WILLIAM, an English monastic historian of the twelfth century, and author of the earliest description extant of London, was of Norman extraction, but born of respectable parents in the city of London. Being a monk of Canterbury, he attracted the notice of Archbishop Becket, who made him one of his clerks, received him as an inmate into his family, and employed him in various capacities. He was remembrancer in the archbishop's exchequer, a subdeacon in his chapel when he officiated, a reader of bills and petitions when his grace sat to hear and determine causes, and sometimes an advocate before the ecclesiastical court, when he was desired to perform that office. He was also present with Becket at Northampton, when the archbishop was forsaken by his suffragans, and an eye-witness of his sacrilegious murder at Canterbury, one of the foulest deeds of an age fertile in crimes. This worthy monk is supposed to have died in the year 1191. His Description of the City of London, which seems to have been written between the years 1170 and 1182, contains, after Doomsday-Book, the earliest account we have of the metropolis; and it may be doubted whether any other nation of Europe can produce a description of its capital, or of one of its principal cities, written at so remote a period as the twelfth century. The first edition appeared in the shape of a translation inserted in Stowe's Survey of London; but as this was found to be in many respects inaccurate, and had, besides, become obsolete, Dr Pegge published a more correct translation, with notes and a preliminary dissertation, 1772, in 4to. Fitzstephen was a person of great learning for his age. He appears to have been tolerably versed in Horace, Virgil, Sallust, Ovid, Lucan, Persius, and other Latin classics; and he had even looked into Plato and some other of the Greek writers. His credulity was a failing less imputable to the individual than to the times in which he lived.