Exploding Bodies, Siamese Twins, and the Womb That Reached Across the Ocean: Writing the History of the Norman Conquest

​

      When it came time to bury the heavy body, it was discovered that the stone sarcophagus had been made too short. There was an attempt to force the bloated corpse into its resting place, but according to Orderic Vitalis "the swollen bowels burst, and an intolerable stench assailed the nostrils of the bystanders and the whole crowd." Frankincense and spices were not enough to mask the smell and so the rites were hurriedly concluded. And so ended William the Conqueror: a bloated corpse stuffed inside a too small sarcophagus.

 

   Such somatic imagery fills the histories of the Norman Conquest written by two Anglo-Normans, Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury, who weave tales of spewing Englishmen and greedy Normans into their histories of 1066.  Claiming to be clear eyed about both sides, William of Malmesbury wrote that the Normans had overpraised King William and the English had savaged him "with foul  calumnies." Stating that he had the "blood of both nations in his veins,"  he claimed he would "keep a middle path" in his account the Conquest.

   

    So these men present the events of 1066 as a conflict between perfidious and aggressively acquisitive Normans and intemperate and ungovernable Englishmen. According to William of Malmesbury, the English ate until they were sick and drank until they spewed. He blames them for their defeat, writing that it was rashness and headlong fury that led them to take on the Duke of Normandy and that “hot blood” has no staying power, especially when drunkenness saps the virility of a man’s spirit. Orderic Vitalis's Conqueror was a king who enforced the law firmly, a good Christian, but also a man capable of much cruelty, punishing the innocent with the guilty in the Harrowing of the North.

​

   William of Malmesbury describes the Normans as a people who hardly knew how to live without fighting because they always wish to “overtake their superiors.” His Gesta Regum Anglorum goes on to say they fleece their underlings but protect them from outsiders, profess loyalty to their lords and then on some slight offense act disloyally. His frank assessment of the Norman character is that  “as coin changes hands, conviction changes with it.” So the grasping hand of the Normans crossed the Channel with the Conqueror.

   

    But this had all been foretold. In William of Malmesbury's  account of the Conqueror’s birth, the future king's mother had a dream before the child was born in "which she saw her own inward parts extend and spread over all  Normandy and England." And as a new born baby, at the very moment he came into the world,  the future King William "touched the ground, filled both his hands with the rushes… and tightly clenched what he had seized."

​

    A mother dreams of her womb extending across the ocean- and her progeny fulfills that prophesy.

    

   However, this cross channel empire would prove problematic as the dysfunctional politics of the Normans bled across the Channel and it was within the context of dynastic disputes and civil war that these men wrote their histories.  And again, everything had been foretold. William of Malmesbury reports that on the border of Brittany and Normandy there appeared, as a portent, a woman, or rather two women joined together with four arms and two heads but joined at the navel. One of the women laughed and talked; the other cried or said nothing. There were two mouths but only one channel for digestion.  One day one of the women died and the survivor carried round her dead partner for nearly three years until the “heavy weight and the smell of the corpse were too much for her.” William is quite clear about what he thinks this means:

   

        "Some people thought that these women signified England and Normandy which, although

   geographically  divided, are yet united and under one rule. Whatever money these two engulf in

   their greedy jaws descends  into a single maw, which may be either the greed of princes or the

   ferocity of neighbouring nations,  Normandy, dead and nearly sucked dry, is supported by the

   financial strength of England, until she herself is  overwhelmed by the violence of her oppressors."

​

     The desire of the English for drink and the Normans for everything became the recurring message of these histories. So the Conqueror,  a man of “great corpulence” cast an unshapely and unkingly figure. And William of Malmesbury  reports that the king's internal organs ruptured when his horse jumped over a ditch causing his massive stomach to protrude over the forward part of the saddle.  

​

    Beware the unbridled appetite. Thus, a corpulent king, an exploding corpse, Siamese twins, and a womb that reached across the ocean became metaphors for the Norman Conquest in histories penned by these men as they wrote about the "body politic" in Post-Conquest England.

​

 Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Majorie Chibnall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).

 

William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, Vol. I, ed. and trans. R.A.B. Mynors, R.M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom          (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

​