A good man he was, and there was great awe of him. No man durst do wrong against another in his time. He made peace for man and beast.
The Peterborough Chronicle on the death of Henry I, 1135
Henry I
parents: William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders
date and place of birth: about 1068, probably at Selby, Yorkshire
wives: Matilda of Scotland; Adeliza of Louvain
dates of marriage: 11 November 1100 at Westminster Abbey (Matilda); 29 January 1121 at Windsor (Adeliza)
legitimate children: Matilda (the Empress) and William Adelin; more than twenty illegitimate children, including Robert, Earl of Gloucester
years of reign: 1100-1135
date of coronation: 5 August 1100 at Westminster Abbey
date and place of death: 1 December 1135 at Lyons-la-Forêt, Normandy
place of burial: Reading Abbey
Henry was the youngest of William the Conqueror's four sons and the only one born after the conquest, which made him the only one born the son of a king. His father left him no land. When William died in 1087, Normandy went to the eldest surviving son, Robert Curthose, England went to the second, William Rufus, and Henry received five thousand pounds of silver. He spent the next thirteen years buying, losing and fighting over scraps of Normandy, falling out with each of his brothers in turn. The monk-historians of the next generation gave him the name Beauclerc, "fine scholar," because he could read Latin, a rare skill in a layman of the time, though they probably exaggerated his learning.
The Death of William Rufus
On 2 August 1100 William Rufus went hunting in the New Forest with a party that included Henry and a French knight named Walter Tirel. An arrow struck the king in the chest and killed him. The chroniclers blamed Tirel, who fled to France and denied it for the rest of his life. Henry did not wait for the funeral. He rode straight to Winchester, seized the royal treasury, and had himself crowned at Westminster three days later, while his brother Robert, who had the better claim, was still on his way home from the First Crusade. The speed of it has led many historians to suspect Henry arranged the killing. Nobody has ever proved it, and hunting accidents were common enough.
Henry moved to win over the people Rufus had alienated. At his coronation he issued a Charter of Liberties promising to end the "evil customs" of his brother's reign: the plundering of vacant bishoprics, the extortionate fees on heirs, the forced marriages of widows. A century later the barons who drew up Magna Carta used this charter as a model. He recalled Anselm, the exiled Archbishop of Canterbury, and in November 1100 he married Edith, daughter of the King of Scots and a descendant of the old English royal house of Wessex. She took the Norman name Matilda. The marriage tied the new dynasty to the Anglo-Saxon kings, though some Norman barons mocked the couple as "Godric and Godgifu."
The Conquest of Normandy
Robert Curthose invaded England in 1101, but the brothers made peace at Alton without a battle, and Robert went home with a pension. Henry then set about taking Normandy, where Robert's weak rule had let the barons run riot. On 28 September 1106, forty years to the day after his father landed at Pevensey, Henry defeated Robert at Tinchebrai and captured him. Robert spent the remaining twenty-eight years of his life as his brother's prisoner, first at Devizes and later at Cardiff Castle, where he died in 1134 in his eighties. England and Normandy were united under one ruler again, and Henry spent much of the rest of his reign defending the duchy against the King of France, the Count of Anjou and Robert's son, William Clito.
Government and the Exchequer
Henry ruled England through officials he picked for ability rather than birth, men the chronicler Orderic Vitalis sneered at as raised "from the dust." The greatest of them, Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, began as a priest who impressed Henry by the speed with which he said mass. Under Roger the royal finances took the form they would keep for centuries. Twice a year the sheriffs came to account for the king's revenue at a table covered with a chequered cloth, on which clerks moved counters to do the sums. The cloth gave the office its name, the Exchequer. The earliest surviving pipe roll, the annual record of royal accounts, dates from 1130 and belongs to Henry's reign.
He was a harsh king. He punished crime with blinding and mutilation, and at Christmas 1124, when he learned that the moneyers had been debasing the coinage, he had nearly a hundred of them brought to Winchester and castrated, with their right hands cut off. The Peterborough Chronicle, which records the episode, still judged his reign a time of peace compared with what came after.
Anselm and the Investiture Dispute
Henry's return of Anselm led straight into a quarrel. The papacy had banned lay rulers from investing bishops with the ring and staff that symbolised their spiritual office, and Anselm refused to do homage to Henry or consecrate bishops he had invested. The dispute sent Anselm back into exile. In 1107 king and archbishop settled it in the Concordat of London: Henry gave up investing bishops with ring and staff, and in return the bishops did homage to the king for their lands before consecration. The compromise anticipated the settlement between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor at Worms fifteen years later.
The White Ship
Henry's only legitimate son, William Adelin, was seventeen in 1120 and already recognised as heir to England and Normandy. On 25 November that year the royal party set sail for England from Barfleur. The king left first. William followed that evening on the White Ship, the newest vessel in the fleet, with around three hundred passengers, many of them young nobles, and a crew who had been given wine for the voyage. Racing to overtake the king, the drunken helmsman ran the ship onto a rock just outside the harbour. William got into a small boat and was pulling away when he heard his half-sister, the Countess of Perche, crying for help. He turned back for her, and the boat sank under the weight of people trying to climb in. One man reached shore alive, a butcher from Rouen named Berold.
Nobody dared tell the king. According to Orderic Vitalis, the courtiers sent a boy to throw himself weeping at Henry's feet, and the king collapsed with grief. The later story that he never smiled again is a legend, but the loss wrecked his plans. His wife Matilda had died in 1118. He married Adeliza of Louvain in 1121 in the hope of another son, but they had no children.
The Succession
That left his daughter. Matilda had married the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V at the age of twelve, and when he died in 1125 her father brought her back and made his barons swear an oath, at Christmas 1126, to accept her as his heir. No woman had ever ruled England or Normandy in her own right. In 1128 Henry married her to Geoffrey, the fifteen-year-old heir to Anjou, the traditional enemy of the Normans, and the barons disliked the match. Matilda and Geoffrey quarrelled, separated, and reconciled, and in 1133 she gave birth to a son, the future Henry II. By then Henry and his son-in-law were fighting over castles on the Norman border, and the old king refused to hand them over.
In late November 1135 Henry went hunting at Lyons-la-Forêt, east of Rouen. According to Henry of Huntingdon, he ate a dish of lampreys, a fish his doctors had forbidden him, fell ill and died on 1 December. His embalmed body was carried back to England and buried before the high altar of Reading Abbey, which he had founded. Within three weeks his nephew Stephen of Blois had crossed the Channel and taken the crown, and the barons who had sworn to Matilda broke their oaths. The result was nineteen years of civil war, described on our page on King Stephen and the Anarchy.
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "Henry I, Beauclerc" https://englishhistory.net/middle-ages/henry-i/, September 30, 2026