The wife of William the Conqueror sent gold, in secret, to a man in arms against him.

The man was her son.

When the Conqueror discovered it, he raged that he had trusted her with his treasury and with justice throughout all his dominions. Matilda of Flanders did not deny it. She told him she would gladly die if it would bring her son back from the grave.

He did nothing to her at all. This was a man who mutilated prisoners, laid waste the north of England, and jailed his own brother for life.

You have probably never heard that story, because eight centuries of retelling have buried it under better ones. That she embroidered the Bayeux Tapestry. That she was dragged through the streets of Bruges by her hair. That she was four feet two inches tall.

None of it is true, and this book shows who invented each story, when, and what they gained by it.

What survives instead is harder and stranger. A hundred charters. A ship she paid for, still named in the Bayeux Tapestry she did not make. A duchy she governed for seventeen years while her husband was busy taking England. An English widow who signed over her entire estate in exchange for the queen's protection, because she expected the protection to work.

And thirteen lines of Latin, still legible on a slab of black marble in Caen, in which the people who buried her do not mention the conquest of England, or her coronation, or a single one of her children.