With over fifty manuscripts in three basic versions, the prose Brut chronicle appears to survive in more copies than any other long Anglo-Norman work. Five manuscripts exist of its Oldest Version, which was written around the beginning of the fourteenth century in the north of England and which offers a complete history of Britain from the fall of Troy to the death of Henry III in 1272. Based on (among other things) the Historia regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace's Roman de Brut, Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis, a version of the Latin chronicle of the Premonstratensian house of Barlings, hagiographic materials and romance matter such as that of Havelok, the Oldest Version is fundamentally secular in focus and interest, with a constant emphasis on the duties of kings to their people, the importance of smooth royal succession and the desirability of peace and order. It goes out of its way, and rewrites its sources, to create an engaging narrative of British history as one of fundamental continuity – rather than one of recurrent decadence, invasion and displacement, as in the Galfridian paradigm.

Composed for stakeholders in society, but not for the highest clerical or court elites, the work proved extremely appealing, and the Oldest Version of the Anglo-Norman Brut became the core of a text expanded with Anglo-Norman prologues and continuations into the 1330s: the so-called Short Version survives in thirty-one to thirty-three manuscripts, and the Long Version in fourteen to sixteen, depending on one's methods of classification and counting.