In a compelling study published in 1973, Warren Hollister and Thomas Keefe argued that the Angevin Empire, “an aggregation of diverse provinces that differed from Henry I's tightly-integrated Anglo-Norman state not merely in size but in fundamental character …, was Henry Plantegenet's own creation, born of his youthful ambition and achieved through his skill and good fortune.” Hollister and Keefe demonstrate conclusively that King Henry I had no such empire in mind when he arranged the marriage of his widowed daughter Matilda to Geoffrey Plantegenet, the fourteen-year-old heir to the counties of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine.

In attempting to ascertain the origins of the Angevin Empire, however, are we limited only to a choice between Henry I's intentions and Henry II's ambition? Might we not ask what Count Fulk the Young, Geoffrey's father, had in mind when he arranged the marriage of his son to the heiress Matilda? John Le Patourel has suggested that Fulk was pursuing the normal Angevin practice of expanding the family's dominions. Le Patourel maintains that “this expansion took a familiar form, the acquisition of rights by marriage, inheritance or in other ways, and their enforcement by war.” For the Angevins the alliance between Geoffrey and Matilda ended a century of warfare between Anjou and Normandy. “Henry I was somewhat furtive over this marriage,” Le Patourel observes, but “in Angers it was a triumph.”

In the English civil war of King Stephen's reign combatants frequently damaged church property. Some of this damage was accidental or malicious, but most was due to military exigency; commanders often took advantage of the strategic location of church properties by fortifying, attacking, or robbing them, either to get at the enemy, to deny him sustenance, or to reward their own men. Chroniclers and other clerics angrily decried this plundering and damage of church possessions. Some wrote of whole years “being consumed with depredations and oppressions of churches …,” and the author of the Gesta Stephani accused the Anglo-Norman barons of having “greedily assailed the property … of the church, which was the wonted and common practice of them all … .” In a famous passage from his Policraticus, John of Salisbury cried out “Where are now Geoffrey, Miles, Ranulf, Alan, Simon [and] Gilbert, men who were not so much counts of the kingdom as public enemies?” These men, the earls of Essex, Hereford, Chester, Cornwall, Northampton, and Lincoln, all made John's list of evil-doers because of their actions against the church during the civil war. There were frequent reports of whole towns having been burned with all their churches, and clerics feared assault and robbery on the highways. Undoubtedly many such stories were exaggerated, but the fact remains that during Stephen's reign the English church suffered material damages on a scale unknown for many generations.

Richard II's attempt to transform his kingdom into an absolute monarchy has provided the basic outline for the traditional interpretation of the reign. The role of the royal household and especially of the chamber has always loomed large in such an interpretation. It was the subject of Thomas Haxey's famous complaint of 1397, and it had a special interest for Thomas F. Tout who undertook a very detailed study of Richard's reign in volumes three and four of his classic Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England. Tout credited the king's tutor, Simon Burley, with the development of the chamber staff as an instrument of royal tyranny:

The subject of mutilations is one I would cheerfully have left to others were it not for its bearing on the character of King Henry I. The sources for his reign disclose a number of instances in which alleged wrongdoers were punished by mutilation, and these punishments have earned Henry a somber reputation among modern historians. Christopher Brooke calls him a “savage, ruthless man”; Emma Mason deplores his “reign of calculated terror”; R.H.C. Davis speaks of his “reputation for brutality.” To Sir Richard Southern, “Henry's vengeance was terrible and barbaric … . He had a morbid dislike of ridicule and he punished with a Byzantine ferocity already outmoded in the humaner society of feudal France, not only treachery and rebellion but slights to his dignity and honour.”

Perhaps the best known contemporary mutilation story comes from the 1125 account in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, where it is disclosed that Henry had the minters of England castrated and deprived of their right hands. We learn of Henry's morbid dislike of ridicule from an event of about the same time reported by the Norman monk, Orderic Vitalis. Henry had ordered the blinding of three captive rebels when Count Charles the Good of Flanders, who happened to be visiting, protested that it was unjust to mutilate prisoners captured in the service of their lords.

Sometime in the second decade of the twelfth century an anonymous clerk compiled a long awkward treatise which we call the Laws of Henry I. He pompously began by declaring, “The glorious Caesar, Henry, moderate, wise, just and valiant, sheds radiance over all his kingdom in ecclesiastical laws and secular ordinances, in writings, and in displays of good works.” On the very day that Henry died in Normandy a Saxon physician, priest, and prophet, Wulfric of Haselbury, living in seclusion in Somerset, told his feudal patron that the dead king would enter Paradise because he had kept peace, had sought justice, and had even built a splendid abbey for Benedictine monks. Few later commentators would be as generous as these two. Other historians unfavorably contrasted Henry's wisdom, wealth, and victory with his avarice, cruelty, and lust.

The law clerk's short catalog contains several surprises. It suggests Henry generated ecclesiastical laws himself, an odd, but not untrue, observation. It reports that the king performed good works, but these are never specified. Most fascinatingly, it hints that “in writings” Henry composed things other than charters and writs. Unfortunately, no such texts have survived. Thus, what we most seek to learn—the monarch's own intentions and reflections—still elude us. Henry's personal understanding of his monarchial responsibilities must therefore be interpreted from his actions, rather than traced from his plans.

In 1097, King William Rufus of England was engaged in a campaign to conquer the county of Maine. When he succeeded in capturing Count Elias of Maine, the count begged Rufus to allow him to serve the Anglo-Norman king as count of Maine, and to participate in his inner council. Moved by his chivalrous instincts, Rufus agreed. But the king's chief advisor, Count Robert of Meulan, counselled that to admit a conquered enemy to one's innermost council only invited perfidy and rebellion, and gave him means to do greater injury. Rufus immediately changed his mind and assumed the governance of Maine himself.

Orderic Vitalis reports this event with some ambiguity, approving of the wisdom of Robert's advice, but mourning Rufus's abandonment of traditional chivalrous behavior. He attributes to Count Robert motives of preserving his own position as chief advisor to the king, rather than notions of service or loyalty. Such motives of self-interest would be consistent with traditional baronial practices. But the advice was sensible and practical, and clearly to the king's advantage in an objective, political sense, despite Orderic's fondness for Count Elias. It is an early example of a change taking place in Anglo-Norman politics—a change of which Robert of Meulan appears to have been the architect.