The idea that English's orthography is crazy because it came into written use late doesn't really hold water. The ancestors of Modern English have all been written down for many centuries, even though post-1066 no-one was using it for a good while at court.
It's more that English as a whole is split between a Germanic and Romance ancestry, with the orthography of both sources being represented, while standardisation took place right around the time of a huge shift in pronunciation - the great vowel shift - fossilising an orthography that represented a bygone pronunciation.
In fact I think more can be blamed on English writing being standardised early than late, and then not keeping up with changes in pronunciation: the infamous cluster used to represent a pronounced /x/ sound - compare English night with German Nacht, or knight with Knecht, or freight with Fracht. All these spellings were standardised from a language that pronounced this consonant! If English really standardised late, then the likelihood would be that these words would not have a (written) consonant where the pronunciation doesn't have one.