William FitzHerbert, archbishop of York, is in Christopher Norton's words, ‘one of the more obscure saints of medieval England’. He is best remembered for the miracle of Ouse Bridge, following the collapse of which, on 9 May 1154, all those who fell into the river while following him in procession to York Minster were saved from drowning through his prayers. When William died in agony on 8 June, only a month later, possibly poisoned, a popular local cult may have sprung up almost immediately. Some seventy-two years on, in 1226, as a result of a number of much later miracles at his tomb, he was beatified as a confessor by Pope Honorius iii. A brief Vita survives from around the mid-thirteenth century, a chapel was constructed rather earlier on at Ouse Bridge and a beautiful window depicting William's miracles and scenes from his life was placed in the minster in the fifteenth century.

But these are the bare bones of the narrative, and they are bones to which, in this first full-scale biography of William FitzHerbert, Christopher Norton has added a great deal of flesh. William's often controversial story fairly bubbles with family intrigue and religious and political rivalries. Born probably in the 1080s, William was the son of Herbert the Chamberlain, himself possibly the illegitimate son of Count Herbert ii of Maine, and of Emma, seemingly the illegitimate daughter of Count Theobald iii of Blois (and, if so, related to Stephen, later king of England, and also – distantly – to Roger ii of Sicily). Herbert was a ‘vicar of Bray’ figure who managed to remain in high office under William the Conqueror, William Rufus and Henry i, amassing a huge fortune on the way – until, that is, he seems (according to Abbot Suger) to have made the fatal mistake of trying to murder Henry i in 1118. Blinded and castrated, he died two years later, but his family, perhaps surprisingly, was by no means ruined. This was probably because his eldest son, also named Herbert, was at the time married to Sibyl Corbet, one of the king's more prominent mistresses, whose illegitimate daughter by Henry was, in turn, married to the king of Scotland. (At this point Norton's four genealogical tables prove inestimably useful.)

Family ties, illegitimate or otherwise, strongly influenced William's own rise and fall. The FitzHerbert family fortunes, based mainly (though not exclusively) in Hampshire and Yorkshire, were amassed largely as a result of high ecclesiastical manoeuvring, patronage (especially by Henry of Blois) and sheer opportunism. As a result, Herbert the Chamberlain's convivial but otherwise clearly unremarkable younger son William, already treasurer and archdeacon of York since his father had first pressurised poor Archbishop Thomas ii into giving him the job in 1109×14, somehow ended up being elected archbishop (as the ‘Blois’ candidate) in 1141. But the Anarchy was not only a time of divided family loyalties, it was also that of St Bernard, whose blinding assault on the evils of secular interference in episcopal elections, and on William's suitability for the job, is seen by Norton as positively obsessive and underhand. (This judgement contrasts markedly with David Knowles's interpretation of these same events in his essay ‘The case of St William of York’, in The historian and character, and also with that of James Raine in Fasti eboracenses.) After a long and very messy quarrel involving several popes, William was finally deposed in 1147 by Eugenius iii, St Bernard's former pupil, and the Cistercian abbot of Fountains, Henry Murdac, was confirmed as the new archbishop. But Murdac (actually a remarkable man, and previously abbot of Vauclair in the diocese of Laon) was unpopular with both King Stephen and York. So when he (and Eugenius iii and St Bernard) died in 1153, William, having subsequently lived an exemplary, semi-monastic and seemingly contented life in Winchester, was restored to York later that same year. But within a month of his eventual arrival there in May 1154, and of the Ouse Bridge miracle (in Norton's words, ‘surely one of the least remarkable miracles in the annals of hagiography’ – but what would the survivors have made of that?), William himself was dead, quite possibly murdered through poison in the communion chalice while celebrating his Trinity Sunday mass in the minster. Osbert of Bayeux, one of William's archdeacons and an old rival (he was Archbishop Thurstan's nephew), was suspected. Nothing was proved, but Osbert was subsequently deprived of his office – though not until c. 1157, some three years later. By then, Roger of Pont l'Evêque, previously archdeacon of Canterbury, had been archbishop of York for three years, Stephen was dead and Henry ii was king. William's restoration had been violently opposed by dean Robert de Gant and by Osbert: and it was these two men who effectively engineered the election of Archbishop Roger. Roger was Theobald's man, and under him Robert remained dean of York – interestingly, also until c. 1157. Osbert lived on as a lay baron for over thirty years, witnessing the occasional archiepiscopal charter and even surviving Roger himself.

But it was William – or perhaps Archbishop Roger – who in a sense had the last laugh. A minor wonder occurred soon after William's death, when a burning beam smashed his tomb but left his body untouched and a sweet smell of incense or oil hanging in the air. His tomb was certainly seen as a place of sanctuary in the later twelfth century. But no really significant miracles seem to have followed until some twenty-three years later, when thirty-three suddenly occurred during the Octave of Pentecost in 1177. (It is only thanks to Dodsworth that an account of these has survived.) It may not be entirely coincidental that this wave of miracles seems to have taken place at around the time when Archbishop Roger's newly rebuilt East End of the Minster (hence the burning beam?) was completed, and just before the dedication of his new chapel of St Mary and the Holy Angels. For, until then, York had possessed the body of no proper saint, in irritating contrast to Canterbury, whose archbishop had been spectacularly (and incontrovertibly) murdered in 1170 and canonised only three years later. Even more interestingly, as Norton points out both in the text and in a useful appendix, several of these thirty-three miracles seem to have been authenticated by Paulinus of Leeds, Master of the Hospital at York. Paulinus, highly regarded both by Henry ii and by Archbishop Roger, was the son of Ralph Nowell, bishop of the Orkneys. And it was Bishop Ralph who, in the face of opposition, had strongly supported William's election to York in 1141.

Like the exact date of Paulinus' death, many facts about St William's early life are, quite simply, unknowable, since the sources are partial and the later Vita is mainly concerned with his miracles. Any full-scale biography must therefore, of necessity, contain large sections made up of bricks without (very much) straw, in particular the section entitled ‘Just William?’ Parts of Norton's narrative, and also of William's ‘itinerary’, are packed with words such as ‘probably’ and ‘perhaps’, and generously (and prudently) sprinkled with question marks. One is still left wondering why Herbert the Chamberlain tried to murder Henry i in 1118, what (or who) finally induced Honorius iii to canonise William in 1226 and, above all, about the significance of the part played in events by Archbishop Theobald. But these are minor quibbles, and are no reflection on Norton's book, which captures the period remarkably well. He has much to say that is both novel and illuminating, particularly where he is writing about the FitzHerbert family estates, the significance of the church architecture of the period (especially with regard to Weaverthorpe) and about the layout of twelfth-century Winchester and York (in which he is supremely knowledgeable: his maps and plans are quite splendid). His section on William's miracles and canonisation is likewise fascinating, although he professes himself no expert: and he puts forward some very plausible theories about William's family which add another dimension to the work of David Knowles, Janet Burton and James Raine. All in all, a most enjoyable read.