As we have seen, William looked back on his youthful, energetic literary activities as ‘playing around with history’. This can safely be regarded as something of an understatement, as if one were to suggest that Tolstoy's War and Peace was a result of the author's toying with literature. By 1126, at which time William hardly can have been older than his mid-thirties, he had completed the first version of his account of the deeds of the kings of the English, and his companion volume on the great ecclesiastical figures of the English people – an impressive lifetime's work, and even more so for someone of William's age who worked, we must assume, more or less within the framework of the daily rhythms of the Rule of St Benedict. An analysis of the former work presents what is arguably the deciding test to which we may put the hypothesis that William's historical writing was integrated with his theological output, and based on the same ethical principles as found in William's own theology as well as in the works of the acknowledged doctors of the Church.

I have argued in the preceding chapters that William's moral outlook was founded on Christian doctrine as propagated by the great Latin fathers, but conceived of according to a mode of thought that was as central to classical thinkers as to their Christian successors. Such a claim would be seriously undermined if the work upon which William's reputation as a great scholarly historian stands proves to be constructed according to principles fundamentally different from those that we have found in his theology.