Welcome to the British History Podcast. My name is Jamie and this is episode 451, The Lucky Few.

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You know, I almost titled the last episode, The Gang Goes to a Funeral.

The trouble was that the Gang didn't go to a funeral.

All of them decided they had somewhere else to be.

And Orderick, whose our main source for this whole embarrassing affair,

actually ends his seventh book speaking for multiple paragraphs about the spiritual and practical implications of such a miserable end.

I think I might do a full reading of it in our next shop talk, but Orderick sums himself up nicely in this quote.

Quote, there is but one lot for rich and poor.

Both become the prey of death and corruption."

End quote.

Basically, you can't take it with you and you're going to end up exactly in the same place

that that poor guy down the street is going to end up exactly in the same place that that poor guy down the street is going to end up in.

And during his post-funeral summation, Ordering kind of sounds like Dickens describing Ebenezer Scrooge. he tells us that William's greed and his cruelty had bought him this really humiliating end.

And frankly, it sounds like the old monk was absolutely here for it.

But speaking about Scrooge, Rufus was now taking possession of the Royal Treasury,

...