Who was Henry I?

Henry I: Royal Reading’s Very Own King

Many Reading residents now know that Henry I was buried in Reading Abbey, but not many people are aware of how important he was both to the town of Reading and to the country as a whole. In fact he was one of the most influential and innovative monarchs of the Middle Ages, and in many ways can claim to be the ‘founding father’ of the Reading we know today.

Who was Henry I?

Henry’s date of birth is easy to remember because he was born in 1068, two years after his father, William the Conqueror and Duke of Normandy, won the Battle of Hastings and was crowned King of England on Christmas Day, 1066. Henry was actually William’s youngest son, but the only one to be born ‘in the royal purple’, and this would be important in his claim to the throne. His mother was Matilda of Flanders, with links to the French royal family, and he was given the French name Henri for this reason. His elder brothers had the Norman, or Viking, names, Robert, Richard and William.
Henry was the first English king to receive a formal education, as witnessed by the name ‘Beauclerc’, or ‘handsome learnèd one’ by which he is known. He was possibly educated at Salisbury, then known as Sarum, by Bishop Osmund, one of William I’s most trusted administrators. As the Bishop of Salisbury had a palace at Sonning it is more than possible that Henry came to Reading as a boy and would have seen the area between the Thames and the Kennet as an ideal place for a royal monastic house. The town had been royal land since Saxon times.

Lindsay Mullaney