17.

He was the only legitimate son Henry had, and the entire future of the Norman dynasty in one body.

In June 1119, the boy had married Matilda, the daughter of Count Fulk of Anjou, which brought the wealthy French county of Maine into the family as dowry.

In 1120, William did homage to Louis for Normandy, which spared Henry the humiliation of kneeling to the French king himself.

Henry also had, by most counts, more than 20 illegitimate children, more than any English king before or since.

Two of them were on the white ship.

Richard of Lincoln was a grown man his father valued for his courage, and Matilda was the Countess of Perche.

The fleet gathered at Barfleur on the Cotentin Peninsula, and a charter Henry issued there is dated November 21st, so the court had been sitting in the port for days.

While they waited, a ship's captain named Thomas Fitz Stephen asked for an audience with the king and offered him a sum of gold for the right to serve the royal family.

Thomas had a pitch, because his father, Stephen Fitzherard, had spent his life as a mariner in the Conqueror's service.

The family story was that Stephen had commanded the very ship that carried William across the Channel in 1066, and Thomas wanted the same honor.

He had a vessel called the Blanche Neffe, the White Ship, and he told Henry it was fitted out to carry a royal party.

It had recently been refitted and was, by every account, fast, but Henry said no, at least for himself, since he'd already picked his ship.