William fitzHerbert was not the first choice to succeed Archbishop Thurstan in the see of York. Two or three other names had been put forward previously but had fallen by the wayside. It was an inauspicious start to an ill-fated archiepiscopate. The saga which unfolded over the following fourteen years was acted out by an international cast of characters which included no fewer than five successive popes, diverse archdeacons, bishops, cardinals and papal legates, Benedictines, Augustinians and Cistercians, and lay people of all ranks of society from the king downwards. Among them were several men who came to be revered as saints, in addition to William himself. The story involved legal arguments and political manoeuvres, bitter controversies and physical violence, unexpected coincidences and extraordinary reversals of fortune. It threw up along the way allegations of simony, unchaste living, intrusion, forgery, assault, arson and murder – a combination of worldly vice and spiritual wickedness in high places sufficient to fill the pages of many a modern novel. Recent scholarship has done much to elucidate the circum-stances and chronology of this most unhappy episode in the history of the church of York, and there is more to be added still; yet the protagonist himself remains very much an enigma.

In a classic article first published in 1936, Dom David Knowles disentangled the threads of evidence relating to what he called ‘the case of St William of York’. He established a reliable chronology of the election dispute, which remains the basis for all subsequent discussions. Some years later C. H. Talbot published a dossier of previously unknown letters of Bernard of Clairvaux which clarified certain phases of the dispute, and further evidence brought to light shortly afterwards by Dom Adrian Morey revealed something of the long aftermath of the affair. In the 1970s Derek Baker published a lengthy analysis of the sources and suggested some minor amendments to Knowles's chronology. The course of events is now reasonably clear, but their interpretation is much more controversial. The period from the death of Thurstan to William's consecration (1140–3) and the years of his first archiepiscopate (1143–7) form the subject of the present chapter. His exile (1147–53) followed by his return and death (1153–4) will be discussed in the next chapter.