many people from Norwich crowded to look at it. Nevertheless it remained unburied till Easter Monday, and then was put into the ground without any religious ceremony. On Easter Tuesday Godwin Sturt and Robert, the martyr's brother, identified the body, and when the Easter synod of the diocese assembled a day or two later, Godwin the priest brought the matter before the bishops and clergy, and in an inflammatory speech charged the Norwich Jews with having murdered his nephew as a Christian victim, and claimed vengeance upon them even to the extent of extermination. The bishop of the diocese, Eborard, seems to have disbelieved the story. The secular clergy as a body were divided in opinion as to its truth. Among the citizens of Norwich and even among the monks in the cloister there was a large party of sceptics who were inclined to denounce the whole affair as an imposture. But so stubbornly and vehemently was the truth of the story advocated by the Prior William Turbe [see William, 1095?–1174], who a year or two later became bishop of Norwich, that in the end all opposition was stamped down, and a large crop of miracles sprang up at the successive tombs of the ‘martyr.’ He had been buried originally at Thorpe Wood, whence he was translated to the monks' cemetery, and afterwards to the chapter-house; thence he was removed to the south side of the altar. When Thomas wrote his life of William, William's remains lay in a chapel on the north side of the altar, but some time before the dissolution of the monasteries they had been placed on the north side of the rood-screen, and an altar erected over them. This altar continued to attract visitors and pilgrims down to the middle of the fifteenth century. In the meantime other boy saints and martyrs were discovered elsewhere, the several legends concerning their deaths and miracles being evidently borrowed from the Norwich prototype.
[The only authority for the life of St. William is a monk of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth by name, whose curious work was printed at the Cambridge University Press in 1896, under the joint editorship of Dr. Jessopp and Dr. James, from a twelfth-century manuscript, which there is some reason to think passed under the author's eye and hand. Incidentally the volume throws some much needed light upon the history of East Anglia during the reign of King Stephen.]
WILLIAM of Thwayt (d. 1154), archbishop of York. [See Fitzherbert, William.]
WILLIAM of Conches (d. 1154?), natural philosopher, was born at Conches in Normandy in the last quarter of the eleventh century. The name ‘De Conches’ has been Anglicised into Shelley, which Bale gives as William's alias; under it William appears in various bibliographies and catalogues. Bale, moreover, in his notebook (Selden MS. 64 B) states that William was born in Cornwall ‘ut fertur,’ giving Boston of Bury as his authority. There is, however, no reason to doubt that he was born at Conches.
Writing about 1145, William describes himself as one who has been for more than twenty years a teacher (Dragmaticon, p. 210, and Schaarschmidt, Johannes Saresberiensis, pp. 22, 73, has shown that Chartres, and not Paris, as was once supposed, was the school to which he belonged). At Chartres he was taught by Bernard Sylvester, and here in his turn he taught John of Salisbury [q. v.] in 1137–8 (Metalog. i. 24). John calls him the most accomplished grammarian of his time, and describes his teaching in detail. He followed the method of Bernard of Chartres, based on Quintilian's recommendations. The lectures covered the whole field of classical Latin, with questions on parsing, scansion, and construction. There was daily practice in Latin prose and verse composition in imitation of classical models, and frequent discussion among the pupils on set subjects, with a view to the acquisition of fluency and elegant diction (Rashdall, Univ. of Europe, i. 65). In his encyclopædic work, ‘De Philosophia,’ which is incomplete, his teaching on the Trinity and the Atonement shows the influence of Abelard; but it was not till after Abelard's condemnation at the council of Sens, 1140, that William's heresies were noticed. William of Saint Thierry first detected them, and pointed them out to Bernard of Clairvaux (Tissier, Bibl. Pat. Cisterc. iv. 127). As a consequence of this attack William withdrew from public teaching, and found protection at the court of Geoffrey the Fair, count of Anjou, where he taught the future Henry II and his brothers. He rewrote the ‘Philosophia,’ admitting his errors, and the corrected version, republished in the form of a dialogue (‘Dragmaticon’), was addressed to the count. He died either at Paris or near Evreux, probably in 1154 (Bouquet, Recueil, xiii. 703 D).
Besides the ‘Philosophia’ (printed in three editions, and with three false ascriptions to Beda, William of Hirschau, and Honorius of Autun) and the ‘Dragmaticon or Dialogue’ (printed at Strasburg in 1567 as the work of one ‘Willelmus Aneponymus Philo-
