some people really know how to live

Just read this in Barbara Holland's The Joy of Drinking--which is not at all what the title implies. It's all about the, uh, pleasures of, uh, alcohol. Okay, maybe it is what the title implies, but in a different way than you might think.

Anyway, the point is that she has a lot of illluminating things to say about the medievals. Take this choice piece on old William of Normandy:

"William the Conquerer, they say, some twenty years after the invasion, finding himself too fat to ride his horse, took to his bed and followed a strict all-alcohol diet How much weight he lost isn't recorded, but since he later died when his horse fell down, at least he'd been able to get onto the creature, though maybe he was too drunk tostay there, or perhaps his bulk brought it to its knees. We can't recommend his drinks-only regime to modern dieters, however, since it was recorded that hiscorpse was so bulky the attendant clergy had a lot of trouble wedging it into his stone sarcophagus and by the time they succeeded the whole place smelled just awful."

I'll just bet it did!