The appearance of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (HRB) in the late 1130s presented a new stimulus to twelfth-century historical thought. As pointed out by Neil Wright and Sjoerd Levelt, the HRB not only provided a revised version of the British past but also subverted the political narrative of authoritative histories such as Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica. For this reason, the HRB gave room for ambiguities and, occasionally, it generated open opposition. Nonetheless, between the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries the HRB was extensively used in both Latin and vernacular historiography, and found in Normandy a precocious hub of interest and circulation. Robert of Torigni (1110–1186), at that time still a monk at the abbey of Le Bec, provides the earliest attestation of the HRB as he showed a copy of it to Henry of Huntingdon (1088–1157) in 1139 when the English historian stopped at the Norman abbey while on his way to Rome with Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury (1090–1161). Jennifer Ferrall and Victoria Flood have shown that, by going beyond its breeding ground of traditional ‘pan-British’ political resurgence, the HRB found its political addressee in the contemporary Anglo-Norman elite: Geoffrey of Monmouth presented a revisionist reconstruction of the British past providing a unitary interpretation of the past and present of Britain under Anglo-Norman hegemony. As argued by David Bates, King Arthur became a Norman and a cross-Channel hero for he stimulated an awareness among the Norman audience on both sides of the Channel of sharing a common, albeit remote, historical past.

However, the impact of the HRB on twelfth-century universal chronicle-writing in the Anglo-Norman world has received little attention. A significant case for analysis is provided by the so-called Continuatio Ursicampina, a twelfth-century anonymous continuation of the universal chronicle of Sigebert of Gembloux (1030–1112) produced at Ourscamp, a Cistercian abbey in the Noyonnais. The Ourscamp chronicler not only continued Sigebert’s chronicle up to 1155 but also interpolated many excerpts extracted from the HRB. According to Robert Fletcher, the Continuatio Ursicampina engendered a sceptical approach to the narrative of the HRB since Geoffrey’s account openly contradicted Sigebert of Gembloux.