The Rime of King William

The entry in its entirety is regarded "as containing the best contemporary estimate of William's achievements and character as seen by a reasonably objective Englishman" (Bartlett, 89).

Se cyng wæs swa swiðe stearc, ⁊ benam of his underþeoddan manig marc goldes ⁊ ma hundred punda seolfres.

He wæs on gitsunge befeallan, ⁊ grædinæsse he lufode mid ealle He sætte mycel deorfrið, ⁊ he lægde laga þærwið þet swa hwa swa sloge heort oððe hinde, þet hine man sceolde blendian.

Walawa, þet ænig man sceolde modigan swa, hine sylf upp ahebban ⁊ ofer ealle men tellan.

He had fallen into avarice and he loved greediness above everything else He established many deer preserves and he set up many laws concerning them such that whoever killed a hart or a hind should be blinded.

The poem is somewhere between 17 and 32 lines long, depending on whether an editor arranges it according to Old English alliterative meter or as rhyming couplets.

Professors George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie did not include the Rime in their six-volume Anglo Saxon Poetic Records.

The poem serves as "an elegy for an age as much as for a king, this entry as a whole constitutes a powerfully literary, and literate, response to the legacies of pre-Conquest English writing" (Lerer, 12).

Within the form of the lament for King William it expresses the indignation of the English at the introduction of the Norman forest law.

Stefan Jurasinski has shown that it is most likely by the compiler of the Peterborough Chronicle himself and that it stands at the head of a developing tradition of literary polemics against the injustice of the forest laws ("The Rime of King William and its Analogues").