ABSTRACT
Medieval language was, in many respects, much more sophisticated than modern man tends to realize at first glance. Multifaceted layers of interpretation were developed for biblical exegesis from the time of the earliest Church Fathers, so that by the High Middle Ages every word and every sentence had four sensus, that is four different understandings, even though all of them pointed to the same meaning. This flexibility of thinking must have permeated all kinds of texts and should therefore be taken into account in any attempt to understand a medieval source, and the relationship between seemingly plain narrative and allegorical interpretation was especially close in medieval history writing.1 It might be natural for us today to assume that a word can have only one meaning, and that it cannot mean one thing and its opposite at the same time. Not so in the Middle Ages. An obvious example is the word pax.
