FOR much of his life Æthelwig had been troubled by an intermittent form of gout. It was very painful and he was said to have been ‘worn out’ by it before he died. That was on 16 February 1078 and within three months a page was turned when the king appointed Walter as the new abbot. It was the first time since 1014 that someone not a monk of Evesham had taken up the position and Walter was, of course, the first foreigner ever to be chosen. When he arrived at Evesham he was completely unknown to the community, but the personal contrast between Walter and Æthelwig was immediately obvious to the all-English monks, for Walter was a cultured Norman and was younger and physically fitter than Æthelwig had been in recent years. He had been promoted to Evesham from Canterbury, where he had been a chaplain to Archbishop Lanfranc, and his association with the learned Lanfranc went back to the 1060s, when Lanfranc was abbot of Caen in Normandy and Walter was his pupil there. Before Caen and Canterbury Walter had been a monk at the abbey of Cerisy-la- Forêt, thirty miles west of Caen. A fellow pupil and friend at Caen was Gundulf, later bishop of Rochester (1077–1108); they were able and ambitious young men and Lanfranc was evidently grooming them for high office. The chronicler William of Malmesbury relates that Walter and Gundulf were one day at Caen studying a gospel-book with Lanfranc, and while Lanfranc's attention was momentarily distracted they decided to play a game. They said ‘Let us turn the pages and see which of us is to be abbot and which bishop.’ They came to the gospel of Matthew, and in the twenty-fourth chapter Gundulf's finger alighted on the words ‘a faithful and wise servant, whom the lord hath appointed over his family’, while in the next chapter Walter found the line ‘good and faithful servant, … enter thou into the joy of thy lord’. They began laughing over these promising words and when Lanfranc asked them what they were so happy about, they confessed. Without hesitation Lanfranc is then said to have predicted that Gundulf would become a bishop and Walter an abbot.