THE HISTORIAN of the reign of King Stephen (1135–54) cannot reasonably complain either of the volume or of the quality of the chronicle sources available for study. The two great chroniclers of the Anglo-Norman age, William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis, lived through less than half of the ‘nineteen long winters when Christ and his saints were asleep’, but in that time they saw a succession dispute broaden into civil war, and they recorded the king's capture at Lincoln on 2 February 1141. The main news stories, such as ‘the arrest of the bishops’ in June 1139, attracted wide attention and we feel that we can see how news travelled. When we come to the end of the reign and look at the terms on which a peace was made in 1153–54 we have the same sense that we have enough different viewpoints to allow us to write a political history that is more than a narrative. There is a wide range of annalist sources also, written not just within the Anglo-Norman regnum, but also way beyond its borders. There is, however, only the one text that has come down to us as a biography. This is the Gesta Stephani.

It is a text that has had an adventurous history. It is first recorded when it was first printed, by André Duchesne in 1619, in a volume which contained also the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis.