The History of William Marshal

The History of William Marshal is the earliest surviving biography of a medieval knight - indeed it is the first biography of a layman in the vernacular in European history. Composed in verse in the 1220s just a few years after his death, it is a major primary source not simply for its subject's life but for the exceptionally stormy period he had had to navigate. It could hardly be other than major, given that its subject was regarded as the greatest knight who ever lived and that he rose in the course of his long life to be a central figure in the reigns of no fewer than four kings: Henry II, Richard Lionheart, John and Henry III. This remarkable biography was brought to light in the late nineteenth century thanks to a determined hunt for the manuscript by its first editor, the eminent French scholar Paul Meyer. It gives a vigorous account of events, full of vivid detail and passionate comment and frequent flashes of humour. And it gives revelatory insights into the attitudes andperceptions of the time, especially into the experience and nature of warfare in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

Few other medieval biographies have the immediacy of this celebration of Marshal's career, based not least on stories told by Marshal himself and those close to him, and it is made available here for the first time in a modern prose translation.