The Conqueror Whose Funeral Fell Apart

On 9th September 1087, William the Conqueror — the man who had invaded England, won the Battle of Hastings, built the Tower of London and ruled two realms with an iron grip for twenty‑one years — died in Rouen after weeks of agony from a ruptured intestine.

What followed was one of the most catastrophic funerals in European history.

THE HORROR The moment William stopped breathing, the room emptied.

His sons were already gone — William Rufus had raced to England to seize the treasury; Robert was in Normandy and Germany. The nobles fled to secure their lands. The servants, left alone with the corpse of the most powerful man in Western Europe, stripped him: clothes, jewellery, anything of value.

They left the King of England naked on the floor.

His body lay there, unattended, until a minor knight — Herluin de Conteville — took pity and arranged for the corpse to be embalmed and carried by boat down the Seine to Caen, where William had founded the Abbaye aux Hommes and wanted to be buried.

By the time the coffin reached Caen, the body was already decomposing.

As the funeral procession entered the town, a fire broke out. Caen burned. The mourners abandoned the coffin and ran to fight the flames. William’s body was left in the street while the town around his abbey caught fire.

Only after the blaze was controlled did the burial service finally begin.

Inside the church, with the coffin before the altar, a local landowner named Ascelin Fitz‑Arthur suddenly stood up and shouted: “In the name of God, I forbid that the body of the despoiler be covered with the earth of my inheritance!”

He claimed — correctly — that part of the site where the abbey stood had been taken from his family by force. The funeral stopped while monks and nobles scrambled to negotiate with a man who had just legally blocked the burial of a king. Ascelin was paid 60 shillings on the spot and promised 100 pounds of silver.

The conqueror of England was held up at his own funeral by a property dispute worth 60 shillings.

Then came the burial itself.

William had been a huge man: tall, broad, and in later life, grossly overweight. The stone sarcophagus prepared for him was too small. The decomposing corpse had swollen. Monks tried to force it into the space.

The chronicler Orderic Vitalis describes what happened next: as they pushed, William’s abdomen burst. Gas and liquefied tissue exploded outward. A wave of stench and filth hit the congregation.

The King of England literally exploded.

The smell was so foul that incense could not cover it. People fainted. Others vomited. Many fled the church in panic. Those who stayed crammed what remained of the body into the tomb as quickly as possible, rushed through the prayers and ended the service.

The man who had reshaped two kingdoms ended his funeral as a burst, stinking disaster in front of his court.

THE MODERN RELIC William’s tomb at the Abbaye aux Hommes has been violated repeatedly. In 1522, church authorities opened it; reports say the body was still recognisable. In 1562, during the French Wars of Religion, Calvinists broke open the sarcophagus looking for treasure. They found none, scattered the bones and took some as souvenirs. Later, English soldiers are said to have carried fragments away.

What could be found was reburied in 1642 under a new monument, but that memorial was destroyed during the French Revolution. Bones were thrown into the River Orne.

A single femur — one thigh bone — survived and was kept. In 1987, on the 900th anniversary of William’s death, it was reinterred under a plain marble slab in front of the high altar at Caen.

The man who conquered England, commissioned the Domesday Book and built the foundations of Norman rule is now represented by one thigh bone beneath an unassuming stone.

His servants stripped him and walked away. His funeral town burned. His burial was interrupted by a land dispute. His body exploded on his mourners. His skeleton was scattered by Protestants and revolutionaries.

The conqueror of 1066 is, physically, one bone in a church most visitors pass without realising that almost everything else of him is in a river.

← Back to the archive