Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/358

 fourteen years before his death in December 1139. In June 1139, however, William was on one occasion in Roger's company.

William seems to have been present at the council held by the legate Henry [see ] at Winchester on 29 Aug.–1 Sept. 1139. After Roger's death the monks of Malmesbury obtained (1140) leave from the king to elect an abbot. They chose a monk named John, who died within a year, and was succeeded by one Peter. It seems that at each of these elections William might have become abbot, had he desired it. Peter accompanied John on a ‘laborious journey towards Rome,’ of which William wrote an ‘Itinerary’ from Peter's report. In a fragment of this ‘Itinerary,’ preserved by Leland, William says, ‘Unless self-love deceives me, I have proved myself a man of ingenuous mind, in that I gave place to a comrade in the matter of the abbot's office, which I might easily have obtained for myself, more than once.’ He may have accepted the precentorship instead; for in later times there was a tradition at Malmesbury that he had been precentor as well as librarian. Meanwhile, he had gone back to the favourite pursuit of his youth. Between 1135 and 1140 he had made two recensions of the ‘Gesta Regum.’ In 1140 he was at work upon a new book, the ‘Historia Novella,’ and upon a revision of the ‘Gesta Pontificum.’ He was present at the council at Winchester (7–10 April 1141), in which the Empress Matilda (1102–1167) [q. v.] was acknowledged as ‘Lady’ of England. Matilda's escape from Oxford in December 1142 is the latest event which he mentions; probably therefore he died in 1143.

William was ‘a man of great reading, unbounded industry, very forward scholarship, and of thoughtful research in many regions of learning’ (Stubbs's pref. to Gesta Regum, vol. i. p. x). If he was exceptionally qualified, he was also exceptionally circumstanced for the pursuit to which he chiefly devoted his powers. The two great abbeys with which he was so closely connected were treasure-houses of material of all kinds, documentary and traditional, for the early history of England; and from the number of authors with whom he shows himself acquainted, even in his early works, it is evident that, what with the libraries of these two houses and his private means of procuring books, he had, while still a very young man, access to a much wider field of reading than was open to most of his contemporaries. His social advantages were equally great. Notwithstanding his monastic education and profession, he had seen more of the world than many laymen of his time. His sketches of town and country in the ‘Gesta Pontificum’ show that he had travelled not only over a considerable part of the south and west of England, but as far north as Carlisle and Yorkshire, and as far east as St. Ives and, probably, Bury St. Edmunds. His facilities for acquiring information, both orally and by reading, were enhanced by the fact that his mixed origin gave him the command of two languages besides the Latin in which he wrote. He was, moreover, especially fortunate in three of his acquaintances; the political history of the reigns of Henry I and Stephen came to him at first hand from three of the foremost actors in it—Roger of Salisbury, Henry of Winchester, and Robert of Gloucester.

William's most important work is the ‘Gesta Regum Anglorum,’ with its sequel, the ‘Historia Novella.’ The ‘Gesta Regum’ begins at the beginning of English history, and was originally intended to end at the year 1120; but the author carried on his work for five more years before he brought it to a conclusion, and in his two later recensions he fixed its termination at 1127–8. These later recensions contain no additions of any great importance, except a dedication to Earl Robert of Gloucester, and a series of notices derived from the history and charters of Glastonbury, and they differ from each other chiefly in the position given to the dedication, and the number and extent of these Glastonbury insertions. Both differ from the first version mainly in this, that the strong language used by the author in his youth concerning the great personages of the past—especially the recent past—is considerably modified by the greater caution, maturer judgment, or deeper charity of his more advanced age. To our real knowledge of the period comprised in the first two books of the ‘Gesta’ ( 449–1066), ‘his independent contributions are,’ Bishop Stubbs says, ‘infinitesimal.’ Of the third book (1066–87) the same authority observes: ‘Considering that he must have been acquainted with many to whom the main events of the conquest were matters of personal recollection, we might expect much more than we find of original information,’ although there is enough of this to entitle him to ‘the distinguished place of a primary and honest, if not always absolutely trustworthy, authority for the period;’ while some details of foreign affairs, such as the succession of the Scandinavian kings at this time, and, more especially, the account of the early Angevins, are of considerable interest and importance,