Pop Goes the William!

You know you've done well in life when you start out as "the Bastard" and end up as "the Conqueror".  This is exactly the moniker improvement that William of Normandy obtained when he became William I of England after winning the famous Battle of Hastings in 1066.  Unfortunately, just because you win one famous battle doesn't mean everyone immediately accepts you as King.

In fact, William had to spend the next several years brutally suppressing the Saxon population over whom he now ruled.   He burnt villages, slaughtered the inhabitants, destroyed farmlands and reduced the entirety of Northern England to smoldering rubble, barren fields and piles of corpses.

As any genocidal maniac will tell you, wreaking such utter havoc on a populace is hard work.  After such exhausting effort, William seems to have decided to treat himself to more than a few lavish feasts in later years, and his svelte figure depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry gave way to more of a Jabba the Hutt style mixture of cruelty and morbid obesity.

When William died in September of 1087, his nobles went off to attend to their affairs in light of his death, and the body was left with the local clergy.  After a few days, it was sent to Caen, a city in Normandy where William had wished to be buried.  At the funeral, William's taste for crumpets caught up with him, as his bloated corpse wouldn't fit into the stone sarcophagus that had been built for him.  One of the priests made the worst possible decision in this scenario and decided to attempt to manually force the corpse (which, remember, had been sitting out in the early September heat for a few days) into the coffin.  Williams stomach promptly burst open, spewing fluids over the priest, and filling the church with the terrible stench of rotten flesh.  If he were not already an unbelievably cruel mass-murderer, this would almost certainly have been a stain on his legacy.  Instead it was just a stain on the church floor.