15. to Adela, Countess of Blois

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[from http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/101.html]

To our venerable and dearest sister, lady/lord Adela, brother Peter humble abbot of Cluny, greetings and all benediction from the lord.
We have sent nothing to your love up to now about the death of our beloved lord king of the English, because the great sorrow from which we are still not able to extricate ourselves prevented it and it troubled us not without cause to be the first relayers of such calamity. If it pleases you to know what we know, you should be aware that we have not been able to find out anything except that for eight days in which he lay ill in bed in a certain town near Rouen the lord archbishop of Rouen assiduously attended him. Fortified by him with all the ecclesiastical sacraments, in the best state of penance and faithful confession, he left the world on the fourth nones of December. His body, as he had disposed, was taken to Rouen and from there was conveyed by count Robert [of Gloucester] his son to England to be entombed at Reading.
All Normandy resounds already with civil and external wars. We have up to now heard nothing certain about the state of the kingdom across the sea. For those who recounted these things to us swiftly fled from Normandy. We have, however, already sent two messengers, one to the lord of Rouen, the other to the lord of Winchester, who will soon tell us whatever they have learned from them about those things. For the eternal salvation of the dead king we have established many things which Cluniacs have never before done for anyone. What you should do for him it seems superfluous for us to indicate.