THE NORMAN CONQUERORS AND THEIR SUCCESSORS 



not only of foreigners but of neighbouring English towns. Their real 

 importance ended with the thirteenth century. 



The Brothers' War. 



With all his faults William Rufus appears to have been a King with 

 quite a good appreciation of sea power, who made excellent use of his 

 Navy. His brother Henry was not so lucky in the beginning of his 

 reign, for no sooner had he seized the crown than his brother Robert, 

 who certainly had a much better claim, returned from the Holy Land. 

 Had he been as energetic as he was war-like he might have had the 

 crown, for he slipped past Henry's hastily-collected fleet in the channel 

 — only the agreement with the Cinque Ports permitted it to be collected 

 at all — and landing at Portsmouth made very good progress before he 

 was persuaded to stop and treat, and so lost all his chances. As he 

 was never very much inclined to keep the agreement that he had made 

 Henry was forced to maintain quite a big fleet in commission practically 

 continuously, and the result was probably very good for the country. 

 Finally, it was because Robert had taken no proper measures to secure 

 the Channel that Henry was able to cross to Normandy without difficulty 

 and keep him in prison for the rest of his life. 



The White Ship. 



The story of the wreck of the White Ship with the only legitimate 

 son of Henry I on board in the year 1120 has been assailed in its details 

 as fable, but there is nothing inherently improbable in the story and it 

 is worth repeating in its entirety. It may or may not be the fact that 

 she was built specially for Prince William, but there is little doubt that 

 she was commanded by one Thomas FitzStephen, either the son or the 

 grandson of the master of the Mora when William I invaded England. 

 La Blanche Nef was one of the crack ships of her day apparently, 

 pulling fifty oars, and FitzStephen begged the king, who was returning 

 with his court from Barfleur to England, to travel in her. Prince Henry 

 and a number of his natural relatives used her instead and started con- 

 siderably after the King's ship, but appear to have made a sporting 

 event of it and to have plied all hands with wine to urge them to race 

 her. In cutting too close inshore and trusting to the moonlight her 

 people failed to see the reef in the Ras de Catteville and stove in her 

 port side as she scraped along it. The fact that she was crowded 

 with three hundred people in all, most of them in a very fuddled state, 

 added to the panic, but they kept their heads enough to launch their 

 only boat and to put the Prince safely into it. At the age of eighteen 

 he appears to have had all his family's gallantry, and insisted on putting 

 back to rescue his half-sister. So many people attempted to clamber 

 into the frail craft that she was speedily swamped, and the only c-urvivor 

 was the butcher, who managed to float ashore on a spar more dead 

 than alive. 



The Encjisli Invasion of Ireland. 



Ireland had long been the object of various invasions, principally 

 by the Norsemen, who came in their flat-bottomed galleys that could 



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