Nevertheless, it has been speculated on the basis of some documents that he was born into a bourgeois family of Moulle in the castellany of Saint-Omer and that he was a notary.
[a] These centred around the monks' desire to elect their own abbot rather than accept an appointee from their mother house, the abbey of Charroux.
The lawsuits began in 1207, when Abbot Iterius transferred to the sister abbey of Ham-en-Artois and sought to enjoin the monks from electing a successor.
[b] He then passed Easter in Paris before going on to the papal court in Viterbo, where he met Pope Innocent III and attended the consecration of Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury.
He joined it at Ferentino and followed it to Rome, where Innocent lifted his excommunication but quashed his election as abbot and sent his case to a panel of papal judges delegate[d] in Paris.
Innocent issued a final decision confirming Andres's right to elect its abbot and sent William to Charroux with a copy.
[3] The Chronicon Andrense functions as both a cartulary (collection of charters) and a chronicle (chronological narrative) of Andres.
In this format—the cartulary-chronicle—"the charters of the monastery were copied in a more or less chronological order and then woven together with a narrative that provided their historical context.
[8] According to the introduction, William reworked the third book of Andrew of Marchienne's Historia succincta de gestis et successione regum Francorum, a history of the kings of France, by adding material on Andres and interspersing its charters.
In 1879, Johann Heller published an edition without the charters based on the Amiens and Brussels manuscripts for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica.
A full edition including the charters based on all three independent manuscripts was made by Leah Shopkow, to be published by Brepols.