Ordericus Vitalis, a mediæval historian, born at Atcham near Shrewsbury in 1075. He was the son of Odeler of Orleans, who in Roger de Montgomery's train had accompanied the Conqueror to England, and from childhood was dedicated to God. At ten he was sent to Normandy to be educated for the monastic life in the abbey of St Evroul. Here he spent all his life, although he made several visits to England to collect historical materials. He became a priest in 1107, and died most probably about 1143. Between the years 1130 and 1141 Orderic compiled his Historiæ Ecclesiasticæ, an elaborate work on the history of Normandy and England, preceded by a brief chronicle of events from the birth of Christ down to his own time. The work is a singular mixture of important history and trivial gossip, marred by absolute lack of order, grotesque style, and laboured grandiloquence; but its writer possessed the seeing eye and the sympathetic heart, and the result is that his confused book remains a precious storehouse to the historian, abounding in those truthful photographic glimpses of reality which are beyond the reach of all the laborious erudition of a later age. With the Conquest it becomes of great value as an honest and trustworthy contemporary source.
The first edition of the Historiæ Ecclesiasticæ was published by Duchesne, in his Hist. Norm. Scrip. (1619). It has also been printed by the French Historical Society (1840), and was translated into English by T. Forester (4 vols. 1853-56) in Bohn's Antiquarian Library. The best edition is that by A. le Prevost (5 vols. Paris, 1838-55). See chap. vi. of Dean Church's St Anselm (1870).