Mabel de Bell\xeame, wealthy Norman landowner, belonged to the de Bell\xeame family.\xa0 They were infamous for cruelty and general wickedness.\xa0 Mabel exercised her share of the wickedness and cruelty; eventually one of the many Normans she impoverished gathered his brothers and murdered her.\xa0 We discuss the de Bell\xeames, when we're not discussing Orderic Vitalis, the monk who chronicled their history. (For those of you who have forgotten, it's Orderic who thought that the White Ship crashed on account of sodomy, rather than the rock in the harbor and everybody being drunk in the middle of the night.)