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Comment by aredox | Hacker News Reader

How reliable is this, though? Many people (especially religious ones) around him were best placed to pretend he turned very remorseful.

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The oration struck me as a little self-serving -- especially since the heir was weak. You'd like the commoners to feel good about the family, and maybe this did the trick.

But, the prison releases do seem to indicate he was in a forgiving mood; I imagine release of the brother couldn't be accomplished without some formal process. "The one jailed for treason? I'd like to see that order in writing."

Would they make it up though? Depends on motives and it is likely he died with many people with different motives around him. Some would want to condemn his violence, but others would want to justify it as their holdings would depend on it.

Probably because:

> He had gifts sent to the local churches and to the poor, “so that what I amassed through evil deeds may be assigned to the holy uses of good men." Some of his wealth also went to the clergymen of Mantes, so the churches he had destroyed could be rebuilt.

I can definitely imagine some bishop or cardinal pilfering the king's treasure room while claiming the king decreed it out of remorse.

You can imagine it but its a less probable explanation.

It was common to leave things to the church and the poor so there was no need to make up the story to justify it. It is likely that a dishonest claim would be challenged by someone given that he said the same things to "everyone".

I don't know if I can summarize as what some historian said about rulers in the middle ages. But I'll take a go at it.

Question: Were rulers callous and violent or were they pious and fearful of being judged in the afterlife?

Ans: Yes.

Also I do remember a reference to an actual will by a knight who renounced his crimes and left a bunch of his wealth to charity. I think it's hard to understand how back then the system, especially for a member of the ruling class, was more like the mafia than what we experience today. As such it'd be hard for someone not to get caught up in it.

Yes, people would simply invent things, or a similar process with the same effect. The idea of history as some sort of neutral record of events is itself historically novel, and most of our sources around the Norman Conquest has a very pronounced slant one way or the other. Chroniclers generally were also using a great deal of secondhand information (at best). In the given instance, Orderic Vitalis was cloistered and more or less explicitly writing propaganda for William.

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