The purpose of this research is to examine a modern biography of William Marshal, an aide to the Plantagenet royal line in England in the medieval period. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which the biography is presented, and then to discuss the details of the life and the biography with a view toward suggesting the significance of the instant work, as well as what it may reveal about the historiography of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.
As biographer Sidney Painter points out in his introduction, the mode of biography as a means of elucidating medieval history is rare. The reason for this is the paucity of primary (and for that matter secondary) contemporaneous written sources. Nevertheless, Painter's method of assembling the biography has been to investigate and compile a series of original documents and histories that, taken together, could constitute a narrative and evaluation of the life of William Marshal.
In the main, this narrative deals with the public life of Marshal and his emergence from an unlanded person of noble birth to a person in the high English nobility who also possessed landed estates, which were the mark of authentic status in the feudal period. Where the details of Marshal's private or family life are concerned, Painter connects them to Marshal's status as a noble gentleman. This is consistent with the fact that, at least for the feudal nobility, personal and professional lives of an individual were indeed connected. Personal life, indeed, appears to have been a function of public life and subsidiary to it, inasmuch as royal approval or at least suggestion was a decisive aspect of marriage, more decisive than the notion of true love or even courtly love. In this regard, Painter says that Marshal's wife, Isabel de Clare, heiress to extensive estates in England and in Normandy, "probably knew from Glanville's clerk, Hubert Walter, that Henry II had promi...