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 one, dated 8 July (probably 1128), to the clergy and people of Tyre, the other to the patriarch. On his return William was accompanied by Bishop Giles of Tusculum, whom the pope charged with a letter to the patriarch of Antioch, bidding the latter resign the jurisdiction which he was illegally exercising over certain sees which were properly suffragans of Tyre. In 1129, at Acre, William granted the church of St. Mary at Tyre to the canons of the Holy Sepulchre. He witnesses two charters in 1130. His fourth successor, the great historian, Archbishop William II of Tyre, with whom he has sometimes been confused, says he was ‘commendable for his life and morals.’ As his immediate successor, Fulcher, had held the see of Tyre for twelve years when elected patriarch of Jerusalem on 25 Jan. 1147, William must have died between 25 Jan. 1134 and 25 Jan. 1136, a date which is further corroborated by the circumstance that he and Bernard of Antioch died about the same time, and Bernard is known to have been patriarch of Antioch from about June 1100 to 1135 or 1136.



WILLIAM (d. 1136), archbishop of Canterbury. [See .]

WILLIAM (d. 1137), bishop of Exeter. [See .]

 (d. 1143?), historian, was born between 1090 and 1096; a treatise ascribed to him contains the statement that its author was born on 30 Nov. ‘The blood of two races’—Norman and English—was mingled in William. He calls himself a ‘compatriot’ of St. [q. v.], which may mean that he was born in Somerset; that his home was in the south or west of England is implied in the fact that he was brought up from childhood in Malmesbury Abbey. He was already there in the time of Abbot Godfrey, i.e. before 1105; he even speaks of himself as having witnessed there an event, of which other evidence shows that the date cannot have been later than 1096. Elsewhere he uses expressions from which it has been inferred that he assisted Godfrey in the formation of the monastic library; but though this is not absolutely impossible—supposing the assistance limited to such small matters as a clever and studious boy of nine or ten might well be capable of—it is more probable that the passage refers to his labours in after years for the increase and improvement of the work which Godfrey had begun. Strongly urged on by his father, William became a diligent student. He heard lectures on logic, he studied medicine, and ‘searched deeply’ into ethics; but his chief bent was towards history. At his own or his father's expense he procured ‘some histories of foreign nations;’ then he ‘set about to inquire whether anything worthy of the remembrance of posterity could be found among our own people.’ ‘Thence it came,’ he says, ‘that, not satisfied with the writings of old, I began to write myself.’ His ‘Gesta Regum’ and ‘Gesta Pontificum Anglorum’ were both finished in 1125. By that time he had secured the patronage of, earl of Gloucester [q. v.] William was now, and apparently had been already for some years, librarian of his monastery. Between 1126 and 1137 he compiled a large collection, still extant in a volume believed to be written by his own hand, of materials for historical and legal study, comprising excerpts from and abridgments of various old writers, and a transcript of the Roman law-book known as ‘Breviarium Alarici,’ with notes and additions from other sources. Between 1129 and 1139 at latest, probably not later than 1135, he wrote a treatise on the history of Glastonbury, and the lives of four saints connected with that house. In one of these lives he speaks of Glastonbury as the minster ‘wherein I am a professed soldier of heaven,’ and, addressing its monks, he calls himself ‘your servant by devotion, your brother in the fellowship of God's soldiery, your son by affection.’ This may mean that he had letters of confraternity with the Glastonbury monks; or, possibly, that he was for a time a resident member of their community. In the prologue to a commentary on the ‘Lamentations of Jeremiah,’ written when he was, he says, ‘forty years old,’ he speaks of having ‘amused himself with history in his younger days,’ and feeling that ‘more advanced age and less prosperous fortune now call’ him to more solemn subjects. It is possible that this ‘less prosperous fortune’ may have involved a temporary exile from Malmesbury, during which he found shelter at Glastonbury, and that it may have been caused by some difficulty with [q. v.], who held Malmesbury Abbey as an appendage to his bishopric for at least