User:Seanconnerysbeard/Orderic Vitalis/Bibliography

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Orderic was born on 16 February 1075 in Atcham, Shropshire, England, the eldest son of a French priest, Odelerius of Orléans, who had entered the service of Roger de Montgomery, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, and had received from his patron a chapel there.

By the late 11th century, clerical marriage was still not uncommon in western Christendom.


 * While clerical marriage was slowly being forbidden throughout Europe, the Archbishop in Rouen ran into resistance to policies that forced clergy to renounce their wives. This led to a more cautious approach by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It wasn't until 1076 that clerical marriage was forbidden for incoming clergy while those already married were allowed to retain their wives. Orderic's father, Odelerius had already married and had children so Orderic's birth had just evaded the new incoming policy from Rome.

Orderic was one of the few monks who were of mixed parentage as his mother was of English heritage. When Orderic was five, his parents sent him to an English monk, Siward by name, who kept a school in the Abbey of SS Peter and Paul at Shrewsbury.

At the age of ten, Orderic was entrusted as an oblate to the Abbey of Saint-Evroul in the Duchy of Normandy, which Montgomery had formerly despoiled but, in his later years, was loading with gifts. The parents paid thirty marks for their son's admission; he expresses the conviction that they imposed this exile upon him from an earnest desire for his welfare. Odelerius's respect for the monastic life is attested to by his own entry, a few years later, into a monastery which the earl had founded at his persuasion. Orderic, on the other hand, felt for some time, as he asserts, like Joseph in a strange land. He did not know a word of French when he reached Normandy. His book, though written many years later, shows that he never lost his English cast of mind or his attachment to the country of his birth.