This paper deals with the portrayal of King Henry I in William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum. While this may, at first, seem a somewhat narrowly defined topic for discussion, it does in fact allow for a series of more wide-ranging questions to be asked. It is on three of these that I would like to focus: how modern readers may approach the oeuvre of this particular chronicler; what the image of King Henry may tell us about how one of the – already among his contemporaries – most widely read and most highly regarded historians of the Central Middle Ages defined the purpose of writing history; and, finally, how a deeper engagement with the political thinking of writers like Malmesbury may contribute to our understanding of the cultural, moral, and ethical framework of high medieval European politics.

Let me begin with the first of these questions. Admiration of Malmesbury is by no means only a modern phenomenon: his Gesta Regum was widely copied already in the twelfth century. At the same time, William's careful sifting of sources and evidence, his archival research and early attempts at Quellenkritik (source criticism), reminiscent of a more professionalized approach to writing history as it emerged in the nineteenth century, combined with a Latin style steeped in traditions of classical rhetoric, have sometimes perhaps blinded his modern readers to just how deeply he was rooted in the cultural, intellectual, and literary conventions of his own time.