General Notes

Lord Bacqueville-en Caux & Archearius
SOURCES: LDS FHL Ancestal File #   (familysearch.org)
AWTP:
"Royal Courtenays/Carew/Alcock/McDougall/Glines" John H.M. Young jhqmy@@hotmail.com (source has generously provided the following narrative at AWTP:

"Ordericus Vitalis, the son of Norman parents but born in Shropshire in 1075, was a writer of much more ambitious scope than Eadmer. His voluminous Ecclesiastical History, borrowing its title from Bede's great work, extends from the beginning of the Christian era down to the year 1141. It is in thirteen books, and represents the labour and observation of some twenty years of the writer's life. It is a characteristic product of the cloister. The church, and all that concerns it, are, throughout, uppermost in Orderic's mind, and determine his standpoint and design as a historian. But he had sufficient curiosity and knowledge of the world to gather and place on record a vast amount of information about mundane affairs. Taken over to Normandy to be educated at the early age of ten, he spent his life as a monk of St. Evroul; but he was not without opportunities of travel, and he paid at least one visit to England for the express purpose of collecting material for his History. Although he is often inaccurate in his chronology, and confusing in the arrangement of his matter, Orderic is one of our standard historical authorities for the Norman period. He is especially valuable for the information he gives as to the condition of Normandy itself during the eleventh, and part of the twelfth, century, and his History deals even more with continental than with English affairs. Yet he always prides himself upon his English birth; he even called himself an Englishman, and could, in Freeman's words, "at once admire the greatness of the Conqueror and sympathise with the wrongs of his victims." Orderic's very defects of arrangement and order as a chronicler were the result of a curiosity and a range of interest which add much to the value of his work as a minute and varied contemporary record. He tells us much that is not found elsewhere about the social conditions of his time, about the monastic profession and even about the occupations, tastes, pastimes and personal appearance of prominent men. His style is, in many places, highly rhetorical. Of it, as a whole, "an English reader," writes dean Church, "may best form an idea by combining the Biblical pedantry and doggerel of a Fifth-monarchy pamphlet of the seventeenth century with the classical pedantry of the most extravagant burlesque of Dr. Johnson's English."