William of Newburgh, a canon of the Augustinian house there, some fifteen miles north-east of York, wrote in the 1190s at the end of the most fruitful and creative century of historical writing in medieval England, and his Historia Rerum Anglicarum (History of English Affairs) has attracted high praise over the last century and more. Howlett, his editor in the Rolls Series, described him in what now read as very ‘Victorian’ terms as ‘a man of unusual moral elevation’ who recorded events with ‘unswerving faithfulness’. Kate Norgate, author of his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, ascribed to him ‘the true historian’s instinct for perceiving the relative importance of things, for seizing the salient points and for bringing out the significance of a story in a few simple sentences without straining after picturesqueness or dramatic effect’. For Antonia Gransden, his History was ‘the most unusual and interesting produced in this period’. The historian who has written most extensively on William in the past three decades, Nancy F. Partner, commented on the degree to which medievalists of our time find him congenial and accessible because he was clearly interested not only in recording events but also reflecting on their significance in the light of the evidence available to him.

Such enthusiasm by modern historians forWilliam has been based to some extent on the contrast between the breadth of his interests and knowledge and the seclusion of his life at Newburgh Priory. He refers to Newburgh as having ‘nurtured me in Christ from my boyhood’ and his only reference to a journey beyond it, is to his visit to the hermit Godric of Finchale in Co. Durham shortly before Godric’s death in May 1170. However, John Gillingham has recently argued persuasively that such seclusion did not deprive William of a good deal of information derived from men who were, unlike himself, active in worldly affairs. He likely had access to the royal newsletters circulated as part of Richard I’s propaganda war relating to his crusade, imprisonment and subsequent dealings with the emperor Henry VI and Philip II Augustus of France, a war in which the royal clerk Philip of Poitou, bishop of the northern English diocese of Durham from 1197 to 1208, played a prominent role.