THE SCENE: There are too many great nuggets in this obituary for King Henry I of England. From a reference to his “concupiscence” (I had to look it up – and to be fair he did have 24 children) to the description of what happened to his body after he died.
THE TEXT: Thus Henry reigned, with great felicity and glory, thirty-five years and some months, at the expiration of which he slept with his fathers. He was a man adorned with many princely virtues, though he obscured them greatly by his concupiscence, in imitation of the lustfulness of Solomon. He was, also, immoderately attached to beasts of chase, and, from his ardent love of hunting, used little discrimination in his public punishments between deer killers and murderers.
His body, after the extraction of the brains and intestines, was embalmed, sewed up in skins, and brought from Normandy to England, where it was interred at Reading, a monastery of which he had been the pious founder and munificent benefactor. The man, indeed, who had been hired, at great expense, to extract the brain, became infected, as it is said, from the intolerable stench, and died; and thus, as the body of the departed Elisha reanimated the dead, so Henry’s dead body gave death to the living.
– History of English Affairs, William of Newburgh, 12th Century AD
