You're Dead to Me, Henry I

1st December 1135.

Here's what Henry of Huntingdon in his, at times rather fanciful, Historia Anglorum has to say on the death of King Henry I:

"Cum igitur rex a venatu redisset Spud Sanctum Dionysum ..."

Wait. You wanted it in English? Well, you are awkward sometimes. Still, I serve to please:

" Returning from hunting at St. Denys, in the 'Wood of Lyons', he partook of some lampreys, of which he was fond though they always disagreed with him; and though his physician recommended to abstain, the king would not submit to his salutary advice; according to what is written: men strive against rules and seek forbidden things.

The repast bringing on ill humours, and violently exciting similar symptoms, caused a sudden and extreme disturbance under which his aged frame sunk into a deathly torpor; in the reaction against which, Nature in her struggles produced an acute fever, while endeavouring to throw off the oppressive load. But when all power of resistance failed, this great king died on the first day of December, after a reign of thirty-five years and three months."

(Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, X.21)

Popular history would have us believe that Henry died from a 'surfeit of lampreys', but as we can see from Huntingdon's text, which one has to take with enough salt to make a lamprey palatable, he never mentions 'too many' lampreys at all, simply that he was advised not to eat them because they 'always disagreed with him', ignored it and then died after a 'violently exciting extreme disturbance', suggesting that, alongside such mighty and elegant rulers of the Western kingdoms such as the emperors Claudius and Vespasian, he shat himself to death.

There are probably all sorts of salutary lessons to take from this. Don't eat lampreys you found in a forest in France, for example, but if you do, make sure they are cleaned and washed properly. Whilst lamprey sushi is presumably divine, they are, after all, just fish; I wouldn't recommend eating them undercooked or even raw or, come to that, at all.

Whether or not we believe Huntingdon's account of the death of Henry I is a matter of some conjecture. It certainly has the matronly air of warning about breaking rules and meeting one's doom as a result and as such, the whole lamprey story might simply be a pretence to warn others of the dangers of such largesse. Huntingdon was an archdeacon, and so what better way to warn men against going counter the advice of those who know better, like those who warn against straying from the word of God, than inventing some story about eating lampreys and then shitting yourself inside-out.

Talking of insides coming out, that bit comes next.

Realising he was dying, Henry summoned Archbishop Hugh of Amiens, Robert of Gloucester and other members of the court. His debts were settled, and final measures were taken to bring certain legal matters to a close. He gave confession and then arranged to be buried in England, at Reading Abbey. The problem arose after the king died when his courtiers now realised they had to transfer a dead king, and one that had just spent the past few hours undergoing several bouts of extreme disturbance, from France back to England.

He was taken under a great escort of 20,000 men to the cathedral at Rouen where, under the knife of a skilled surgeon, his body was disembowelled and embalmed with 'sweet spices'. Presuming that the lamprey-ravaged entrails would be the bit to go off first, they were taken to the priory of Notre-Dame du Pré and interred there. Henry's body was then prepared for the journey home.

As always in this part of the world, the weather had other ideas, and for four weeks, they waited for a calm passage across the sea back to England. All this time, Henry's corpse sat, sewn up in skins so as to not offend the sense of those who approached it, in the Abbey of Saint-Étienne, Caen, getting progressively more 'violently exciting'.

Accounts say that the stench was so intolerable that the man who had disembowelled the king, which included taking out things such as the heart and the brain, became infected by the ill humours and died.

The foul stench and leaking fluids from Henry's corpse became so bad that buckets had to be put under his bier to catch the liquid as it seeped out, and the attendants tasked with emptying them had to wear heavy linen veils simply so they could bear getting anywhere near it without fainting.

These accounts all seem a little suspect and are probably more aimed at spoiling Henry's memory than preserving it. After his successor, his nephew Stephen, attended Henry's burial at Reading, England was tipped into a bloody and protracted civil war between Stephen and his cousin, the Empress Matilda; a period that became known as The Anarchy.

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