[3] 1136 – 1198), also known as William Parvus, was a 12th-century English historian and Augustinian canon of Anglo-Saxon descent from Bridlington, East Riding of Yorkshire.
William experienced the Jewish pogroms in York in the late 12th century mentioning, "the slaughter was less the work of religious zeal than of bold and covetous men who wrought the business of their own greed".
[8] William saw his own work as being based on reliable sources, unlike Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, of which Newburgh was highly critical, saying "only a person ignorant of ancient history would have any doubt about how shamelessly and impudently he lies in almost everything.
Because belief in souls returning from the dead was common in the 12th century, William's Historia briefly recounts stories he heard about revenants, as does the work of Walter Map, his Welsh contemporary.
While he says that these have an apparent signification, he does not explain what that meaning might be: "he offers these prodigious events to his readers with questions, hesitations, and doubt – with, in short, all the confessions of a critical and honest mind".