William of Malmesbury

The fact that the later chronicles begin to register Harold's actions as king only after his return from York at Easter reflects their concealment of a journey made by him at the start of his reign to put an end to the rebellion.

That expedition is reported in the biography of Bishop Wulfston of Worcester, the original version of which, now lost, was composed in Old English by Wulfston's former chaplain, Coleman, and translated into Latin by William of Malmesbury.

According to Malmesbury, Harold went north after his coronation to win over the rebels.

Over the course of the rebellion, a seismic shift had occurred.

The North had thrown off the rule of Edward and his faction, which included Tostig, Edith, and the heir, Edgar Etheling, who represented that camp's survival into the future.

According to Orderick, two planks of the ship shattered and the vessel went down quite quickly.

William of Malmesbury's version is the more vivid version, and he says the crew ran to the rail with boat hooks and tried to push the ship off, and that the oars splintered against the stone.

The prow hung fixed on the rock while the water washed men overboard and poured in through the seams.

In the middle of that, somebody got the ship's one small boat into the water and put the prince in it.

and it's a major part of the narrative.

That's a reminder that some of the other portions of the story that we can't independently verify might be more fiction than historical fact.

William of Malmesbury, writing in the mid-1120s, is generally drier and more political.

His memorable line is that no ship ever brought England such misery, and he doesn't say what he's most often credited with saying.

It's really hard to get into, but when the water runs out, you're in real trouble.

And as the water begins to run low, so we get William of Malmesbury, who's writing kind of in the beginning of the next century, tells us that as the fresh water ran out in Mont Saint-Michel, Henry sends a message to his brother saying, we're getting quite thirsty in here.

And Robert sends him a load of fresh water.

And William is like, what are you doing? This is literally why we're here.

I think they were, yes.

William of Malmesbury, the Norman chronicler, comments on the coming of the Normans and how, I think he said, in every city and village you could see churches rise up in a style unknown before.

I mean, they were building, they were building big.

Sometimes we get mistaken Impressions about monasteries such as St Mary's, they're thought of as being very inward-looking communities, little oases.

And when the vassal, if he owed allegiance to his lord, was bound by no ties to his fellow vassals, the system of feudalism could not fail to feed the worst passions of human nature, and the absence of an authority capable of constraining all alike involved for those who felt or fancied themselves aggrieved an irresistible temptation to take the law into their own hands.

But the practice of private war thus set up would sooner or later assume the form of a trade, and in the words of William of Malmesbury, things had now come to so wretched a pass that feudal chiefs would take each other captive on little or no pretense and would set their prisoners free only on the payment of an enormous ransom.

This military violence of the laity was accompanied by corruption on the part of the clergy, showing itself in a shameless traffic of benefices and dignities which, in brief phrase, fell to the lot of the highest bidder.

In such a condition of things, to drain off to distant lands a large proportion of the men who at home might do something to check, if not to repress the mischief, would be to leave those who remained behind defenseless.

When the business of the council being ended, Urban ascended a lofty scaffold and began his address to the people.

He spoke to hearers for whom arguments were no longer needed, but who were well pleased to hear from the chief of Christendom words which carried with them comfort and encouragement.

Three forms or versions of this speech have been preserved to us, one in the pages of William of Tyre, a second in those of William of Malmesbury, a third from a manuscript in the Vatican.

It is possible that they may represent three different speeches, but the substance of all is the same, and we are left in no doubt of the general tenor of his words.

His son Edward, later called Edward the Elder, completed it.

William of Malmesbury, writing in the 1120s, added that Edward had to buy the land from the bishop and canons of the old minster, and they charged him an exorbitant fee.

The two churches ended up so close together that when the monks in one were singing, the monks in the other could hear them, and the rivalry between the two houses curdled for generations.

It's in that context that William tells what I can only classify as a medieval zombie story.

Whether the cannons actually believed in the zombie or just wanted the body and its pilgrim traffic out of their building is the kind of question you can argue about forever.

Alfred's wife, Elswith, joined him there after her death in 902, and Edward himself followed in 924, and a younger son, Ethelward, was buried there too.

In 1109, Henry I ordered the new Minster out of the city, and William of Malmesbury says the move gave the monks a healthier and more conspicuous home.

The new abbey went up on Hyde Mead, a stretch of low, wet ground just north of the city walls, and in 1110, the monks carried their treasures out through the gates in procession.

Spicing his inanities with a certain witty elegance, he turned everything into a joke and set his audience to roaring with unbridled laughter.

William of Malmesbury and Guillaume IX, Duke of Aquitaine.

The Count of Poitiers was one of the courtliest men in the world, and one of the greatest deceivers of ladies.

He was a fine knight at arms and generous in his wooing, and he was good at composing and singing, and he spent a long time travelling through the world in order to trick ladies.

I think the Rufus thing is more about he goes very red-faced when he's angry, and he can be quite a shouty person.

Um, so we- we've actually got a physical description of him by William of Malmesbury, who's writing kinda in the 11th century, um, so the, the following century to, to his life.

But he says that, uh, William Rufus was well set, which is a polite way of saying [laughs] something.

Um, he's well set, his complexion florid, so red, that's where the Rufus comes from.

He, he finally secures Maine, which, you know, Robert has been trying to do for s- for several years.

It's William who finally manages to do this.

And, [clears throat] and William of Malmesbury, who's writing in the following century, is also insistent that, that William was planning a huge campaign into Aquitaine, that he was gonna invade Aquitaine and try to add that to the, the family portfolios.

You know, he's not short on ambition either.

So this hopefully will pull the whole thing together.

Now, I'd like to start, Mark, with, with one of the main sources, William of Malmesbury, because, um, he, he sort of creates, uh, an intellectual justification in a way for the Norman Conquest in that he calls the Celts on, uh, on the edge of Norman territory barbarians, and he focuses particularly on the fact that they still have slaves.

This is an important part of his rhetoric.

Well, I mean, people who listened to the previous episode might remember just at the very end, I said two of the things that the Normans introduced immediately after ten sixty-six were chivalry, in the sense of not killing your opponents when they surrender, sparing them, ransoming them, maybe letting them go free if they promise to be good.

And the other side of that is slavery, which the Normans had done in the past when they were Vikings, but hadn't done for a generation before the conquest and didn't do afterwards.

In a way that all the people in Britain and Ireland, all the peoples in Britain and Ireland, whether they were, uh- Anglo-Saxons or Scots or Irish or Welsh, slavery as an institution and war as slave hunt was very much the normal way of doing things, and the Normans end that quite quickly.

And so you get to, to, to finally get to the point you wanted to start at, William of Malmesbury, you get to a point, William of Malmesbury is writing in the 1120s, and so this is 50 or 60 years after the initial Norman onslaught.

Sitting in Wiltshire in the west of England.