The story that follows is to be read as an exercise in intellectual history, and in particular as an attempt to trace the debt owed not just by twelfth-century English chroniclers, but by English churchmen and kings, to the literary and historical traditions of a much more distant past. In pursuing this line of enquiry, I owe a special debt to two modern historians. The first, Barrie Doson, in his study of the York massacre of 1190, has identified the chief contemporary witness to these events, the Historia Rerum Anglicarum of William of Newburgh, as a ‘comparatively impartial and well-balanced if sometimes over-calculated’ source. The full extent to which Newburgh's account of the 1190 massacre is ‘over-calculated’ I shall in due course reveal. The second of my modern authorities is Peter Biller, whose study of Newburgh and the Cathars has revealed for the first time the extent to which Newburgh's historical writing was coloured by a profound familiarity with scripture and patristics, in this particular instance with Augustine, Jerome and Isidore writing on the heresies of the early Church.

To state my thesis very briefly, I intend, by close analysis of his language and lexical peculiarities, to demonstrate that Newburgh depended heavily in his account of the York massacre upon careful and deliberate citation both of the Vulgate of St Jerome, and of the standard Latin translation of the Bellum Judaicum of Josephus, widely circulated in twelfth-century England.