‘[Ethicae] maiestati assurgo’: how are we to understand William's seemingly earnest declaration that he bows to the majesty of ethics? In order to fulfil the function I have sketched out in the preceding chapter – that is, to make the writing of history meaningful within a coherent system of learning as well as within a monastic way of life – ethics as defined by William must be capable of accomplishing at least three tasks. Firstly, it must provide a unifying principle for the different branches of learning; secondly it must provide a kind of unity acceptable and even desirable within a Christian way of life as practised by Benedictine monks in twelfth-century England; and thirdly, it must be able to bridge the gap between Christian and secular learning, which predominantly meant the literary tradition of pre-Christian Rome. If all of these factors can be shown to be included in the notion of ethics to which William professed his allegiance, it will at least not be unreasonable to proceed to analyse the extent to which William follows up this notion of ethics in his historiographical works. Only then may my initial hypothesis be said to have been substantiated.

It is difficult to envision how modern moral philosophy may ever rise to fulfil these three functions. Ethics is one discipline among many, with its own distinct objects and methods. Indeed, many recent critics, perhaps most notably Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre, have claimed that modern moral philosophy consists of mutually exclusive schools of thought without any common ground on which to find agreement and resolve conflicts – in diametrical opposition to the notion of ethics we need to find in order to conclude that ethics could function as a uniting factor of medieval learning. MacIntyre’s influential account, in particular, holds that modern moral philosophy arose out of a fundamental break with classical and medieval modes of thought, rendering the framework within which pre-modern ethics was understood forgotten and ignored. While we do not need to accept MacIntyre’s version of events – although to a great extent I do – there seems at any rate to be sufficient grounds for bracketing our own notions of what comes within the proper purview of ethics as we move to study the medieval idea of ethics.