Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/367

 should be amended thus: ‘Liber Sanctæ Mariæ de [?], Chronicon Fratris Willelmi monachi de Rufforth;’ that the historian's family may have come from Rufforth, near York; that he may therefore have been called ‘William of Rufforth,’ and that both the ‘blundering rubricator’ and Vossius may have transformed William of Rufforth, canon of Newburgh, into ‘William, monk of Rufford,’ a Cistercian abbey in Nottinghamshire. There is, however, no evidence as to the origin of Vossius's mistake; Mr. Howlett's emendation of the rubric in Rawlinson MS. B. 192 is merely conjectural; and the rubric as it stands, though obscure, might be interpreted in another way; it might mean 'the book of Brother William, monk of St. Mary of Rufford,' and refer, not to the author of the history, but to an actual or former owner of the volume, or to a brother who had given it to Rufford Abbey.

The author's sole ascertained surname is derived from the place of his almost life-long abode, an Augustinian priory established in 1145 at Newburgh, near Coxwold (Yorkshire). At Newburgh William was brought up from boyhood, and there he spent the rest of his life. David Powel's story that he was once a candidate for the see of St. David's rests on no authority, and is intrinsically almost impossible. Cave (Hist. Litt. a. 1195) says that, 'as some will have it,' William lived till 1208, and this statement has been repeated by later writers without Cave's qualifying words; but it is baseless. All the evidence as to the date of William's death goes to show that he died in, or very soon after, 1198. Some illness or infirmity had incapacitated him for active employment when, at the desire of Ernald, abbot of Rievaulx, he began his 'History of English Affairs.' The fifteenth chapter of the first book contains a mention of Roger, abbot of Byland, as 'still alive, having com- pleted about fifty-seven years of rule.' Roger became abbot in 1142, resigned in 1196, and died in 1199 (Monast. Angl. v. 350, 353, 354;, Monast. Ebor. p. 339). If the passage above quoted was written, as Mr. Howlett thinks, before Roger's resigna- tion, William has made Roger's tenure of office too long by three years; but from the context it seems possible that William may have only meant that about fifty-seven years had elapsed since Roger was made abbot. If this be his meaning, and if his reckoning be correct, the words cannot have been written earlier than 1198, and in that case the whole of William's history would seem to have been put into its present form in a very few months; for it ends abruptly with a record of an event which took place in May 1198, and shows no trace of later re- vision. Probably it was brought to an end by the author's death.

The work apparently put into writing with such astonishing rapidity must have been the fruit of many years of preparation; it bears no signs of hasty composition. Both in substance and in form it is the finest historical work left to us by an Englishman of the twelfth century. Ernald, says William, 'bade me write down, for the instruction and ad- monition of posterity, the memorable things of which our own times have been so full.' The spirit in which the author entered upon his task shows itself in his preface, which contains a vigorous denunciation of the injury done to historic truth by Geoffrey of Monmouth [q. v.] and his followers, and a keen criticism of the fictions which they palmed off on their contemporaries as the early history of Britain. For William that history begins with Gildas and Baeda. After alluding to 'those who have carried on the series of dates and events from Baeda to our own day' by which, though he nowhere names them, he probably means Symeon of Durham and Henry of Huntingdon he states how he proposes to take up the work enjoined upon him, 'briefly running through the times from the coming of the Normans to the death of Henry I, forasmuch as I know that others have brought down the story of England thus far, and beginning a fuller narrative with the accession of Stephen.' Accordingly his first book consists of a short introductory sketch of the history from 1066 to 1135, and a more detailed account of the years 1136- 1154. Book ii. covers the reign of Henry II from his accession to 1174; book iii. continues the story to Henry's death, 1189; book iv. deals with the reign of Richard I down to his second coronation in 1194, and book v. deals with the remaining years to May 1198. For the framework of book i. William seems to have used Henry of Huntingdon; the account of the Scottish war of 1173-4 in book ii. maybe based upon the poem of Jordan Fantosme, but it is more likely that William and Jordan worked from the same materials. It has been suggested (, Itinerarium, pref. p. lxix;, i. pref. p. xxvii) that the chapters in books iv. and v. relating to the affairs of Palestine are summarised either from the 'Itinerarium Regis Ricardi' or from a French poem with which the 'Itinerarium' is closely connected, and which has recently been published in full by M. Gaston Paris, under the title of 'L'Estoire de la Guerre Sainte, par Ambroise.' There are chronological reasons for doubting whether