The proposed title for this study, with due deference to Ann Williams, was ‘The English and the Norman Conquest – according to Wace’, but that implied yet another skirmish in the Hastings ancestry stakes or, perhaps, a Domesday database-style dot map of his inventive gazetteer of King Harold's towns and counties. However, the cultural re-orientation is intentional and, in the spirit of independent vernacular scholarship so well-represented by Wace (Magister was, surely, the equivalent of Doctor today), there is also a shift in time. His Roman de Rou is re-assessed as the source of an English prosopography for the twenty-year period between the accession of Stephen of Blois in 1135 and the first years of the reign of Henry II.

The purpose is to identify those of the so-called ‘Conqueror's Companions’ exclusive to Wace who occupy a no-man's land in surname history (albeit a vigorous virtual life). His work had been read as a tenurial mapping exercise but he was discredited – solely on the basis of the ‘1066’ section translated in 1837 – because so few of the personal or (presumed) locative names were found in the orthodox literature. Wace was the first to use the Anglo-Norman term surnons in what would now be considered a prosopographical context (lines 8659–60) and almost all of them correspond with twelfth-century hereditary English family names. This is more than a co-incidence of adopted feudal identifications: his neighbourhood contemporaries, either from choice or service obligation, were becoming ‘Domesday Descendants’.