William Fitzstephen's is the most appealing of the Lives of Thomas to the modern reader. Like Herbert of Bosham's, it stands apart from the other Lives, being based largely on the author's own observations or on information not found in other Lives. It tells us a great deal about Thomas and about the dispute which we would not otherwise know, most notably in his account of Thomas's life as chancellor, which is treated cursorily by all other writers, but also in his reports from the royal court from the time of Thomas's flight to France onwards. Fitzstephen's eye for detail is unrivalled by any of Thomas's other biographers, and his descriptions of the Council of Northampton and Thomas's murder, both of which he witnessed, are both highly informative and graphically evocative. His work is also packed with anecdotes and pen-pictures of individuals passed over by others. Fitzstephen is an elegant and erudite writer who peppers his prose, as most of the biographers do, with allusions to Christian writings, but he makes equally frequent use of classical sources. As an observant chronicler of the secular world, interested in the everyday, quoting pagan writers, Fitzstephen seems less a hagiographer than a biographer or historian. His world-view appears closer to ours than do those of the other writers, and his seems to stand as the best representative among the Lives of ‘medieval humanism’ or ‘the twelfth-century renaissance’.