. The
weather was calm and bright with moonlight, and as the young princes
urged their captain to row harder after their father's ship, he took a
short cut along the treacherous coast, and the boat split open on a
rock on the night of the 25th of November. The only survivor was a
butcher of Rouen, called Berold, or Gueroult as Robert Wace gives the
name,

"Cil Gueroult de Roem esteit
Machecrier ert, la char vendeit"....

and he was only preserved because of the thick clothes he wore through
the frost of the night, to be rescued by some fishermen next morning.

"Un pelicon avit vestu
Ki del grant freit l'ont defendu;
Iver esteit, grant freit faiseit,"

says the "Roman de Rou" (15,319), so that in the Rue Massacre (close
to the Rue Grosse Horloge) at Rouen, one home was gladdened with good
news after a catastrophe that threw at least three courts into
mourning, and gave the succession of the English throne to the great
house of the Plantagenets of Maine.

Rouen had not remained entirely submissive to the Lion of Justice. In
1109 the King of France encouraged yet another rising of the citizens
in Rouen and elsewhere against feudal power. And after the wreck of
the White Ship, Fulk of Anjou took the opportunity to push the claims
of Duke Robert's son both in England and Normandy, but the rebels were
badly beaten at Bourgtheroulde (between Seine and Rille), and the Lion
of Justice held a court in Rouen to judge them. Some were imprisoned
in his Tower by the Seine, and some in Gloucester, while a satiric
poet, named Luke of Barre, paid the penalty of being a pioneer in
scoffing politics by having his eyes put out. At Henry's death in
1135, Matilda's infant heir was still very young at Le Mans, and the
usual anarchy followed both in England and in Normandy that was
inevitable when the direct male line of Norman Dukes died out. Of the
two countries Normandy had perhaps the fate that was hardest to bear,
for it was better to be ruled by any one than a Count of that Maine,
with whom, as with an equal, so many centuries of battles had been
fought. But the strong stock of Anjou and Maine soon took advantage of
the weakness of the Northern Duchy, and in 1144 Geoffrey Plantagenet
entered Rouen in triumph.

"Ceu fulmen ab alto,"

sings the poet,

"Neustria concutitur fulgure tacta novo."

To an inheritance so rich already, the boy Henry Plantagenet added all
the dominions of Eleanor of