Recovered from my laughing fit, I'm now ready to share this with all of you. In trying to finish up my Language and Dialect paper, I found a couple of really good articles at Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia has tons of links in each article, and while I was browsing Old English, I came across the Norman conquest in 1066. Clicking on it, I spotted William the Conqueror's name. I clicked, and had an immediate Stanton flashback to my ninth grade world history teacher, 'Boss' Howard, whom we constantly made fun of for wearing pink button-down shirts. I have exactly two memories from that class. The first is him telling us that Napoleon was so short that his bed was square rather than rectangle, and the second had to do with William the Conqueror. According to the Boss's anecdote, William was hugely fat and had gotten jammed in the stomach by his saddle horn during a battle, causing some pretty massive internal bleeding and his subsequent death. When trying to place him in the coffin, however, he turned out to be too fat to fit. The pallbearers pushed and pushed on his stomach, trying to cram him in, when the corpse gave in to the tension and exploded, spraying blood and guts everywhere. None of us ever quite believed that far-fetched story - the Boss tended to go off on less-than-credible tangents - however, in scrolling to the end of the Wikipedia article, I read this:

"[William the Conqueror] died aged 60 ... from abdominal injuries received from his saddle pommel when he fell off a horse at the Siege of Mantes. ... In a most unregal postmortem, William's corpulent body would not fit in the stone sarcophagus, and, after some unsuccessful prodding by the assembled bishops, exploded, mephitizing the chapel and dispersing the mourners."

I can see Boss Howard now, in his pink shirt and glasses, doubled over in a snorting fit of hysterics. "William the Conqueror exploded!" We didn't believe him at the time, but he turned out to be right after all. Go figure.