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A review by sparkin
The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I's Dream by Charles Spencer
4.0
This book opens with a really powerful description of a huge tragedy, and though the rest of the text doesn't reach the same level of intensity, it does clearly lay out all the ways in which the sinking of the White Ship impacted the Anglo-Norman world and what followed.
It's a period that strangely little has been written on for a general public audience and I thought it did a really good job of setting the scene, with the context of the Norman invasion and Henry I's rise from landless younger brother to European power-broker. It also serves as a biography of Henry I in that respect, and that's where the tone sometimes feels a bit jarring as the author is entirely too admiring of a man who personally threw a traitor out of a window, forcibly removed people from their homes so he could use the stone to extend the walls around his hunting land, and allowed his own granddaughters to be blinded.
I found the narrative interesting but it was often lacking in insight or analysis outside of Henry I himself - for example, Matilda disappears from the narrative a bit too easily, and I felt she was somewhat underserved. In setting out the huge cast of characters, why they matter and how they're connected, the prose also sometimes becomes an endless list of names. That said, it's mostly quite pacy and helps to fill an important gap between the Conqueror and the Plantagenets about which many people like me know very little.
It's a period that strangely little has been written on for a general public audience and I thought it did a really good job of setting the scene, with the context of the Norman invasion and Henry I's rise from landless younger brother to European power-broker. It also serves as a biography of Henry I in that respect, and that's where the tone sometimes feels a bit jarring as the author is entirely too admiring of a man who personally threw a traitor out of a window, forcibly removed people from their homes so he could use the stone to extend the walls around his hunting land, and allowed his own granddaughters to be blinded.
I found the narrative interesting but it was often lacking in insight or analysis outside of Henry I himself - for example, Matilda disappears from the narrative a bit too easily, and I felt she was somewhat underserved. In setting out the huge cast of characters, why they matter and how they're connected, the prose also sometimes becomes an endless list of names. That said, it's mostly quite pacy and helps to fill an important gap between the Conqueror and the Plantagenets about which many people like me know very little.