William the Conqueror is very hard to empathise with. His counterinsurgencies to put down the many rebellions in England that followed the Norman conquest make him sound like a sort of sadistic maniac.
Despite this, we were always told for the last 60 or so years that, when William died in 1087, some people at his funeral remembered some very surprising qualities about him. He was cheerful, he was eloquent, he was affable, they said – so there was apparently this other side to his character, which you might not necessarily associate with the brutal conqueror.
However, that was actually the result of Hugh of Flavigny’s Chronicle having been mistranslated – all those positive adjectives were actually about the Abbot of Verdun. So, we no longer have any really good evidence for a cheerful, affable William the Conqueror.
