Henry I indulges in a few lampreys too many

It’s a curious thing that two words – ‘surfeit’ and ‘lampreys’ – are seldom uttered in English nowadays unless they are used together in an infamous phrase to describe the cause of death of Henry I. Of all the myriad ways it was possible to meet one’s end in the Norman era, it took a king to bring about his own demise by consuming ‘a surfeit of lampreys’. We can only speculate as to how many further violent deaths might have been avoided in the 18-year civil war that followed his untimely death had William the Conqueror’s fourth son had the willpower to temper his ichthyophagous gluttony. On a more positive note, Henry’s rash decision to fill his belly with this barely edible eel-like fish would eventually lead to the drawing up of arguably the most important document in the history of the nation.

Henry was born two (or possibly three) years after his father’s 1066 invasion of England. He seized the throne in 1100, when the king, William Rufus (one of his older brothers), was killed by an arrow in a hunting accident in the New Forest. No sooner installed he married Matilda, daughter of King Malcolm III of Scotland, and defeated the forces of his older brother, Robert, thus securing the throne.

So began Henry’s 35-year reign over England and Normandy. It was characterised by the monarch’s efficiency, a virtue only soured by his tendency to ruthlessness. All would perhaps have been well, had his only legitimate son and heir, William Adelin, not been drowned along with 300 others when a vessel called White Ship went down in the English Channel in 1120.

Matilda of Scotland had died two years earlier, so Henry swiftly married one Adeliza of Louvain in the hope of producing a new heir. Unfortunately, this union proved fruitless, and so Henry was forced to choose a successor from a group that included his daughter Matilda, his illegitimate son Robert (the Earl of Gloucester) and his nephews. The most likely of this last set to gain the avuncular blessing was Stephen of Blois (who was married to yet another Matilda).

In 1127, Henry declared that, on his death, his daughter would become queen. It was unusual to choose a female successor but there were no hard-and-fast rules laid down regarding succession to the throne and Matilda was the pragmatic choice. In preparation, Henry married her off to Geoffrey of Anjou, hoping to rebuild an alliance with that state. This proved a not altogether happy choice, since the couple turned not only against each other but, when they became reconciled, then turned against the king. They were incensed when he refused their requests to cede castles in Normandy to Matilda or to compel his Norman nobles to swear an oath of loyalty to her – moves that would have strengthened her claim to the crown. Normandy and Anjou shared a frontier and, as relations between Henry and his daughter and son-in-law deteriorated, the king spent his final months hurriedly reinforcing the border against his southern neighbour.

It is at this troubled time, towards the end of November 1135, that a desire to go hunting brought Henry to the forest of Lyons in Normandy. The king was in his mid-sixties – a grand old age in those days – and had habitually enjoyed unusually robust health. There is no reason to suspect that this was not the case when he arrived at the forest. What happened next was set down by the chronicler Roger of Wendover:

Henry… stopped at St. Denys in the wood of Lions [sic] to eat some lampreys, a fish he was very fond of, though they always disagreed with him, and the physicians had often cautioned him against eating them, but he would not listen to their advice. This food mortally chilled the old man’s blood and caused a sudden and violent illness against which nature struggled and brought on an acute fever in an effort to resist the worst effects of the disease.

The lamprey is not one of Nature’s most delightful creatures. It is a fish that resembles an eel and some species are parasitic, feeding on their prey by attaching their jawless sucker mouths onto them. The historical novelist Elizabeth Chadwick has offered a compelling theory as to why Henry’s physicians might have been so opposed to the king consuming this particular fish. The medieval outlook on nutrition, she points out, was to categorise all foods in one of four humours: Sanguine (warm and moist), Phlegm (cold and moist), Melancholic (cold and dry) and Yellow Bile (warm and dry). The ideal diet included foods from all four humours, which would provide the body with a healthy balance. However, those who were advanced in years were advised to err on the side of the warm humours – particularly the dry Yellow Bile. Lampreys, by contrast, were almost off the scale in terms of their perceived coldness and wetness, putting them at the extreme end of the Phlegm humour.

Hence it must have come as no great surprise to his physicians when Henry became seriously ill (it’s quite possible that the lampreys – fish that can prove toxic at the best of times – simply gave him severe food poisoning or brought on dysentery). After hanging on valiantly for up to a week, the king died on 1 December 1135. His corpse was taken to Rouen where it began to decompose rather unpleasantly. Roger of Wendover relates that, at length, a physician was paid a large sum of money to conduct the unpleasant task of extracting the king’s brain with a hatchet in order to bury it separately, as was the custom. ‘…notwithstanding that the head was wrapped up in several napkins, [the physician] was poisoned by the noisesome smell, and thus the money which he received was fatal to him; he was the last of King Henry’s victims, for he had killed many before.’

Henry had clearly not anticipated dying at this juncture. It may be expected that a man concerned for his legacy would have ensured a smooth transition of power after his death, and Henry no doubt imagined that he still had plenty of time to arrange matters to this end. He could either ensure that Matilda was in such a position of power and authority that her coronation would go unopposed; or jettison her altogether and give sufficient backing to one of the other prospective candidates to enable them to ascend to the throne unchallenged. As it was, at the time of his death, he was attempting to suppress a rebellion of nobles in southern Normandy who were supported by Matilda and Geoffrey. Thus, he was in the awkward position of being in a military conflict in which he was opposed by his daughter, the woman he had publicly chosen as his successor.

It’s little wonder that things went haywire as soon as the lampreys had wreaked their revenge on Henry. As the late king’s anointed heir, Matilda claimed the throne of England and Normandy for herself. The Norman nobles, for their part, favoured Henry’s nephew, Theobald of Blois. However, it was his younger brother, Stephen of Blois, who was first off the mark, crossing the Channel from Boulogne to be crowned on 22 December 1135. The inevitable civil war that followed lasted until 1153 and threw the nation into such utter disarray that the period gained the name the Anarchy. Such was the dark horror of this time that The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that ‘men said openly that Christ and his saints were asleep’.

Stephen, though a brave soldier, was not a slick political operator and quickly alienated the nobles and clergy whose support he needed to secure his throne. One particular enemy he made was Henry’s illegitimate son, Robert, the 1st Earl of Gloucester. As a result, Robert joined forces with Matilda when she arrived in England in 1139. Bitter and bloody war commenced, ending in February 1141 with Stephen defeated and captured at the Battle of Lincoln.

Opposition to Matilda in London meant that she was never crowned. However, her condescension and arrogance showed her to be as unfitted to the rôle of queen of England as Stephen had been to be king. Playing on the would-be monarch’s unpopularity, Stephen’s wife – who until recently had actually been Queen Matilda herself – marshalled her own army and war broke out again. There is a faintly comic element to this new twist, for it left both sides declaring their allegiance to Matilda, then having to clarify which one they meant. Sadly, violence rather than hilarity ensued, leading to Robert of Gloucester falling prisoner at Winchester to the former Queen Matilda. The latter was able to exchange Robert for her captured husband in a prisoner swap, and Stephen promptly declared himself king again. He and his wife, Matilda, enjoyed their second coronation at Christmas 1141. The war continued with neither side gaining the upper hand until Robert died in October 1147. With her key ally gone, Henry’s daughter retreated to Normandy the following year.

However, this did not bring an end to the bloodshed. The cudgels were taken up by Matilda’s son, Henry, on his mother’s behalf and the conflict dragged on. Eventually, the nobles became sick of the seemingly interminable warfare and took the expedient step of refusing to go on fighting one another. This sage, if overdue, resolution led to the end of the civil war in 1153, with Stephen and Henry being cajoled into signing the Treaty of Winchester. This agreement decreed that Stephen would remain on the throne until his death, when Henry would become king. Stephen died the following year and Henry II (see A king’s intemperate outburst is taken at face value) reigned for 35 years, just as his grandfather and namesake had done.

The Anarchy had been both a devastating and debilitating experience for the nation but it had one notable effect: it increased the power of the nobles to a point where they could force their own monarch into making peace. Just over six decades after the end of the war, the barons would flex this political muscle in boldly forcing King John to sign the Magna Carta.

And none of this might have come to pass had Henry simply leaned back in his chair after a lamprey or two and said, ‘I think that’s probably enough for now.’