St William of York is one of the more obscure saints of medieval England. Even in the city whose name he bears he is less well known than his younger contemporaries Aelred of Rievaulx and Thomas Becket. If he is remembered at all, it is as likely as not for the miracle of Ouse bridge – surely one of the least remarkable miracles in the annals of hagiography – or for the unedifying mystery surrounding his death. Outside York, few people have ever heard of St William – unless they be twelfth-century ecclesiastical historians, among whom he has achieved a certain notoriety as the man at the centre of one of the most protracted and convoluted election disputes ever to have afflicted the English church. For cognoscenti of ecclesiastical rows, the ‘case of St William of York’, as it has come to be known from the title of a famous article by Dom David Knowles, has assumed the status of a classic. And not without reason. The election of a new archbishop of York developed from being a little local difficulty into an international cause célèbre involving kings, cardinals, popes and several men who were subsequently to be reckoned as saints, all divided between the different factions.

Yet the intense spot-light which has been shone on the election dispute has tended to leave in the shadows other aspects of William fitzHerbert's career. For thirty-five years prior to his consecration as archbishop of York, William held the twin offices of treasurer of York Minster and archdeacon of the East Riding. These decades have generally been passed over more or less in silence, on the grounds that the details of his early career are few; yet his family connections and lengthy ecclesiastical apprenticeship are by no means as poorly documented as has been supposed, and are essential for under-standing the troubled, final years of his life. The procedural twists and turns surrounding William's election and consecration, his deposition, and his eventual return as archbishop inevitably constitute a dominant theme in the last decade and a half of his life, but there are other aspects of this period which equally merit attention. As for William's canonisation and the early development of his cult as a saint, the considerable body of evidence which survives has never received the critical attention which it deserves.