In the mid twelfth century, the monks at the wealthy Benedictine monastery at Ely, located deep in the fens of East Anglia, composed and compiled what is now called the Liber Eliensis, which survives, in different forms, in six manuscripts. Like a typical chronicle-cartulary of the period, it was a combination of Ely's charters relevant to the monastery's extensive properties with a historical narrative derived from several sources, including hagiographies and Bede. Liber Eliensis covers the years from the monastery's initial foundation by St Æthelthryth in 673 to the mid twelfth century, and, although intensely localised to Ely's East Anglian concerns, it also provides a lens through which we can view pre- and post- Conquest England and the tensions encountered through times of distress. The eleventh century saw direct action of the Norman Conquest in East Anglia, including the Isle itself being besieged by William I in 1071, and it is from this region that we also receive the resistance stories of Hereward the Wake, some of which are preserved in Liber Eliensis. Ely also adapted the Domesday survey technique to its own uses to demarcate the monastery's lands in the 1080s in the Inquisitio Eliensis, indicating strife between pre- and post-Conquest land issues. In the twelfth century, the civil war between Stephen and Matilda affected Ely as a result of Bishop Nigel's (d. 1169) machinations and factions fighting in and around Ely. And it was within this time, at the tail end or just after the conclusion of the civil war, that the monks of Ely were at work on the Liber Eliensis.

Within this context, the twelfth-century compilers of Liber Eliensis included three significant inventories mainly of moveable goods: pieces of art and material culture that belonged to the monastery, the brothers, and, later, the bishopric. This may come as no surprise; the Inquisitio Eliensis was copied about this time in its twelfth-century manuscript too. Ely had a keen sense of what was or should be theirs. With the struggles surrounding the monastery in both the late eleventh century transition of power and the mid twelfth century war, Ely was (like many post-Conquest monasteries) attempting to both lay and keep claims to property, real and moveable.