William of Malmesbury’s histories have long been recognised as essential sources for the study of England between the eighth and twelfth centuries. However, William also wrote theological and exegetical works, and these have received less scholarly attention.Footnote 1 These include his Abbreviatio Amalarii, which is a creative abbreviation of the Liber officialis by Amalarius of Metz. Another is his commentary on Lamentations, the modern edition of which numbers roughly four hundred pages: sufficient heft to warrant consideration alongside the voluminous histories for which William is rightly famous. He organised his biblical commentary around three senses of interpretation: history, allegory and morality. This paper examines William’s use of the allegorical sense of biblical interpretation. Allegorical exegesis, I will suggest, is essential for understanding William and his writings, both in his exegesis and beyond.
In previous centuries, allegorical exegesis had already become a fixture of interpretations of England’s past.Footnote 2 Christians generally believed that the Jews had brought the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests on themselves through sin, and exegetes, preachers and writers of history asserted that the inhabitants of Great Britain had done the same. In the sixth century, Gildas’s On the destruction of Britain interpreted attacks on the Britons by invading tribes through a biblical lens of collective sin and responsibility.Footnote 3 Two centuries later, Gildas became Bede’s most important source for early insular history. In the Ecclesiastical history of the English people, Bede explained that the Britons’ suffering at the hands of the Angles, Picts and Jutes resulted from the Britons’ own sin.Footnote 4 England’s history, like Israel’s in the Old Testament, revealed a pattern in which God allowed foreign invasion and conquest as punishment for sin. So too, the Anglo-Saxon chronicle and the Ǽthelred chronicler presented the Danish and Norman invasions as events allowed by God because of Anglo-Saxon sin.Footnote 5 By William’s day, the allegorical sense of biblical interpretation had long served as a way for historians to understand foreign invasion and conquest in England.
In William’s case, this overlap between history and biblical exegesis was particularly indebted to Bede. While William’s desire to be Bede’s successor in history-writing is well-known, he also sought to be a successor to Bede in biblical commentary. In the Gesta regum Anglorum, William recalls a statement of Bede in the third book of his commentary on Samuel. As William renders it, Bede had said that even if his biblical commentary helped no one else, it would be beneficial to its author, because it would help him turn from sin and draw near to the mysteries of God.Footnote 6 Some ten years after penning his Gesta regum Anglorum, William echoed this reference in the prologue to his own exegetical project, explaining that the ideal subject at that stage in his life would be one that could ‘warn me off the world and set me on fire towards God’.Footnote 7 The exegetical inspiration that William took from Bede points to his dependence on earlier scholarship for his commentary rather than on contemporary works. Indeed, William’s commentary reflects no knowledge of other twelfth-century commentaries on Lamentations that were appearing on the continent and in England.Footnote 8 Instead, William took as his exemplar the commentary on Lamentations by Paschasius Radbertus, further confirming that he was writing in an older and venerable tradition of Carolingian exegesis. Compared to his innovative histories, William’s exegetical method appears somewhat conservative and even nostalgic.
While many scholars have sought to reconstruct William’s view of the past from his histories alone, I hope to demonstrate that allegorical exegesis is also an important component of that vision, particularly regarding bishops. The Norman Conquest had significantly increased the number of men from the continent who held influential positions in both the secular baronage and the Church, and William identifies this disruption in leadership in both his biblical commentary and his histories. He was often suspicious of Norman-appointed bishops, many of whom he depicted as driven by selfish ambition and prone to exploit the churches and monasteries under their care. These general criticisms grew out of William’s reaction to his own bishop, Roger of Salisbury, formerly of Caen. William criticised Roger obliquely while he was alive and more explicitly after his death. To cope with his own sense of exploitation and suffering, William read his experience into the English Church as a whole, and he used allegorical exegesis to accomplish this task.
His biblical commentary on Lamentations makes the point explicitly. There, William explains that the Norman Conquest was a result of English sin. He traces the pattern of sin and subsequent conquest back to the Old Testament and presents it as the experience of the people of God through the ages:
Nun. Thy yoke of my iniquities hath watched; they are folded together in his hand, and put upon my neck; my strength is weakened within me; the LORD hath delivered me into a hand out of which I am not able to rise: Lamentations i.14.
Commentary: These customs weaken armed peoples and overthrow fortified cities. They made the Jews, once beloved of God, no match in war, first for the Babylonians, then for the Macedonians, and finally for the Romans: clients in subservience, captives in defeat, tributaries in money. Rightly! Those who had been ungrateful for God’s clemency were being taken away at the whim of their conquerors on account of their pride.
These customs reduced us to a small number, who once were a people even if not many, at least to be preferred to many in learning and courtesy. Surely in us is seen to be fulfilled what the Psalmist indicated concerning the Jews: Scatter them by thy power, and destroy them, O Lord, my protector [Psalm lviii.12]. Thus, some of us, having been deposed, lost the glory of the world, some were turned out and sigh for their sweet homeland, and some, having died, took consciousness of their miseries away with them.Footnote 9
William considered God just in allowing the Jews to be conquered because of the sin of pride, maintaining that they had failed to heed God’s merciful calls to repentance through the prophets. So too with the English, who had brought the Norman Conquest on themselves through their own sin. As for English courtesy, John Gillingham has argued that the idea of chivalry in William’s histories was instrumental in the development of a twelfth-century English attitude of superiority over their own forebears and neighbouring Celts, Irish and Scots.Footnote 10 William’s allegorical commentary takes a different approach. In it, he turns this idea of chivalry against his own countrymen in the present, since their sin had led to their loss of status in the Conquest’s wake. The English had become like the Jews: the once great but now conquered people of God under the thumb of foreign invaders.
And yet, William did not go so far as to say that God had caused the conquests of Judah or England. Rather, God had allowed the wicked to conquer his people in order to chastise those whom he loved. As such, conquest was purgative and didactic for the people of God, and at the same time a potentially damnable offence for the conquerors themselves. William explores this theme further in his allegorical commentary on Lam. i.14, where he explains that corrupt bishops and kings who use their power to cause suffering are not really blessed, despite appearances; instead, the blessing goes to the sufferers. Notice William’s use of the first-person present tense verb, confirming that he sees the fate of the Anglo-Saxons in the book of Lamentations:
Commentary: But since it deals with the unworthiness of persecutors, let us remember that what we are suffering is not new. It is a defect of the world and generally of nature that the wicked trample on the wretched. If they were truly good, they would not trample. But God, using their wickedness well, reproves those whom he loves through them, for anyone generally throws into the fire the stick with which he beats his son once the boy has been punished.Footnote 11
The fire referred, of course, to hell. God had allowed the wicked to exploit the weak and wretched, but he would not allow it forever. Eventually, the weak and wretched, if sufficiently chastised by suffering to turn from sin, would gain eternal life. Their wicked oppressors, however, were in danger of damnation. This belief that conquest was perilous for the souls of the conquerors is in keeping with the assignment of penances for Duke William’s forces after the Battle of Hastings.Footnote 12 For William of Malmesbury, however, the guilt of conquest extended far beyond the Norman consolidation of political power – a process largely complete by 1080. Since the exploitation brought by conquest was still shaping his world, the damnation of its perpetrators still loomed as well.
William’s use of the first-person verb is not a one-off slip of the pen. It becomes something of an exegetical habit for him. First-person verbal constructions appear again in reference to first-hand experience of the damage oppressive kings and bishops could inflict:
Daleth. He hath bent his bow as an enemy, he hath fixed his right hand as an adversary: he hath killed all that was fair to behold in the tabernacle of the daughter Sion, he hath poured out his indignation like fire: Lam. ii.4.
Commentary: Have we not learned from our forebears that Christian kings and dukes have destroyed monasteries and abbeys, putting monks to flight, and have we not ourselves seen bishops do the same? We have seen church ornaments either sold or given to another house. This is the religion of our princes, that they convey the spoils of old monasteries to their own, and that they offer to God what they have plundered from the wretched population. Is this a sacrifice pleasing unto God?Footnote 13
The final question was obviously a rhetorical one. Kings and bishops were plundering monasteries in order to endow other monastic houses with the wealth they had seized – a crime William implicitly compared to the plundering of the Temple in Jerusalem. He contrasted this kind of behaviour with the virtues of leaders of the early Church, lamenting that in his own day pious motives seemed to have vanished entirely:
Samech. The Lord hath taken away all my mighty men out of the midst of me: he hath called against me the time, to destroy my chosen men: the Lord hath trodden the winepress for the virgin daughter of Juda: Lam. i.15.
Commentary: Their joys are only in the possession of wealth, and nothing ornaments a bishop as much as his rent-roll. Thus, while the people blush that their priests should prefer such things to the goodly, the prayers of these men are directed to covetousness, and the virtues are disparaged.Footnote 14
In another reference to first-hand experience of the plundering of monasteries, William casts further blame on bishops in particular:
Ain. The Lord hath done that which he purposed, he hath fulfilled his word, which he commanded in the days of old: he hath destroyed, and hath not spared, and he hath caused the enemy to rejoice over thee, and hath set up the horn of thy adversities: Lam. ii.17.
Commentary: And (oh, a sad thing!) outsiders are not doing these things, but the protectors themselves. The bishops themselves assail with all machinations those whom they should have protected.Footnote 15
While Lam. ii.17 frames the aforementioned destruction as an act of God, William’s interpretation maintains that it is human actors – in this case, bishops – who bear responsibility. When he applied the lens of allegory to Lamentations, past and present royal and episcopal corruption in England came to mind. His allegorical commentary drew connections between the conquest of Jerusalem and the Norman Conquest in order to understand abuses of power in his own day.
Similar threads run through William’s better-known works, such as his Gesta pontificum Anglorum. For example, let us consider the English career of the Norman priest, Ranulf Flambard. Having become a friend to William Rufus and justiciar for the kingdom, Ranulf promised to double income collected from royal tribute.Footnote 16 William Rufus rewarded Ranulf for this increased revenue by appointing him bishop of Durham – a turn of events that, if not an instance of full-fledged simony, would nevertheless have been uncomfortably close to it for some in William’s audience. Once at Durham, according to William, Ranulf began his episcopacy in cautious avoidance of sin, lest he provoke St Cuthbert’s wrath. But in time his behaviour worsened until ‘he grew so bold that he did not hesitate to drag away guilty persons who had sought sanctuary in the church of the saint, thus daring a crime unheard of in all the years of the past’.Footnote 17 Ranulf’s mercenary service to the king, reward with a bishopric and denial of sanctuary as bishop of Durham, not to mention his disrespect toward Cuthbert, exemplify William’s theme of the corruption and oppression brought to England by Norman royals and ecclesiastics.Footnote 18
An even more extreme example in William’s eyes was Robert de Limésy, bishop of Chester, who decided to move his see to the monastery of Coventry.Footnote 19 The diocese of Chester had become poor in the wake of William the Conqueror’s harrying of the north, and Robert’s predecessor, Bishop Peter, had moved the see to Chester from Lichfield in 1073.Footnote 20 The relative newness of the see at Chester and the general poverty of the diocese provide a different perspective on why Robert may have sought to move his see to the monastery of Coventry. However, there is no such ambiguity in William’s interpretation. He tells us that Robert ruled as bishop in residence at Coventry for years, during which he repeatedly used his monastery’s wealth as gifts for the king. In this way, Robert slowly depleted the once great wealth of Coventry. To make matters worse, Robert neglected the upkeep of the monastery itself, so that the roof was left in danger of collapse. He ‘stole so many church treasures that he incurred the charge of embezzlement, and a bishop would have faced trial for this offence, if a prosecutor could have been found’.Footnote 21 For William, Robert’s self-serving mismanagement deprived the monks of Coventry of their rightful holdings. By siphoning wealth from the monasteries within their dioceses, Norman-appointed bishops like Robert became agents of conquest, not unlike those who despoiled the Jewish Temple.
William’s Abbreviatio Amalarii offers a key to his jaundiced view of bishops. Amalarius of Metz’s Liber officialis was a commentary on the liturgy from the Carolingian era. Amalarius was the first theologian to apply principles of biblical exegesis to the interpretation of liturgy. He did so because he believed that liturgy, like Scripture, was an authoritative source for Christian belief in its own right. Confidence in liturgy’s didactic authority brought him into conflict with other Carolingian churchmen, such as Agobard and Florus of Lyon.Footnote 22 William’s use of Amalarius is another example of his returning to an older rather than a modern authority. Reworking the section on presbyters drawn from the Liber officialis, William rightly notes that Amalarius, through a multitude of examples, taught that bishops and priests were together responsible for organising the wider Church in the apostolic age.Footnote 23 William then adds his own observation, namely, that after the age of the Apostles, ‘ambition began to grow’.Footnote 24 He explains that, once ambition and contention had entered the Church, it became necessary to introduce a more hierarchical power structure in which ordination was bestowed by bishops alone. This explanation of episcopal supremacy is absent from the same section in the Liber officialis, where Amalarius instead treats the rise of episcopal power after the apostolic age as a matter of course. William’s addition no doubt reflected the kind of episcopal governance he desired from his own bishop, Roger of Salisbury. The point is not without a hint of irony, since William considered Roger guilty of ambition rather than a check against it.
In terms of ambition, Roger was a special case. He became bishop of Salisbury in 1101, but his reach extended far beyond the bounds of that one diocese.Footnote 25 He played a key role in the establishment of the Exchequer. The earliest recorded description of the Court of the Exchequer dates to its Michaelmas session at Winchester in the year 1111, and this description lists Roger among a group of fifteen judges of the court under Queen Matilda, who presided.Footnote 26 By the early 1120s, after the deaths of Matilda and William Adelin, Roger came to hold preeminence over the court.Footnote 27 When Henry left England for Normandy in 1123, he appointed Roger to govern the kingdom in his absence. Roger’s influence was so great that contemporaries such as Henry of Huntingdon could refer to him as second to the king.Footnote 28 In sum, Roger of Salisbury was one of the most powerful political figures in England.
Roger made his presence felt in Malmesbury in various ways. He became its de facto abbot in 1118, seemingly by deposing Abbot Edulf. Roger’s justification for doing so is unclear, and it is curious that William never mentions Edulf.Footnote 29 Roger continued in that role at Malmesbury for twenty-one years, from 1118 until 1139. His right to hold the abbey was formalised by Pope Honorius ii in 1126 – within a few years of William’s completion of his Gesta pontificum Anglorum, a work filled to the brim with examples of episcopal overreach.Footnote 30 King Henry i reaffirmed Roger’s right to hold the abbey in 1131, as did Pope Innocent ii in 1139.Footnote 31 Like other conquering Normans, Roger built a castle for himself on the abbey grounds sometime after the beginning of his abbacy.Footnote 32 Thus, he literally reshaped the landscape in which William lived and wrote.Footnote 33 Roger’s exercise of episcopal power in and around Malmesbury Abbey helps explain why William wrote at such great length about the negative consequences of episcopal ambition and overreach.
William gave voice to the plight of Malmesbury Abbey under Roger’s rule in veiled ways. In his account of the episcopacy of Ealhstan, bishop from 824 to 867, a criticism of Roger is unmistakable, though he remains unnamed. Speaking of Ealhstan, William writes:
I would be praising him unrestrainedly, were it not for the fact that, in the grip of a very human greed, he seized possession of what did not belong to him when he subjected our monastery to his schemes. To this day we feel the effects of the mischief caused by his effrontery, even though, since he died, the monastery had completely escaped the rapacity of bishops right down to our own times, when it experienced a similar crisis. It is so irresponsible to set an evil precedent. Its originator may die, but his example lives on … the robbers who take our property both plunder us and keep us oppressed, so that we are not even allowed to give free expression to our sorrow.Footnote 34
Ealhstan had collected Malmesbury Abbey’s revenues for himself in the absence of an elected abbot, and Roger did the same. This passage is the closest William comes to direct criticism of Roger while he was alive, and his reluctance to do so more explicitly is understandable. The bishop was too powerful and too close to be contradicted openly. Instead, William placed implicit criticism of Roger within accounts of other bishops, especially bishops who set precedents he regarded as dangerous in Roger’s hands.
In William’s final work – the Historia novella, written after Roger’s death in 1139 – he speaks more freely about Roger, and his comments show how negative his view of the bishop’s political manoeuvering had become. Take, for example, William’s characterisation of Roger during the contest for the throne between Stephen and Matilda:
I myself have often heard Roger, bishop of Salisbury, saying that he was released from the oath he had taken to the empress, because he had sworn only on condition that the king should not give his daughter in marriage to anyone outside the kingdom without consulting himself and the other chief men, and that no one had been involved in arranging that marriage, or had been aware that it would take place, except Robert, earl of Gloucester, and Brian Fitz Count, and the bishop of Lisieux. In saying this I would not wish it to be thought that I accepted the word of a man who knew how to adapt himself to any occasion according as the wheel of fortune turned; I merely, like a faithful historian, add to my narrative what was thought by people in my part of the country.Footnote 35
William clearly distrusted Roger on account of the bishop’s tendency to shift allegiances in order to benefit himself. Roger’s influence was wide, and many in the area of Malmesbury were swayed by his explanation for breaking his oath. However, William was convinced that he saw through Roger’s ruse. It was the sort of shrewdness that he had come to expect from his bishop.
In 1140, a year after Roger’s death, Malmesbury finally did gain its own abbot, as did other abbeys that Roger had held. King Stephen restored their monastic privileges, and William interprets this development as one of liberation for the monks of Malmesbury:
The monks of the abbeys that Bishop Roger had unlawfully held approached the king, and obtained the restoration of their ancient privileges and their abbots. In accordance with the terms of the privilege that the blessed Aldhelm had gained from Pope Sergius 466 years before, and had ratified by Ine king of Wessex and Æthelred king of Mercia, the monks elected as abbot of Malmesbury a monk of that place named John, a man especially distinguished by his kindly nature and noble mind … It was he beyond doubt who rescued it from slavery.Footnote 36
John had spearheaded the effort to convince the king to restore Malmesbury’s privileges, especially its freedom to elect its own abbot, and William credits him with the effort’s success. Roger had built a castle on the abbey grounds, taken the office of abbot for himself and claimed the abbey’s revenues: for these reasons, Roger’s tenure as de facto abbot had been, according to William’s allegorical interpretation, a period of slavery for the monks of Malmesbury. In John’s election as abbot, the monks were delivered from episcopal captivity and entered a new era of freedom. Much like the freeing of the Jews after the Babylonian exile, William believed that Malmesbury’s monks had found deliverance at last.
Roger’s abbacy is important for understanding the context in which William lived and wrote. William did not often admit the resentment he harboured for Roger for fear of exacerbating an already tense relationship with a powerful man. Nevertheless, the looming presence of Roger in Malmesbury strongly suggests that William’s broad interest in elite power and its abuses stemmed from experiences in his own abbey. From this perspective, William’s criticisms of nobility and bishops become a mirror for his view of Roger. Like Roger, wicked elites were selfishly ambitious and took advantage of the monasteries under their care for their own personal gain. Unlike Roger, good bishops were devoid of selfish ambition and exercised the power of their office for the good of their flocks. Allegorical exegesis provided a method with which William could articulate critiques of this kind, since God had allowed tyrants to oppress his people in the past in order to encourage them to turn from sin toward good works and eternal life. Unrepentant tyrants, on the other hand, could expect a more sulfurous end.
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