William I ruled England for twenty-one years after the Norman Conquest. His reign is notable for the ruthlessness with which he secured his hold upon the throne; but also for his remarkable construction programme (Canterbury, Ely, Lincoln, Rochester, Winchester and Worcester Cathedrals were all begun during his reign), the church reforms he instituted, and the Domesday Book, the ambitious survey of English landholding undertaken towards the end of his life. Though William was rapacious, he was no kleptocrat: he poured tremendous energy and resources into the development of his new acquisition.

His reign is memorably chronicled in a manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle written at Peterborough around 1121. This is a copy of a manuscript (now lost) probably borrowed from Christ Church, Canterbury, to replace one that had perished by fire in 1116. The ultimate origin of this text is of more than passing interest, both because of the author's firmly stated views and because of the tantalizing clues he left to his identity. He was not friendly towards William, though he was willing to be fair to him. He was certainly a churchman, and one who ranked high enough not only to have "looked upon" William, but also to have lived in his household. His English is grammatical and idiomatic: almost certainly he was an Anglo-Saxon, not a Norman. Though William had placed Normans in the highest positions in the English church (both the Archbishop of Canterbury and the prior of Christ Church were Normans), Anglo-Saxons remained influential. The noted hagiographer Osbern, for example, was active in Canterbury around the time of William's death, and the historian Eadmer, then a young man, was also there. It is unlikely that we will ever know the name of this contributor to the Chronicle, but whoever he was, he gave us an unusually vivid portrait of William on the occasion of his death in 1087. It is rare that an early medieval writer pays much attention to what modern readers think of as "personality"; but interest in the interior life was on the rise throughout Europe in the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries: this text is an early example of that interest.

The present text is part of the entry for 1087 (misdated 1086 in the manuscript), and was presumably written shortly after that date. The Old English written around this time is conservative—still very far from the Middle English of Chaucer or Laȝamon, or even the mid-twelfth-century entries of the Peterborough Chronicle. The scribe of 1121 did a reasonably good job of preserving the usage of the older manuscript that he was copying, but introduced a number of late features. Here the inflectional endings and some spellings have been normalized to make the language more like what the original author probably wrote. For an edition of the Peterborough Chronicle, see Irvine [xx].