york00orns

YORK.
Murdac rivalled his friend and master St. Bernard in
his own personal austerity of life and the unbending
rigidity with which he enforced the ascetic rule of his
Order. During Murdac's life William Fitzherbert
lived in retirement at Winchester. On Murdac's
death, in 1153, he was restored to the position to
which he had formerly been elected, and received the
pall from Pope Anastasius. When he entered York
as Archbishop he was welcomed by the acclamations
of a vast multitude. A wooden bridge over the Ouse
gave way under the pressure of the crowd, and many
were precipitated into the river. William is said to
have offered up earnest prayers to Almighty God, beseeching
Him with tears to save them. Not a life was
lost, and in memory of the miraculous preservation, as
it was deemed, which his supplications had procured,
a bridge of stone was built with a chapel upon it bearing
his name, which existed down to comparatively
recent times.
His tenure of the archiepiscopal dignity was a very
brief one. He was in York but thirty days. On
Trinity Sunday he celebrated high mass in the
minster, which he had barely finished before he was
attacked by illness. Eight days after, he died, and
Osbert of Bayeux, who had been archdeacon under
Thurstan and Murdac, was popularly supposed to
have been guilty of the foul crime of putting poison
into the chalice which the Archbishop used at the
celebration. An allusion to this occurs in one of the
hymns for the Translation of St. William in the York
Breviary. Many miracles were said to have been
wrought at his tomb, and as the church of York had