The king that exploded in his coffin in 1087 and almost made mourners throw up in disgust
In any work of fiction, you can get away with absolute murder if you nail the ending. Hamnet, The Blair Witch Project, and Star Trek: The Next Generation are all pretty humdrum until the final acts, when everything clicks into place. The same goes for people, from pauper to king.
Conversely, a bad ending can ruin everything that came before. This is one you don’t even need examples for, because they’re all over our history. Whether you’re a story or a real-life person, a poor or embarrassing final act can conclusively overshadow all the good you’ve done previously. It’s a testament to the incredible legacy he left in life that William the Conqueror isn’t one of them, because his exit could have easily undermined his achievements.
For most of his life, he was William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy. This wasn’t just his subjects showing a lack of respect; he was an illegitimate son and thus spent his entire Dukedom with a massive chip on his shoulder. Desperately consolidating power in the face of an entire region that saw him as a pretender. He needed to do something to change his reputation. So, when it became clear that his first cousin, King of England Edward the Confessor, wasn’t going to have children eligible for the throne, he saw exactly how to prove himself.
All he needed to do was invade and conquer England, and loads of people had done that before, so how hard could it be? When Edward finally died in January 1066, William made his move, and on Christmas Day of that year, he was crowned the King of England. That’s not the extent of his achievements, either. William also consolidated the disparate, battling kingdoms of England into one country, ended slavery practises in the country and started work on the Doomsday Book.
He’d have to as well, because his death was still so absurd that it nearly overshadowed all of it.
First, there are the strange circumstances surrounding his death to consider. Fittingly for his name, William the Conqueror died in battle in France, but not the way he would have wanted to. The old, out-of-shape ruler was observing a battle on horseback when his horse stumbled. At the time, saddles were made with large, extended pommels on the front that were reinforced with metal. William was all but impaled on the pommel of his saddle and ruptured the internal organs of his stomach. Ouch.
The king died later that week. To give you an idea of the kind of respect he held at the time, his corpse was looted as it lay in one of his palaces in Rouen, and then the most notorious story from his death occurred at his very funeral. Since he’d died away from home, the body hadn’t been carefully looked after in the days following his death. By the time of his funeral, his body had rotted and swollen up so badly that it was a struggle to get him into the coffin.
William’s mourners struggled, strained and finally forced him into the coffin. At which point the poor guy’s bowels exploded in the middle of his own funeral. No incense could cover up the paralysingly awful stench, and the rest of his funeral was completed as quickly as humanly possible before people started passing out. If William were any other English monarch, that would be his lasting legacy. In fact, a number of his successors tried to make it exactly that. After all, William was a powerful, respected ruler of his time, but he wasn’t exactly liked.
With all that in mind, there’s reason to believe that the story might have been played up to try and ridicule the departed king, but in this case, better to print the legend. After all, the first thing anyone thinks of about William the Conqueror is one of the great triumphs in military history; he can explode in a cloud of shit at his own funeral.