THE SCENE: William the Conqueror, one of the most powerful men in Europe at the time of his death, wasn’t able to command the same respect as a corpse, when he was unable to be buried in his preferred burial ground because a (metaphorical) “living dog” had claimed it first.
THE TEXT: Thus William slept with his fathers; a man from childhood enterprising in arms, great in mind, blessed with success, and the ornament of bastardy. He lies buried at Caen, in the monastery of the protomartyr Stephen, which he had entirely built, and splendidly endowed. I learn, moreover, from credible relation, that a remarkable occurrence took place at his funeral. For when the celebration of his obsequies was concluded, and the body was about to be consigned to its destined receptacle, a man approached, and terribly invoking the name of the Almighty, forbade his burial in that place.
“That ground,” he exclaimed, “is mine by ancestral right, which the king took from me by force, when he was building the monastery; and never afterwards has he made me any compensation for it.” All present were astonished at the judgment of God, deeming it done as an express manifestation of the emptiness of transitory domination — that this most potent prince, whose sway, during life, extended so far, could not, when dead, obtain quiet possession of ground enough for his own body. Finally, all were so moved by this claim, that they first satisfied this living dog, as the better of the two, according to his demands, and then performed all due solemnities to the dead lion.
Indeed, whatever degree of glory among men this Christian man obtained, by attacking, in hostile manner, harmless Christians, and gaining to himself a kingdom by Christian blood, the same was his degree of guilt in the sight of God. A proof of this I have heard from credible witnesses. In the place where the vanquished English were slain, a noble monastery, called St. Martin of Battle, was built by the victors, to be a lasting monument, at once to man as a memorial of the Norman conquest, and also to God as a propitiation for the effusion of so much Christian blood. Finally, within this monastery, the spot where the greatest slaughter of the English was made, who were fighting for their country, after every gentle shower, there exudes real, and as it were recent, blood, as though it were evidently proclaiming by this circumstance, that the voice of so much Christian gore still cries to the Lord from the ground, which hath opened her mouth, and drunk in that blood at the hands of Christian brethren.
– History of English Affairs, William of Newburgh, 12th Century AD
