HISTORICAL writing was a literary genre in the Middle Ages, and while most modern historians have come to recognize the importance of literary theory in the decoding of medieval chronicles, historians of the Anglo-Saxon Church have been less successful in applying that theory to texts. As the introduction argued, the most prolific of the English Church's modern commentators have exhibited a marked preference for post-Conquest chronicles over the piecemeal, often non-narrative Anglo-Saxon evidence, despite the growing body of literature that has argued persuasively against such an approach. In her book on thirteenth-century historical writing in Flanders, Gabrielle Spiegel reminds us that

In other words, medieval historians made use of the past not to elucidate it for its own sake – a thoroughly modern conception of the purpose of historical writing – but to assert an ideology or ideologies of contemporary relevance. As literary products the creation of which was driven by contemporary concerns and the composition of which was governed by a series of contemporary conventions, these later chronicles tell us much that is useful about the world in which they were written, but, to varying degrees, surprisingly little of use about the past. Yet eminent historians continue to embrace their viewpoints rather uncritically, while others fail to appreciate the significance of the monastic lens through which most medieval writers interpreted both the past and the present. This chapter undermines many of the prevailing assumptions in the modern literature by first discussing the conventions that governed the writing of history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and then using these conventions to decode several of the more influential post-Conquest texts. Although it focuses on representatives of three different twelfth-century viewpoints – William of Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis and Henry of Huntingdon – this chapter is not meant to be an exhaustive study of their lives, works or thoughts.