King William's Death Research Paper

Also, in the same year, before the Assumption of St Mary [August 15], King William went from Normandy into France with an army, and raided against his own lord, Philip the king, and killed a great part of his men, and burned down the town of Mantes and all the holy minsters which were inside the town....This thus done, the king William turned back to Normandy. He did a pitiful thing, and more pitiful happened to him. How more pitiful? He became ill and that afflicted him severely."

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Peterborough MS)

William died early on the morning of September 9, 1087. He was fifty-nine years old and had ruled England for twenty-one years and Normandy for thirty-one more. There are two accounts of his death: the nearly contemporary De Obitu Willelmi by an anonymous monk of Caen, where the king was buried, and the Historia Ecclesiastica of Orderic Vitalis, which, even though it was written some sixty-five years later, is the more reliable. In Book VII, Orderic recounts William 's death and burial.

Six weeks before, William had attempted to capture the French town of Mantes, where the king, "who was very corpulent, fell ill from exhaustion and heat." (William of Malmesbury, a contemporary of Orderic, adds in his Gesta Regum Anglorum that William, his stomach protruding over the forward part of his saddle, was injured when he

"I treated the native inhabitants of the kingdom with unreasonable severity, cruelly oppressed high and low, unjustly disinherited many, and caused the death of thousands by starvation and war, especially in Yorkshire....In mad fury I descended on the English of the north like a raging lion, and ordered that their homes and crops with all their equipment and furnishings should be burnt at once and their great flocks and herds of sheep and cattle slaughtered everywhere. So I chastised a great multitude of men and women with the lash of starvation and, alas! was the cruel murderer of many thousands, both young and old, of this fair